Page 95 of The Scarlet Alchemist

The prince tried once more to run from the corner, but the monster swung out its free arm and tore off the prince’s sleeve, rattling the bracelets on his wrist. One was gold with smaller jewels I couldn’t make out, one was smooth jade, and the other was a blue-green gemstone.

“Give me your bracelets!” I said.

“How is that going to help?”the prince said, crushing himself back against the wall.

“Just throw them!” I said.

The prince let out a frustrated sound but pulled off his bracelets with shaking hands and tossed them over the monster’s head. They hit the ground and spun off in three different directions, but I quickly snatched them from the floor and held them to the light.

I tossed aside the jade one immediately. Jade was softer than sapphire and would shatter just like wood. I held the blue gemstone up to the light, praying it was some sort of blue diamond. But the bracelet had red and yellow hues, so it was probably topaz, which wasn’t hard enough.

“Zilan?” the prince said uneasily as one of the monster’s claws began to unlatch.

I ignored him, dropping the blue bracelet and examining the gold one. The gold itself was useless—surely the crown prince wore jewelry made of pure gold, which was butter-soft. But the tiny decorative gemstones in the pattern were clear. I jammed my nail under the base of the stones and popped them out one by one, until I had a handful of tiny glittering shards. I closed them in my fist and used up my iron rings as catalysts to meld them together into a single diamond the size of a fingernail, sharp like a dagger on one end with a flat surface on the other. It wasn’t very big, but it was the hardest gemstone in the world.

“Distract it!” I shouted.

The prince’s eyes went wide. “Distract it?With what, exactly? My death?”

“Something else, if you can manage,” I said, clambering up a pile of broken wood.

The prince sputtered and tossed another plank at the monster, shielding his face when it bounced straight back at him.

I reached the top of the wood pile, as high as I could hope to get. For once, I was grateful that I was tall. I needed to be in order to reach the towering monster’s soul tag.

The monster yanked its claw once more and, in a spray of splintered wood, freed its arm from the floor.

“Zilan!”the prince said, shrinking into the corner.

Then, at the worst moment possible, my vision swirled.

I saw flashes of crooked roots and black water in the parched river of my soul, then scorched red earth, a dirt road unfurling, the five gates of darkness rising up before me like a tidal wave. My own face reflected back at me a thousand times in the prisms of sapphire, eyes hollow, my ears burning with the name that the darkness screamed. I felt myself falling and reached out into the nothingness.

The sharpness of sapphire beneath my fingers shocked me back into awareness, its jagged edges biting into my palm. I’d wanted to jump onto the monster’s shoulders, but I’d only managed to grab onto its back while falling.

The monster twisted around, reaching for me, but its limbs were too stiff to touch its back. I locked my legs around its waist and hoisted myself up, and only then, as a jolt of coldness rushed through me, did I realize the diamond was gone.

I must have dropped it when I got dizzy, and there was no chance of finding it in the chaos of the library floor.

The monster arched backward and its fingers caught my dress, tearing a line across my leg. I winced and jammed a hand into my satchel, already knowing that there was nothing else strong enough, but I had to trysomething. I couldn’t just hang on like a rag doll and wait for the monster to squish me against a wall.

My fingers pinched a stone I didn’t recognize at first, before I remembered it wasn’t a stone at all. It was a soap bean left over from this morning.

My gaze snapped to the soul tag scorched into the back of the monster’s spine in dusty streaks of black. Whoever had made the monster must have realized that sapphire was too hard to carve a soul tag into, settling for burning the name into the surface instead. Maybe I couldn’t damage the soul tag, but I could clean it away.

I crushed the soap bean between my fingers, spit on the soul tag—that’s what you get for ruining my plans—and scrubbed the soap into the characters.

The name smeared at once with a long streak of black under my thumb, and the monster froze.

Cracks shot across every inch of the monster’s skin, like tangled vines. I lost my grip and crashed to the floor as chunks of sapphire molted off the monster, falling in twinkling shards of sharp blue rain.

A pale human crawled out of the steaming stones, then fell limp and still on the floor among its sparkling fragments. I crawled closer to him, both to make sure he was really dead and then to close his eyes and mouth.

The prince crossed the room, his shoes crunching over the shards, and before I could speak, he knelt on the floor and wrapped his arms around me. He smelled like blood and fire, and I didn’t know what to do with my hands. In the stillness, I felt his heart beating fast against my cheek.

“I don’t think the evening tea ever made it there,” I said. “It’s not over, if that’s why you’re hugging me.”

He sighed, but rather than letting me go, his arms only pulled tighter.

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