THE TRUTH IS SPILLED
Makebate (noun): one that excites contentions or quarrels.
DAY 36, HOUR 4
It was the underside of the e as it was carved into my back.
It was the fiftieth mile of what was supposed to be a forty-mile run—legs pumping furiously, lungs rattling for relief—as Lothaire screamed at us to run faster or we’d do another lap.
It was hour three of being set aflame by Mother.
I suffocated.
Persisted.
Drowned in a melee of screams.
I hallucinated that Lothaire stood off to the side, watching the battle. “You’re my daughter,” he said proudly. “You’re powerful, I know it.”
“I’m your daughter. I’m strong,” I whispered as I swung, hoping if I said it aloud, I’d believe it.
Blood splattered across my face, and I barely noticed the warm fluid. Green gore sprayed from carapace shells as I mercilessly sliced them to pieces. A woman screamed in my face as she died.
Despite it all, the haze hadn’t swallowed me.
The world flashed in vibrant colors, and time moved at its usual speed. Terror for my best friend replaced any emptiness I might have once felt. My necklace and bracelet pulsed.
I dodged a pincer, then sliced off the ungodly’s head.
Sweat poured down my face, and the oppressive warmth kept my fingers clammy. There was no ice.
I kept my back pressed against Sadie’s unconscious form.
The corner provided cover.
It was the only upper hand I had.
I stabbed an infected through the heart, turned and disemboweled another, then sliced through the heads of both ungodly as they ripped free.
They fell in pieces before they could rise to their full height.
Death himself hadn’t wrapped his cloak around my shoulders. Not yet. I existed in the in-between: a land of fortitude and intrusive thoughts.
It was just me, the battle, and the familiar out-of-breath, winded, barely alive feeling.
My arms prickled with numbness.
Hours of blocking heaving blows and swinging my sword were taking their toll. My fingers were cramped around the hilt. I couldn’t remove them even if I wanted to.
Terror for Sadie, who was slumped helplessly against the wall behind me, had me repeating a stream of expletives to myself.
She should have woken up by now.
But I’d had to do it.
She’d been losing a significant amount of blood and had been in danger of permanently harming herself from exhaustion.
The mental war raged as I refused to give in to the exhaustion.
The physical war persisted.
Life was intolerable torment, and anyone who thought otherwise had never stood over their closest friend and swung a sword as they held back a room full of mindless monsters.
Time marched forward as I sliced and blocked.
A large middle-aged male infected slammed his enchanted sword down with so much force that my right arm went completely numb.
I felt nothing.
I couldn’t move my shoulder or forearm.
Slamming my foot into the man’s knee, I used my left hand to rip the hilt out of my unmoving fingers and rammed the blade through his stomach.
Right arm useless at my side, I resumed fighting with my left. I wasn’t fully ambidextrous, but my nondominant hand was sufficient.
Sufficient was enough.
It had to be.
For Sadie.
Sweat blurred my vision, and I couldn’t see beyond my attackers and the pile of carcasses at my feet. They kept coming, and I kept getting more tired.
I barely blocked a swing. The edge of an enchanted sword sliced down the outside of my thigh, and I screamed.
Lunging, I decapitated the infected and killed the ungodly as it emerged.
But another infected appeared in its place.
Again.
Another infected appeared.
“Wake up, Sadie!” I screamed desperately, but there wasn’t so much as a twitch from the legs I bumped against as I fought.
Tears of frustration poured down my face because if she’d died, it was my fault. I’d killed her by knocking her out.
I sobbed as I fought.
Gasped for air around body-shaking sobs.
A sword swung low and cut shallowly across my shins—I didn’t react quick enough. As I collapsed to my knees, I focused on my shoulder muscles.
Wings exploded.
My shirt was covered in cuts and provided no resistance. It fluttered off me in shreds. Left hand swinging the sword to block blows that rained down from above, I clumsily grabbed a feather with my numb right hand. With every ounce of will I possessed, I ripped it off.
It burned like a motherfucker.
With no precision or accuracy, I flung the feather into the crowd. An infected screamed, and I took it as a good sign. I ripped another feather and did it again.
Again.
And again.
Bodies screamed as everything blurred.
Sweat mixed with tears, and I grabbed the brick wall to hoist my body up. A last-ditch effort. The final stalwart defense that my friend deserved.
I didn’t move.
My wings were too heavy.
