A Chill in the Flame (Villains #1)

Fifty-two

Fifty-two

6:45AM

00:00

“Firi.” Dwyn slurred the word. She sputtered, speaking as if drowning in mud.

“Heal yourself,” Ophir begged, not seeing Dwyn at all. She wasn’t in Tarkhany. She was holding Caris’s lifeless body all over again, pleading with her to be okay. She knew this could be fixed. She knew Dwyn was powerful. The ending could change this time. Dwyn didn’t have to meet Caris’s fate.

Tyr called from whatever distant part of herself was still capable of comprehension. He claimed Dwyn had one borrowed power left. He insisted it. Demanded it. He screamed at her, shaking her. “Heal yourself!”

Dwyn’s sludge-like sputter came again, eyes in the back of her skull. “Firi—”

“Hang on!” Ophir forced down her sob. This time would be different. Dwyn would not die. Ophir gritted her teeth and spun on the woman before her wearing Zita’s face. “Who are you?!”

The far-off queen—the one clad in lavender, the second queen who had screamed her outrage from a distance—had continued running and was now almost to the platform. She’d reach them in a moment.

The woman in orange, gray, and black disregarded Ophir entirely, turning to the queen in purple. “Stand down, Zita! If you won’t bloody your hands to seek justice for your people, I’ll do it for you.”

The new Zita panted as she neared the platform. Hate burned behind her eyes as she outstretched a threatening palm. “Tempus, stop!”

The one in orange turned for Ophir, scrambling to grab the princess from over the table. Zita threw up her hands, and the woman in orange who wore Zita’s face seemed to hit an invisible wall. The false queen began to scream, banging against an unseen container. She began to seek an exit, clawing as the box of Zita’s shield appeared to shrink around her. Ophir had seen shields used in defense, but never as an offensive maneuver. Her breath caught in her throat as she turned to where she knew Tyr would be.

“Go and help Harland!”

“Dwyn or Harland, Firi?” Tyr barked back over the yelling crowd and the confusion around him. “Choose now, because I can only help one!”

Roses. Caris. Death.

She was paralyzed with panic. The crowd’s frenzied screams and drowning hysteria acted like hands, outward panic gripping her and shaking her with indecision. She couldn’t choose one and forsake the other. Neither could die. Neither would—

The world came to a glass-shattering halt.

Terror greeted her with open arms as the face of chaos screamed back.

Tyr had barely spit out the final word before everyone in the audience flinched, bending in half as they clutched their hands to their knees. Zita’s shield wavered and dropped as both the queen and the imposter clutched at their skulls, protecting their eardrums from a sound so deafening, it may as well have been a jagged needle shoved into Ophir’s ear canal. The sound was like bloodied glass, like rusted metal, like carpenter’s nails dragged across porcelain, like the wailing of banshees all at once.

It was the sound of hate, death, and defeat.

Ophir yanked her palms from her head. She tore her eyes from Dwyn to the sky to see a black cloud encroaching. No, it was a bird. A storm?

The bloodcurdling cry tore through peace and sanity once more.

It was the sound of a dragon.

The gargantuan, winged demon was upon them before they’d even looked up. An enormous, quadrupedal black serpent with a wormlike neck and razor-sharp talons descended. Membranous wings like bats, nightmares, and cobwebs rolled into two enormous expanses flapped as the creature aimed to land in the middle of the crowd.

“Firi…” The sound was less than a whisper. Dwyn spoke her name, scarcely clinging to consciousness. She was trying to say something, to communicate, to help, to plead. Ophir didn’t know.

Another gruff, desperate sound came at her side. Tyr was speaking to her.

“Command it!” he demanded, horrified. “It’s yours, Ophir! Command it!”

He’d said it already, hadn’t he? Tyr began yelling. No, begging. Goddess, when would it stop? When would this be a memory? She struggled to see the wings and fangs and claws. The sulphuric smell may as well have been roses. The screams of the audience may as well have been Caris’s guard—the noble August—tragic, final, dying.

This wasn’t Berinth’s party. She wasn’t holding Caris.

For fuck’s sake, hold on , she begged herself. Dwyn can’t die because you’re a coward. This is your fault.

Ophir couldn’t breathe. She was going to pass out. The smell of roses was too strong. She couldn’t think. The screaming was too loud. The blood. The smell. Goddess. Mother. Fucking. Cursed. Shit. Roses. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

The dragon’s mouth shot down into the crowd, plucking a terrified audience member. The wet, horrible crunch and slurp of the slain man was a music she hadn’t expected. The dragon swiped, biting, crushing dozens of bystanders as it thundered to a landing. Their broken bodies were toppled by the weight of its legs, its tail, its knife-sharp talons. The too-long neck of the snake snatched a second unlucky, screaming civilian in its rows of hundreds of needle-like teeth, tossing the man into the air as he kicked, thrashed, and cried out in horror and pain. The snake caught the man in its mouth, crunching down with a wet, bloodied sound as bones shattered and his screaming stopped. The man went limp as the serpent lifted its wormlike head to the sky, allowing gravity to help it pull its victim down into its belly.

