Chapter 179: Sunrise

Blood had spattered across the amulet Kartania had given me, dulling its shine. More had spilled down the front of Countess Elstein’s meticulously-tailored dress, the torn and battered garment now sticky and heavy. When I’d crashed through the wall, the amulet had gone with me, and even now it was somehow still attached to the chain, its clasp mangled together. Wiping at it, I stood up and shook my head.

Going through the wall had definitely hurt, and the half-demolished chimney I saw in the hole I’d left told me why. There were indents shaped just like my horns in one particularly large rock.

A groan got my attention, clearing the fog in my mind.

Brynna!

Ignoring the clinging dress, I rushed over to where my friend had fallen—been thrown, more accurately. The lupael was splayed out in the wreckage of a table, and the first thing I noticed were the streaks of crimson through her normally-gray hair and tail. My influence? Nelys hadn’t shown that…

But theirs hadn’t been a contract made in desperation.

Dimly, I could feel a tether to Brynna; from it I knew she wasn’t dying anymore.

“Can you stand?” I asked, bending down to give her a couple of hands.

She grunted, rolling onto her stomach before pushing up with both arms. One clawed hand shot out and took mine. Staggering, she stood up and faced me. The amount of blood down her front—her own blood—pushed at my fury. I let it go, but I really hadn’t processed how close she’d come to death.

In a lot of ways, Brynna wasn’t changed. If not for the hand-length curved black horns sticking out of her temples, she’d look like she did before. Her pale blue eyes hadn’t changed, though her pupils might just have been a bit taller and narrower. Her ears were flat against her head, breaths heavy and eyes wide.

When she opened her mouth to speak, her already-big canines had grown, and the teeth behind them were matching, if smaller. “How bad is it?”

I tilted my head. “You look like you bled out, so your outfit’s a loss, but I think your crossbow’s intact somewhere around—”

“Not that!” She reached up and brushed a hand along one of her new horns, shivering. “The… changes. I didn’t get tentacles, did I? I think I have the right number of limbs.” She felt up her sides and relaxed a little.

Relief drew a smile wide across my face, and I pulled her into a hug, making her growl a little in surprise. “The tentacles are Nelys’s thing. Unfortunately, you’re missing a couple of arms, but we might be able to do something about that—”

“No! I mean—I know you’re joking. I can sort of… feel that—and I don’t know if I like that I can. But I don’t want more arms! And I like my tail how it is!”

“Do you hate the horns?” Genuinely, I wanted to know. Reminded of Duchess Kapel back at the castle, I’d hate to force changes on someone that they then hated.

I hated to force changes at all, really. Zero for two on that tonight, Zarenna.

Brynna felt them again, and how they stuck back between her flattened ears. “If they don’t get in the way… I guess I can pass for demon-blooded. Wait, aren’t I demon-blooded now?”

“I think so. I can always end the contract.”

“Will it change me back?”

“No idea. But I don’t think so.”

Brynna frowned. “Maybe later then.” She walked quickly over to her fallen crossbow and picked it up. “We should really—”

A loud crash and a scream from outside interrupted her.

I jogged toward the door. “Let’s go, yeah. Two of us’ll make a hostage trick that much harder.”

Outside, the sound really hit me. It wasn’t that I couldn’t hear it inside, it was that I just didn’t understand the scope of what was going on. Fires had started, casting flickering orange up toward the horizon, and the cacophony melted into a thrumming roar that shook my bones.

Fighting back, maybe, but Astryans were dying, The city was dying under the onslaught, having not even recovered from its occupation. I took off toward the nearest sounds I could make out, and Brynna surprised me by keeping up.

She’d been fast before, before her contract. Now though? No one would mistake her speed as mundane. We tore through the streets like one of the fires I was snuffing out, driving demons back and pointing people to the safety of resistance hideouts. Well, Brynna did the latter anyway—I knew only a couple and even then not without context within the city itself.

We arrived at the main street shortly, following wherever we heard fighting, and tearing through more and more to get there. I found a vicious rhythm of a sort, leaning into the slaughter with far too much glee.

In the contract details, which I’d gone over so quickly that my Name had been no more than a thought, Brynna would return to me any power she took. I felt it the moment she killed the third lesser demon to challenge her, distracting it with a nonmagical bolt and caving in its skull with a blurred-fist punch. A tiny trickle of power came back to me, like a spell held ready then dispersed. The lesser demons weren’t all Envy or Avarice. It’d be easy to direct demons of lesser Wrath, like diverting a stream. Some had probably even been created during the fighting against the cult.

I’d be surprised if I didn’t run into a greater demon from then, honestly.

Contracts were, after all, meant to benefit me. Power gained would go back to me, unless I dictated exacting terms like with Nelys… or Joisse. And that power would come from other demons, with few exception wrath demons, challenging those I’d made contracts with. And therefore challenging me.

Brynna’s faint aura had a flicker of my own crimson to it. She didn’t have a capability for magic anyway—at least not before.

I grabbed a lesser demon by a hind limb and spun it around before plunging my claws into its neck. More blood spattered my poor, ruined dress and stained the plaza below. Out of both our reach, a nearly human-looking lesser demon swung down at a lupael man who’d been fighting it.

Though his sword glowed with faint magic, the demon only had superficial wounds.

Even knowing I wouldn’t make it, and that Brynna was reloading, I took off toward the lost fight. At that same instant, a knife flew down from the rooftop and into the demon’s skull. Only the first two centimeters or so sunk in, but it was enough that the man could roll into a staggered block.

Before either could recover, I slammed into the lesser demon, knocking it away. A jet of fire from one of my hands roasted it in the street, bathing the man and I in crimson fire. Reflexively, I offered him a hand up.

