11. Chapter 11
Her effect was instantaneous. Serich’s warm amber eyes went blank, the shutters behind them drawn.
Run, It said. Will you make me force you?
“Hop down and see me,” she said, her eyes glowing like coal. “It isn’t safe out here.”
The bow dropped from Serich’s hands and spiraled through the air before clattering to the tree roots.
My hand snared around his bicep. “Serich, close your eyes. Stay with me.”
She tilted her head like a bird, gazing up at us. Hands clasped behind her back, she smiled, innocent as a child. One bare foot twisted behind the other, her tattered, dirty skirt swishing at her knees. “He can’t hear you right now.”
And Serich was swinging his legs off the side of the branch to jump down to meet her, slipping through my grasp like water.
“Serich!” I screamed, but I didn’t exist to him anymore.
He’s lost, It said. But you don’t have to be. I don’t like to have to compel you, but I will if you make me.
If you’re not going to help him, then shut up, I snapped, and dropped from the branch after Serich.
My knees buckled on impact, the contents exploding out of my satchel as it thumped beside me.
She’d wrapped herself sinuously around Serich, brushing the dried dirt from his face, whispering some monstrous sweet nothings in his ear.
I started forward, the arrow in my hand.
I needed a clear sight to her eyes, but Serich was in the way.
I didn’t even see her leg flash out to kick me.
One moment I was standing and then suddenly I was airborne, smashing into the tree trunk.
The impact rattled my teeth, stole my breath, a jolt of pain rushing through me from the hard landing.
My knives jangled at my hips, utterly useless against a succubus.
I was so insignificant that she couldn’t be bothered to kill me immediately. She would get around to me at some point. When she felt like it.
I felt that dismissal like a brand.
She could be saving you for one of her brothers! Would you please just run?
I care about him. I staggered to my feet. I don’t expect you to understand.
I care about you, It snarled back. I care about what will become of US.
She didn’t seem to want to break eye contact with Serich.
Would he come back to himself if it were disrupted?
I rushed her again, tried burying the head of my arrow in her back.
It left a hole in her ragged dress but glanced off her skin without so much as a scratch.
Blindly, she reached out, grabbed me by the throat and sent me sprawling to the ground twenty feet away.
Give me strength, I said, pushing myself up on my creaking elbows, gasping from the power of those fingers around my windpipe. I need to get him away from her.
She has her arms around him! On my best day I don’t have her strength.
You won’t even try?
That must have shamed him. I felt his grudging frost, felt him cast me into that dark locked room he lived inside.
My arms lifted, quick as lightning. They reached out for Serich, who budged, though only marginally.
But it was enough to make the succubus flash an angry look our way.
A human wouldn’t have been able to make an impression at all.
It’s not going to work. His voice rang oddly back to me as I waited backstage. Will you listen to reason now?
“What are you?” she hissed, peeling herself from a vacant Serich’s side.
You have to do something, I said. Distract her. Let her come close, try to blind her. You can buy us time enough to run.
We had her attention now, though she didn’t know we were two. She didn’t know until a voice came out of my mouth, mine but not totally, ringing higher and colder than usual with the unmistakable edge of inhumanity.
“That one’s mine,” It said, nodding at Serich.
A few seconds passed in silence as she stared. Then a surprised laugh burst from her mouth as she moved closer to get a better look at us. She crossed her arms, one dirt-caked fingernail tapping out an irritated beat against her bicep.
Its fear was a venom, poisoning whatever vestige of hope I’d had. Was this my bloodrose come to life? Would she disarticulate me, scatter my limbs like those fallen petals strewn about the earth?
She took a step forward and we took a step back. “And you are?” Her red eyes smiled along with her rosy, laughing lips. But her amusement was short-lived, rapidly devolving into agony when It took the opening, hurling the shaft of the arrow into her eyes, one after the other.
She didn’t look so beautiful with old black blood pouring from the smoking sockets.
Her scream sent the fig leaves shuddering; wild, unearthly, reverberating. I felt It shrink back, letting me steer. I grabbed my satchel, stuffed the clothes with faerie blood back into it, screaming for Serich, who stood there blankly, a handsome, dirty shell. Waiting for his mistress.
“Serich!” I stood right in front of him, shaking his shoulders, yelling into his face. “Serich, please, we have to run!” I might not have said a word for all the good it did me.
She still thrashed around like a landed eel behind me, screaming like she was dying, but she couldn’t die, not even when It was at the helm. She would heal eventually and be madder than ever—
Her screams will bring more, It said. More of them than you could ever imagine. How many graves did we pass on our way? RUN.
“Serich!” I slapped him. Nothing.
And so I stabbed him with the arrow through the firm meat of his shoulder, wrenching it hard enough for the steel head to cause serious damage, twisting it until his eyes filled with agony and blinked away her thrall.
“Run!” I shouted, yanking him to his feet as he made to sag to the earth in pain.
We ran. Ran and ran, until my lungs burst into flames and I was breathing smoke, dodging nests of tousled roots, silvered grass flashing by on either side, plunging through the light fogs which had traveled from the stretch of wood I could just make out up ahead.
Ran until I couldn’t feel the stitches, the fire in my throat; ran for the only thing you could ever run that hard for: your life.
Serich was right on my heels; I felt his feet pounding the earth as the grass thickened. Malicious flowers snapped at our ankles as we passed, trees turning into frequent obstacles we were forced to dart around.
I couldn’t tell for how long we ran, didn’t care. Didn’t bother to look at anything that wasn’t right in front of me. That was why I didn’t see her until she stepped into my path, forcing me to either veer around her or mow her down.
In trying to avoid her, I stumbled, my ankle twisting beneath me. Rolling to the overgrown grass, I pushed myself up on my hands as she loomed over me. Tried to crawl away and keep her in my sights at the same time.
She was old, human-looking, hunched, a body God must have designed with a cylinder in mind. And also hideous, squinting down at me. Her hair was a white wig of tangled thorns, her nose a vicious beak. One long white eyebrow crossed the wrinkled shelf of her brow.
“One of those hellbitches after you?” she asked, her hands on her generous hips.