“Ophir, command it!” Tyr tried again, shaking her shoulders.

Ophir looked between the twin queens, her rapidly poisoned friend, the sprinting, crying civilians, and the enormous demon she’d created. It was then that she realized why it was there.

“I did,” Ophir said, too stunned to explain.

Tyr said something unimportant. He didn’t understand what she meant. Of course he didn’t. He hadn’t been there in the desert when she’d given the very instructions that had brought them here. She’d told them to destroy her sister’s murderer.

She’d done this.

Smoke poured from the humanoid abomination’s mouth as it flamed its wings, descending into the crowd toward the middle of the platform. Paralyzed with fear, the queens, their guards, Harland, Samael, Tyr, Ophir, and Dwyn were unable to move. It landed on the lip of the platform, near Berinth.

The winged, faelike monstrosity opened its mouth and spoke.

“Murdererrrrrr,” the abomination hissed, waves of carrion and rotten eggs overpowering the scent of roses. “You wear the blood of Carissssss on your handssss.”

“Ophir!”

Tyr pulled at her. Tugged. Shook her. He’d crossed the bridge from desperation to madness.

“I did command it.” She looked helplessly at the thing she’d made, knowing precisely why it had come. She’d stood on the sands outside of the city and told the demon to do exactly whatever it had to do in order to terrify the ones responsible for Caris’s death. She’d first told it to stay out of the city and keep the serpent out of sight, but her second command was obviously the one it had followed. She never made anything right. Nothing ever turned out the way she wanted. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Her mouth was so dry. Her heart murmured arrhythmically. “That’s why it’s here. It’s here because of me. It’s here on my command.”

The serpent beat its mighty wings, knocking a number of civilians to the ground as they attempted to run for their lives. Its black wings blotted out much of the early morning light, casting a deep and bottomless shadow over them.

“Call a door,” came Dwyn’s garbled, drug-addled words. She wasn’t looking or seeing or hearing. This was the only sentence she’d managed. For all Ophir knew, it would be her last.

A request. A lifeline. Hope.

The dragon swatted at the audience, its nails biting into the flesh of all who ran, its foot crushing more. Its mouth still dripped with the blood from its first meal, but now it bit for sport, continuing to pick at things that drew its attention. Blood. So much blood. The cacophony of screams would never end.

“What?” Ophir couldn’t think. She could smell sulfur, and spoiled eggs, and roses. This had to be a nightmare. None of this was real.

The two-legged demon with the body of a man took one step toward them, then another.

“Stop,” Ophir tried weakly, but it did not.

“Killll…” it hissed, its head twitching from one side to the other like an insect as its horrible, black eyes looked between them.

“Firi!” Tyr demanded. She wasn’t even sure what he was trying to ask of her anymore.

“Beast!” Zita screamed, throwing up her hands once more. She spread her shield to create a wall between the demon and those on the platform. The demon extended a sharply pointed hand to the wall to test it for weaknesses, thick, tar-like drool dripping from its mouth as it looked among them.

“A door…” Dwyn said again, unable to reopen her eyes.

Zita kept her hands aloft. She was confident in her shield until the demon called for the dragon. When its head struck out, it hit the shield, shaking its head violently against the impact. Zita cried out, absorbing the blow as if the shock flowed through her directly.

“Go!” she called to them. “Get to safety!”

“Zita!” The imposter turned to her, but she wasn’t looking to the woman in orange.

“Where’s Sedit?” Ophir looked around blankly. Screams filled her ears. The serpent’s blackened, wormlike head struck the shield again. She looked into the bottomless trench of its maw, horrified at what she’d created. Chunks of flesh and cloth remained stuck throughout its rows of bloodied, needle-like teeth from the last man it consumed.

“Firi!”

The two-legged demon reached a hand toward Berinth, grabbing him around the throat. “Your massster will pay for your crimesss.” Ophir heard the sickening crunch as Berinth’s neck snapped in the demon’s hands. It faced Ophir, taking one step, then another toward her. It extended its hand for her, running into the shield.

