Page 113 of In the Ravenous Dark
Kadreus wastes no time. He has a hand around my throat, metal claws digging into my skin, before I can blink. I jam one half-moon blade into his side, but he doesn’t even flinch. I raise the other, and he catches my wrist, his own sword abandoned, and squeezes until my bones crack and snap, and my blade clatters on the ground. I scream, but he lifts me off the floor by my neck, choking me off.
I can’t use any death magic without breath. For sigils, the fingers of my broken arm are useless. I hesitate too long in letting go of the weapon jammed in his side—long enough for him to sketch sigils of his own that break all those fingers. Pain lances through me, enough that my mind stumbles when I try to use the only sigil I know well enough to follow without sketching. When I finallymovehim, it’s feeble. He only pivots, still dancing, and slams me up against a wall. My toes dangle a foot off the ground.
“Any more tricks up your sleeves?” he hisses. “Ah, yes.” It doesn’t take him long to find the second stake, bound beneath the wrappings on my other arm. His retrieval of it, jostling my fractures, would have made me scream again if I could.
He raises the stake eye level between us, twisting it back and forth to examine it.
I gurgle at him. My straining eyes follow the stake in his grip. I can feel my wrist and fingers quietly knitting back together. When the inevitable blow comes, I hope they’re strong enough to catch it before it reaches my heart.
“I’m not done with you just yet,” he says. “First, a toast.”
He strikes like a snake, lips parting to reveal elongated eyeteeth. I don’t have much of a glimpse before they’re buried in my neck. I can’t even gasp in shock or pain.
I hear Ivrilos shout, but he can’t stop this.
It’s like the old days, when I was still alive and my guardian would steal from me. Everything feels like it’s draining out of me. My wrist and my fingers stop healing. The world wheels around me. Without my feet on the ground I soon lose track of what is up or down, and the lights begin to fade. I barely notice the hand at my throat or when Kadreus’s teeth pull away; I feel so empty. Adrift.
“Just delicious.” Kadreus’s voice floats toward me from far away. All I see are his red lips swimming before me. There’s a current I can feel against me, trying to carry me off.
Part of me just wants him to let go.
“It’s not broken, you realize,” he says, and I have a hard time understanding, at first. “The link to my father’s domain. It’s like severing only one rope of a bridge. It might not work correctly, be too precarious for proper use, but it’s notgone. And it could always be repaired.” Maybe he’s trying to reassure himself, or perhaps his father. “Are you prepared to go to the underworld to finish the job, Rovan?”
Kadreus smiles into my face as he watches the news sink in. “I’m certainly planning on sending you there, for all the good it will do you. You’ve lost. I told you, you can’t beat me alone.”
Then there’s another voice, and a face behind him that sharpens my focus and drags me against the current, closer toward the surface.
“She’sneveralone,” Lydea says over his shoulder—just as she rips Kadreus’s heart out through his back. The sigils she uses are magnificent, more powerful and yet more delicate than I’ve ever seen her use. It’s a work of violent art.
Oddly, I can almost hear Japha’s voice echoing her. But maybe that’s because I’m dying. Again.
It doesn’t stop me from smiling as Lydea tosses his heart aside like so much trash. Not even when Kadreus hurlsmeaside, and my head cracks on the stone floor like an egg.
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If only Kadreus getting his heart torn out would kill him. But he remains standing, just with a gaping, impossible hole in his back.
I can still see him from my vantage on the floor, my body like a broken doll’s, even though it looks as if I’m staring down a long dark tunnel. A tunnel that’s underwater. I hear Ivrilos crying out again. His memory of his mother and sister dying rises in my mind, clearer than my own vision. He’s trying to feed more of his essence into me, and his foremost memory must be coming with it. But it’s not enough, not after I’ve lost so much blood. And he can’t spare much of himself, not while fighting his father.
“Don’t,” I try to say, but it comes out as a rasp.
Kadreus thinks I’m talking to him—they always think that—and he turns to give me a grin, right before he seizes Lydea by the throat.
She wasn’t ready for him. She obviously thought ripping out his heart would slow him down. But no. Only a stake of wood or bonepiercingthe heart can kill a revenant. The only stake like that left within reach is clenched in Kadreus’s hand.
I can’t sketch sigils to snatch it away from him, not with my unhealed fingers. As my brain sluggishly tries to think of something to do from within the empty ruin of my body, I can only watch his hand tighten around Lydea’s throat as his sigils bind her limbs like invisible rope, even down to her fingertips.
“Where is your sense of honor, dear Lydea?” Hetsksat her. “You came at myback? Your king, no less?”
“You can’t speak of honor. And you are no king, not anymore,” Lydea hisses. “I am your queen.”
“Wedefinitelycan’t have that,” he says. I can’t see his face directly, but his rage is barely concealed under the calm mask of his tone. “I guess my line ends with you. So be it.”
Lydea, absurdly, grins. She looks fierce, bright, even as Kadreus is trying to snuff her fire. “You forgot Delphia. She’s the one Alldan truly wants anyway. She’s the continuance of your line, and an alliance with Skyllea your end. They’re coming for you.”
“I’d best make ready, then,” he says. And then he snaps her neck.
It’s the sound of my own heart breaking.