Lying back against Sadie’s body, wings spread wide—a fallen angel who’d never gotten to fly—I dropped the sword and ripped at my feathers with both hands.
Flung them at the faceless bodies.
I knew in my gut that it was the end; there was nothing to analyze. No strategy left. I prayed they’d eat my heart, because I couldn’t live in a world without Sadie.
I hiccuped between gasps.
Tears streamed down my face as I flung feathers blindly.
In the end, I wasn’t strong enough; in the end, all the power in the world wasn’t enough to save us.
Please sun god, save Sadie. Take me instead, the world needs her lightness. I sobbed. The world doesn’t need any more darkness, and that’s all I can give. It needs her. So badly. She has so much goodness to offer. She’s too pure to end like this. I need her. Tears blinded me. I need her so fucking badly. I can’t live without her. I can’t. Please.
I wrenched a feather off my wing and flung it.
It clattered across the floor.
Shadows descended.
All around.
Hallucinating, I imagined the ground quaking beneath me. Portraits rattled as they fell off the walls, bricks rained down as the ceiling opened up, and a divine figure dropped from above.
The shadows turned toward the figure.
They stopped ascending.
I blinked.
I wasn’t imagining it.
The monsters had really turned around.
Before I could be grateful, a heinous sound, too unimaginable for words, made every muscle in my body seize in agony. I was paralyzed by it.
Then it stopped.
Blessed relief flooded through me, and I gasped for air. Sadie was limp and warm beneath me.
I blinked, blurry vision clearing.
A handful of infected and ungodly stood in the center of the room, and all of them were frozen still with their mouths open wide as their eyes danced with a strange kaleidoscope of colors.
I’d never seen anything like it.
A soft voice chanted.
I pressed shaking fingers to my eyes and dragged them away, but the scene remained.
I rolled off Sadie and crawled forward on my hands and knees through piles of substances I refused to think about. My heavy wings trailed behind me like a downed butterfly’s.
Head lifted high, I squinted as I peered between the legs of the infected.
I stopped.
Immediately I wished I hadn’t crawled forward, because now the image was burned into my memory.
Jinx was crumpled on the floor in a pile of bricks, and her one arm was dislocated at a horrible angle—but that wasn’t the scary part.
Her sunglasses were off, and her eyes glazed pure black.
Her one hand was outstretched, fingers bent in different broken directions as she pointed at the frozen figures and chanted, “Anima tua est mori.”
A gold cuff glowed brightly on her other wrist like it was leaking sunshine.
Light illuminated the mangled bodies that covered the floor, and the temperature in the already warm room skyrocketed.
Long tendrils of a white flame floated in the air between the frozen creatures and Jinx’s outstretched hand, creating the illusion that she was connected to our remaining foes by ropes.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
It wasn’t Jinx’s midnight-black eyes, the white flame, or her words alone that made my stomach drop; it was the sheer power that radiated off her.
Silky black hair curled up around her head defying gravity as she repeated the chant.
Looking at Jinx was like looking at Lyla.
No.
It was worse.
The adage “you don’t look fate in the eyes” seemed more like genuine advice and less like a whimsical saying. She was power incarnate, a type of power that didn’t seem native to the realms of the High Court.
She dropped her outstretched hand, and the white ropes dissipated.
The bodies of the infected and ungodly dropped—Jinx was the only one still alive.
They were all dead.
Black receded, and Jinx’s eyes went back to normal. Her breathing was labored and loud in the aftermath of whatever she’d done.
The sunshine exploding from her cuffed wrist extinguished like it had never existed. The room plunged into shadows.
“What are you?” I croaked.
She lifted her head in my direction and whispered, “You already know.” Her words trailed off into an agonized moan as she convulsed on the floor.
My heart clenched with worry as my mind rebelled.
I tried to crawl forward to help her, but exhaustion punched through me, and I collapsed face first onto blood-covered stone.
The threat was eliminated.
But was it?
As I drifted into consciousness, the Latin saying, “Anima tua est mori,” repeated inside my head. Its literal translation was, “Your soul must die.”
The white ropes made of flames had been their souls stretching as she pulled them out of their bodies.
She’d consumed them.
The kings were the chosen soldiers of the sun god, and even they could only see souls and judge them; they couldn’t take them.
The power to consume a soul was the ability of a dark god.
Jinx had destroyed them all—she was a terrible creature of lore.
She was a soulmancer.