Tyr shook her too hard, too violently as he desperately tried to make her see the pandemonium. The lives of Midnah and everyone in it were in Ophir’s hands, and she was frozen. His voice hitched with something near tears as he cried out for her to hear him. “For the love of the goddess, try something, Ophir! Anything! ”

The dragon hit the queen’s shield again. This time when Zita groaned, Ophir knew she wouldn’t last much longer. The dragon satisfied itself with a distraction as it grabbed a wailing woman who’d dodged between buildings, nearly escaping the massacre on the palace grounds.

“Sedit?” Ophir cried, a little louder this time. She wasn’t sure why she called for him, only that she knew he would help. He was her baby, her son, her beloved creature, her loyal companion. She needed him. “Sedit!”

Tyr released her and grabbed Dwyn by the scruff of her neck. “Don’t you have a power left? Use a healer’s power! Do something!”

“Door…” was the last thing Dwyn said before falling utterly limp. Her body doubled in weight as she went dead to the world.

Ophir saw it then. Like the serpent and the humanoid demon, her hound came bounding down the city streets for her. Seeing him filled her with a relief so tangible that it helped bring her back into her body. She took a deep breath, inhaling through her mouth for the first time since she’d smelled the sickening scent of roses. Sedit was nearly to the platform when a Midnah guard lifted his sword to protect his queen.

“No!” Ophir screamed, but it was too late.

The guard brought the sword down over Sedit’s head, severing it from his body. Her bloodcurdling cries were as horrible as the dragon’s. The creature joined her in her shrieks, a legion of ten thousand demons screaming from within its belly as it flapped its wings again to mirror her pain. This time when the dragon struck, Zita was thrown back against the force of her shield shattering.

“Tempus!” she cried out, and the imposter ran for her. Before the others could blink, Tempus had stepped from a woman in a gown into the shape of a horse. Zita grabbed on to its mane, and they took off away from the dragon as the city fell into chaos.

Tyr cursed as he released Ophir, pushing himself to his feet with a purely angry grunt. He sprinted past the two-legged demon without giving it the chance to reach for him and leapt from the platform and into the crowd. He pushed past the guard who’d killed Sedit and told the man to stand down, grabbing the dog’s body and its head as thick, viscous blood began to stain his hands, his shirt, his very skin. He tossed the dog’s torso onto the platform before swinging himself up.

The humanoid demon took several steps toward Ophir. She pulled Dwyn into her lap and raised her arm, smelling roses. She didn’t see Dwyn; she saw Caris. She didn’t see a demon, she saw men and their blades and the red, pooling blood of her sister. She heard the screams from the party. She felt the nausea, the fear, the need to drift into the ocean.

“Murderrrerrr…” the demon hissed. It would be standing over them in the next ten seconds unless Ophir did something.

Tyr rolled Sedit’s head toward its body, and white, parasitic tendons began to stretch from one part of the beast to the other as it reconnected.

“Ophir! He’s fine!” Tyr grabbed a sword from a guard who’d run and swung toward the two-legged demon. It hissed as it advanced toward Tyr. “Ophir!” Tyr cried out again.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sedit stand.

Her heart began to beat once more.

That which had died could be brought back to life.

Time could rewind.

Things could be fixed.

This was not Caris.

“Stop!” Ophir cried to the demon. “Sedit, help!” She pointed at her creation, lucid for the first time. She focused on the scent of sulfur and blood, vastly preferring it to the scent of roses. A door. Dwyn had told her to call a door. To where? For what? She looked around to see piles of broken bodies. Her winged snake continued to strike, picking off anyone who had broken their legs or been trampled by the crowd, unable to escape. They would not live to see another day.

Sedit leapt for the demon, but she didn’t have the time to see what their battle entailed. She envisioned a door, focusing on how it would open to somewhere better, somewhere safer. She closed her eyes and lifted her hands, thrusting her intention toward the open space in the platform until a door appeared.

“Get Dwyn!” she cried to Tyr as she scrambled to her feet, tugging at the unconscious girl’s arms. Power rippled through her voice as she rallied her strength.

Tyr growled his displeasure as he yanked Dwyn roughly upward, throwing her over his shoulder. “Go, Firi! Go!”

She ran for the door, twisting the handle as she called for Sedit. She sprinted through the door, out of the pastel morning lights of the desert and into the dark, cool, damp shadows of an overcast forest. Tyr pushed through behind her, Dwyn over his shoulder. Tyr dropped Dwyn to the sodden forest floor. With the anger and pent-up rage of someone who’d helplessly witnessed a massacre, he began kicking the door over and over and over again until it fell to the ground.

The wooden door banged. Its handle rattled as pressure pushed on it from the other side. Moans and cries and grunts poured from the crack as it opened. The Tarkhany crowd was quick to follow, and within a minute, they would not be alone.