Page 133 of The Lost Reliquary
A brutal thud cuts off the rest and Avery drops to the ground, a white-robed figure looming behind him.
Caius.
He grips a spine of blood-spattered stone, a bit of Osiron’s handiwork turned impromptu club, chest heaving up and down with the exertion of the fight. For one blisteringly frigid instant, we lock eyes. Then the moment cracks, and his gaze drops to the vial.
I close my fingers around it. Turn. Andrun, fueled entirely by a new rage.
Avery…
I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. I don’t even consider where I’m going. All I can do is move, slipping between the pillar and the wall, darting around the threshold of golden bones, doing my best to ignore the growing gray haze at the edge of my vision as I struggle to pull the stopper from the vial—
Something hits me in the small of the back with the force of a cannonball. At least, that’s what it feels like as I go sprawling, colliding with the wall of the apse. I gasp, lungs emptied, bits of gold flashing in my ruptured vision that eventually resolve into femurs and ribs scattered across dark stone. And then into a pair of feet, crushing smaller pieces of bone beneath their heels as they approach.
Shit.My hands. They’re empty.
Which is the reason Caius doesn’t bother with me, passing by where I wheeze thickly, being pulled under a tide of my own blood. Because that’s worthless compared to what sloshes around in the vessel he plucks from the field of gilded debris.
He examines it, and then me. “This is your weapon?”
I don’t respond.
“Nothing clever left to say?”
I open my mouth but can’t quite makeNot while choking on my own fluids, you fuckwitcome out. What I manage is a feeble “Don’t.”
“This was what you were going to use to murder our blood mother?” Caius leans over me and grabs my hair, snapping my head up.
I look out upon chaos. The heretics have managed no more control over their stolen power than Emmaus, now only vaguely human forms composed of sickly green miasmas, like the sky before a tornado. Some rage at Tempestra-Innara, who is still standing and surprisingly vigorous, half engulfed by the power of their divine flame. Others, fully feral beings now, tear through the gathered clerics. A few of my blood brethren have broken Osiron’s barriers and are confronting the deity, who is making an impressive show of fending off both the Chosens’ blades and their sibling’s power. I can’t tell who is winning, only that this is a battle on the edge, ready to tip in either direction.
Caius’s grip tightens. “If this is enough to defeat the Goddess”—he hisses each word into my ear—“then it is enough to save them too.”
He releases me, and I remain upright just long enough to watch him unstop the vial and drink.
Fifty-two
Blood sings to blood.
HONESTLY,I’M SURPRISED. Inever thought of Caius as anything other than self-serving. Not like Nolan and his tedious, selfless devotion. Or even Morgan, dedicated to a fault. But here he is, trying to play the hero.
The change comes over him as quickly as the others, though immediately, it’s clear something is different. Power radiates off him like heat from a hearth, an aura not quite like Tempestra’s or Osiron’s, but unmistakably divine in origin. Caius swells with it, inhaling deeply before tossing the empty vial aside. Then, with one final, gleaming look of triumph over me, he plunges into the fight.
I can’t let him. Desperate, I grab a nearby femur, use it to push myself up…
The world grays.
Then brightens again, some indeterminant amount of time later. As it comes back into focus, I find myself staring at a familiar golden skull. Missing teeth, daggers in the eyes.
“Alastair.” The name croaks out. “Good to see you, buddy.”
I must not have passed out for long, because when I turn my head, the battle is still raging. Caius is taking on two of the altered heretics himself, lightning crackling off him. Storm Goddess. Makes sense.
“That would have been neat,” I say to Alastair. “Bet it tingles.”
Then Caius throws a punch that lands with a massive bolt, obliterating one of the heretics.
Shit.I blink back the spots of light and search for help, for a weapon, for… for…
I stop. The realization comes, quiet and whole, epochal despite its simplicity. I gaze again over the frenzied sprawl of the Cathedral. To the blood and the bodies. To the devoted and the divine.
