The threads of Spiritum were slippery, try as she might to grasp them. The same as on the night with their leader, magic tugged from beneath her like a rug. She couldn’t concentrate, and every time she dropped into channeling-space, the golden strands slithered away, blinking in and out.
Apollius pulling it back, away from her. Surely, He couldn’t know just how badly she needed it right now; the god had put her through every hell, but He didn’t want her dead.
Lore snarled into the sand.
The snatches of moonlight that fought through the ash gleamed along a knife blade, clutched in the first Presque Mort’s fist. He knelt, almost reverently, and brought it close to Lore’s neck. “We kill you and the world is saved.”
A crack. The Mort’s head, struck by a rock. His eyes rolled back as he fell over on top of Lore, a vague shape behind him raising the rock again.
Jean-Paul. He must have seen her leaving, followed her.
Fulbert had gotten off easy earlier; the old poison runner hadn’t forgotten how to fight. He twisted sideways, lashing out with the rock again, but now he’d lost the element of surprise. Another of the Presque Mort grabbed the knife from their fallen leader and spun to Jean-Paul, scoring him across the shoulder.
“Hey!” An inane thing to scream, but it was all that came to Lore’s tongue. She pushed up, lashing out at the nearest Mort, punching him in the knee in a move that hurt her as much as it did him. The knee went sideways, bringing the Mort to the ground, but he didn’t stay there long, limping up again to go after Jean-Paul. Jean-Paul, who was fading fast, another bleeding mark opened across his stomach.
“Lore!” His shout was thin. He lunged with the rock again, but the Presque Mort dodged him easily. “Lore, run!”
They were going to kill him. He’d come after her out of some remaining dreg of affection for the girl she’d been, and now he was going to die for it. Henri and Etienne would be left alone, across the sea in Ratharc, always wondering.
Lore reached for her power again. Spiritum, flickering gold. It tried to slip away, water dragged toward a drain, but she didn’t let it, not this time.
“Fuck you, Apollius,” she growled, and grabbed the threads in tight fists, not letting them slither from her grasp.
She dropped into channeling-space with teeth-clenchingeffort, the world going black and white except for the bright stars of Spiritum at the center of every living thing. The cosmos of the Presque Mort glowed, Jean-Paul a constellation. The smaller sparks of sand mites, the tiny flecks of plankton in the ocean beyond them.
There wasn’t time for finesse, but Lore didn’t need it, not anymore. She could make this power do whatever she wanted, and now, she wanted desolation. She wanted apocalypse.
Her fingers curled. And Lore pulled.
This was different from the night she’d killed the other Mort. Her will was different, and thus the magic reacted to it—she didn’t just want to use Spiritum, to force it into allowing an escape. She wanted it to behers, wanted to grab it all and undeniably stake her claim. Lore was afraid, and her fear made her reckless, made her willing to do whatever she had to.
Spiritum responded. It slid into her, curling up like a golden serpent. It set fire to everything else, shone in all the dark places. Lore felt like a star, wreathed in bright light. She felt like the sun.
Every shadow washed out of her, every darkness, the moon scoured away by the daytime, death defeated by unfettered, wildlife. All of it, hers, because she claimed it, because this power could belong to nothing else in her vicinity.
A ponderous shift, the world readjusting its axis. Something taking notice. A decision being made, somewhere out there, a path rewritten.
Lore didn’t realize just what it was she’d done until every last drop of that light was gone from the space around her, contained inside instead.
Gasping, Lore fell to her knees. And so did the bodies, before slumping forward onto the sand.
She threw her head back, staring at the sky, pulling in great lungfuls of ash-tinged air through her teeth and smiling a wide, sharp-edged smile.
Myriad hells, Mortem had never felt like this. So muchpower, crowding her out of herself. Making her empty and invincible.
With a short laugh, Lore looked down at the dead Presque Mort fallen around her. Their bodies were dry and desiccated, every bit of life wrung from them like wet rags on a laundry line. Three bodies, one for each of the Mort—
Wait. Four bodies.
Jean-Paul.
Her mind wouldn’t string the information together, not at first. It shied away. Lore had killed people before, and probably some of them hadn’t deserved it. But Jean-Paulcertainlydidn’t. Jean-Paul whom she was trying to save, with his husband and his son in Ratharc, with his life still stretched ahead of him—
She’d killed other things, too, grasped the lives of everything close enough for her to reach, but this was the only one she cared about. The mites were dead in the dirt, the fish were dead in the waves, but Lore couldn’t bring herself to give a single shit.
She walked slowly past the bodies of the Mort, approached Jean-Paul limp on the ground. Lore lowered herself down, slowly, careful not to touch any part of him.
There were no tears. She’d spent all of hers earlier. She settled, pulled her knees into her chest.
