Chapter 17 #2
A vampire, wielding a god-forged spear of the White Pantheon.
His white suit was now spattered with black and red blood. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see the spear—the tip now glistening with metallic, rainbow-tinted liquid. Srana’s blood?
I didn’t know how he was standing.
He glanced over his shoulder, just slightly, the movement so calculatedly casual. His hair, normally neat, was dirty, falling over his eye.
And then I saw it. The slight sway. The purple-black around his hands, where he touched the spear, spreading second by second.
He didn’t need to say it, but I heard the words anyway:
Get up, dove. Get up.
My eyes found Zefiah easily, even through the chaos. A part of me always led back to her. She was closer now.
But gods, my body. My body was broken.
I dragged myself up, gritting my teeth against the agony of my limp arm, dangling on by a few threads of muscle.
“Fallen ones,” Srana hissed, her contempt bitter as poison. “So arrogant. Just like their tainted mother. Murderous little thieves.”
And Srana, apparently unlike with me, did not see anything in Septimus that was worth saving.
In a movement so fast my eyes couldn’t track it, four spindly, bladed fingers surged toward Septimus.
Someone shouted behind me. I barely heard it. With a roar of exertion, I pushed myself forward, good hand out.
Zefiah!
And as always, Zefiah, the greatest friend I’d ever had, answered my call.
Her form in my hand gave me a much-needed wave of strength. Wounds began to stitch closed. Pain faded. I didn’t give myself time to think. I pushed myself to my feet and flung myself at Srana, bringing Zefiah’s blade down upon those delicate metal blades just before they struck Septimus.
They shattered. A piece of metal went flying across my cheek, sending blood into my left eye. Septimus staggered backward, doubling over.
I charged at Srana again. My gaze sought her chest—the crack in her breastplate, still oozing smoke and shimmering god blood, where Septimus had struck her with the very weapon she had once created. An opening.
Zefiah’s fury thrummed in my ears, drowning out the mortal pain with the comforting glee of vengeance.
But Srana moved faster than I did. I didn’t even see her next strike coming. Pain bloomed over my torso, and the next thing I knew, I was on the ground.
Srana rose, and rose, and rose. Steam now spewed from every gap in her armor, and her metal body was so hot it glowed, as if freshly forged in her rage.
I managed to peer over my shoulder to see that her automatons had driven further into the Salt Keep.
I saw only a tangle of indiscriminate movement, blood of humans and vampires spattering against so much relentless metal.
Atrius barked commands, but I couldn’t see Sylina anywhere.
None of these soldiers were prepared to take down a goddess.
But I could still end this. I was certain of it.
My eyes didn’t move from that crack in Srana’s armor. That one weak point. I just needed to get close enough.
But just as I was about to run forward, Septimus stepped in front of me.
There was something different about him, though I couldn’t pinpoint what. He was pale. He no longer had Srana’s weapon, though I didn’t see where it had gone.
“Get out of the way!” I growled at him.
Srana cocked her head, lowering to us. Pop, crack, as her broken limbs straightened one by one, poising for a final blow. One metal arm unfolded from behind her and I cursed when I saw that it firmly grasped the spear.
Fucking hell. It was now or never.
Seconds until my window was closed.
But Septimus ignored me. Instead, he lifted one elegant finger to the sky, and said, “Goddess, what is that?”
Anyone who had ever said curiosity was a uniquely mortal vice had never met a god. They were as easily distracted as cats.
Srana halted mid-movement.
Gear by gear, her body unfolded and re-formed until she was looking behind her, to the sky.
A sky painted with fragments of rainbow light.
“You are in the territory of the Goddess Nyaxia,” Sylina’s voice bellowed from above. I turned to see her standing on the roof of the keep, red dress billowing in the wind. “Did you not think she would come after such a slight?”
{They summoned her,} Zefiah said.
That, I realized, must have been why Sylina was gone.
Srana halted. We had been forgotten. She was now more interested in much bigger game.
I froze, too, staring at the sky. Staring at the wisps of light where Nyaxia would appear. I could picture her cruel face just as I’d seen it over Vostis ten years ago, and over my friends’ mutilated bodies in Hegaella.
I wasn’t expecting it to have such a powerful hold on me. The draw of her blood, like a fierce, painful twist in my gut.
{We will have it,} Zefiah promised me. {In time.}
Those two words pained her as much as they did me:
In time.
I was bleeding, barely capable of standing. Zefiah felt awkward and heavy in my left arm, because my right was barely still attached to my body—something I couldn’t even afford to think about, because the idea of potentially losing my sword arm was so devastating.
Yet I couldn’t make myself move.
Nyaxia was so fucking close.
So close I could taste her death cries.
And gods, I wanted them. I wanted them more than I had ever wanted any food or sex or pleasure in my entire pathetic life.
“Move, dove.” A jolt of pain as Septimus grabbed my good arm. “Let’s not waste the gift they’ve given us. Go.”
He pushed me fiercely to the edge of the balcony, and I was about to yell at him for apparently trying to kill us both when I peered over the rail to see what was below.
A single door—actually, it looked to have maybe been a window frame—sat on a shelf at the balcony below this one, bright and glowing, mists within.
An aethergate. One of the oddest-looking ones I’d ever seen, as if it had been very hurriedly opened and placed.
My head lifted to see Sylina and Atrius at the upper levels. Sylina’s hands were outstretched. Atrius’s gaze met mine, hard and seething. Oh, he was pissed.
He inclined his chin just once, in an indisputable wordless command:
Go.
The distraction was already waning. Three of Srana’s automatons swiveled around with a symphony of melodic whirrs. One started toward us.
There was no time.
Septimus’s hand was tight around my arm.
“Ready to fly, dove?” he murmured in my ear, and I wanted to snap at him, again, to not to call me that. But there was no time for that—or anything else.
No time to do anything but jump, plummeting through the gate.