Despite the terror I must have looked like, he accepted the proffered hand without hesitation and stood. “Thank you, Marchioness.”

His voice was familiar enough that I paused.

Underneath matted, straw-colored hair and bloodstained leathers, a familiar young face looked up at me, though his eyes were harder.

“Doryn?”

“You remember me?”

I nodded.

“Now’s not the time ta catch up, Boss!” another familiar voice sang from the roof. “Toss me that knife, will ya? I only got six left.”

“Catch!” I grabbed the knife out and flicked it up toward the roof gently as I could.

“Ya tryin ta stab me?” Taava yelped. Despite that, the knife didn’t come back down, and a familiar brown-eared head popped out over the roof’s edge, smiling.

“Tell me where you need me, Marchioness.” Doryn stood at attention, weapon still out and at the ready.

The instant I opened my mouth, I felt a twang in my connection with Nelys, like a lute string plucked too hard.

“Follow Brynna,” I replied quickly as the demon-blooded lupael jogged up. I knew she’d heard.

Doryn’s eyes widened, but he nodded quickly.

“Taava! Where’s Nelys?”

“Farms to the west!” Taava replied. “Don’t know where, but I think they were by the big granary closer to town.”

“Thanks!” I turned.

“Ya leavin?’”

“Nelys is hurt—bad.” I didn’t elaborate; I couldn’t risk the time.

After a quick leap, I flared my wings of fire behind me and took off over the city toward the granary on the edge of town.

***

“Abomination,” the demon over Nelys rasped, voice barely intelligible.

The demonic cecaelia clutched their side, gasping. Blood ran hot between fingers, down tentacles curled in pain. They looked up at the demon, jaw set and mind racing.

All around them, the stores in the granary were burning, flickering orange light across the figure that loomed above Nelys. Long, clawed arms extended past vestments of skin and scale. A holy symbol of Dhias, familiar to Nelys through Kartania’s tabard, had been twisted and broken across the demon’s chest, burned in like a scar. Their head too, was close to human above their wide, fang-filled jaws. Eyes like cooling embers radiated malice.

Nelys had traded blows with them; burns of lightning zigzagged across the demon’s body and stab wounds burned black around the edges from holy enchantments.

“You are cursed, not blessed!” the demon hissed. “Yet you dare to wield divine power?”

The demon pounced down, legs bending the wrong way as its claws drove forward into the dirt where Nelys had been not a moment ago. Nimbly, they’d managed to roll away, but they came up gasping, tentacles from their skirt trying to compensate for failing legs.

More blood ran down from a slash across their chest, and they remembered the unbearable, agonizing heat of trying to hold their own organs in. Matching it now was the fire at their back, saved only by the cool stone wall close to their side. Feinting a thrust, they ducked low, catching claws in a shoulder, but slashing wide across the demon’s thigh.

Lightning crackled from Nelys’s fingertips and the demon stumbled. More fire erupted from them in their fury, and Nelys brought an arm up, feeling flesh bubbling against the wall of heat. Above, a beam cracked, crashing down between the pair and scattering burning grain up into the air.

Spread out, the grain burst into a wave of fire. Hugging the stone wall, Nelys tried to run for the door, only to be met by claws and a staccato hiss. The dagger they brought up to guard met flesh, then bone, then claw, skidding and sparking along its short length before the young cecaelia’s grip faltered and it flew off, flashing, into the flames.

Behind the demon’s sweeping twin tails Nelys could see the exit, door closed and burning. On the next step they stumbled, blinking ash out of their eyes. The bloody claws of the demon shot forward again, and Nelys found themselves staring at the twisted symbol through gangly fingers.

Ducking, they felt their hair slicing away from their scalp, claws grating on bone. The next thrust was blocked, then a tail took their beloved legs out from under them. Tentacles flailing, they rolled, dodging one strike. Then again into the flaming beam on the floor. Kicking off they made between legs for the exit, limbs growing heavy as their regeneration faltered.

Through their connection with Renna, that ever-present little itch in the back of their mind, power surged. A broken hand blocked the tail, a knee found an ankle, and they were through to the door.

Stumbling, standing, Nelys shoved forward with their unburned elbow. It smashed through and fresh air surged into the burning granary. The sudden influx of cold lasted a single blissful moment before the fire roared in tandem with the demon.

Heat and force launched Nelys forward, out of the building and tumbling through the half-melted snow and churned earth of the fallow field. Dazed, they felt the power draining away as their body mended, but not fast enough.

They rolled and slipped in the mud, eyes wide at the greater wrath demon charging out of the collapsing granary on all fours, their foe’s eyes manic and fanged maw open in a terrifying screech.

A boom sounded again, and a shockwave sent the last of the granary tumbling down to earth. Nelys blinked and almost missed a crimson blur intercept the demon. The next instant the enemy demon was gone, and a familiar, spine-tingling roar drowned out the fire.

Zarenna.

Nelys turned, following a long furrow in the ground to the small crater where their friend was fighting the demon. For once showing the wrath her title implied, Zarenna ripped and tore at the other demon. Against her strength they could scarcely do more than try to defend.

In less time than it took for Nelys to struggle to their feet, Zarenna had the demon’s head off. When she rose and threw it aside, crimson fire incinerating the body behind her, Nelys could see blood dripping from her sodden outfit. Whatever she was wearing, be it a dress or a robe, hung off her in blood-soaked tatters. Her blue eyes were wide, but the Sovereign of Wrath’s mouth full of sharp teeth twisted into a genuine smile at the sight of Nelys alive and standing under their own power.

The only thing that matched her teeth’s shine was a necklace of silver metal still somehow hanging over her chest. Lips covered teeth, and the Sovereign of Wrath swept Nelys up into a warm, bloody hug.

They hugged back, watching as the first pink hues of dawn rose over the nearby mountains.