Page 231 of Eternal Ruin
Susenyos. Bloodied beyond belief—from his mouth to his dark wet shirt.
Kidan let out a cry.
Urgently, she traced his neck and found it broken, tilting to an unnatural angle. The entirety of his chest was covered with careful blade slices. If any of the Sicions’ blood-licked silver had hit a vital artery… he would die. Kidan had the sensation of falling, a loud thumping noise drummed in her ears, and she was shaking him, shouting his name.
His heart wasn’t beating under her fingers.
“Yos,” she demanded louder, and louder. Her vision had changed, bleeding, a furious red. She didn’t hear the Sicions at first, her eyes focused on Yos’s unmoving chest.
Move, move. Please, God, move.
Someone touched him, trying to take him away and she lashed out, attacking them with her nails and clawing half their face off. They hissed and retreated. It was the red-haired Sicion that was snarling at her, flashing his fangs.
“Leave him here,” the other Sicion said outside the cell, arms crossed, watching her with gray eyes. “We’ll return in an hour. The smell from his rotting corpse should loosen her lips.”
Rotting corpse.
Rotting corpse.
The two words disassembled in her mind, she was unable to form them wholly, refusing to allude to what they meant.
The Sicion stood with a menacing gaze and exited with his partner. Kidan was already by Yos’s side, cradling his head in her lap. There was so much blood gushing from his mouth, and she parted his mouth to see they’d defanged him.
Tears came to her eyes now, and she pressed her forehead to his sticky one.
She couldn’t feel the warmth of his breath. His nose and mouth were cold. She pressed her ear to his mouth, waiting for the familiar trickle of life. There was nothing.
Nothing at all.
Rotting corpse.
Quickly, she cut her palm with a piece of rock, hissing. She pressed it to his parted lips. Her blood dripped slowly into him.
“Please.” A jagged sob wrenched free from her throat. “Yos, open your eyes.”
She waited a minute that stretched for eons, but there was no movement. Her fists bunched and before she knew it, she was hitting at his still chest, again and again.
Once, he’d used violence to bring her back from the gates of death, and she would do it now, pounding at him until his own heart would beat.
“Yos! Wake! Up!”
She beat him until there was no more energy in her arms. She fell forward, pooling braids curtaining his face, her shoulders rising and falling roughly.
“Please, don’t take him from me,” she begged, whispering to him, to the gods, to anyone who listened to broken souls. “I can’t lose anyone else, please.”
80.
SUSENYOS
Someone was calling him.
Their voice was twisted with a cry, and they were calling him. It filled him with urgency to be called in such a way, to be needed like he was their own breath.
But every time he tried to answer, he was lost inside his broken body. The Sicions had perfected the art of pushing an immortal creature to the brink of death, and it was where he hovered now.
It would take only one more slice of their blood-licked blades to send him across that threshold into oblivion. He felt the poison of their blood inside him, slithering toward the arteries of his heart, and he was doing all he could to not let his heart pump, and risk pulling in the venom. The stench of a rotten forest peaked, sweeping over him. He reached in the dark, found life on his tongue. It tasted like the thing stars were made of. The very oasis of the desert.
Yos!
