Chapter 167: The way of the world
SÉVERINE
Not through his working first this time. Through mine.
She dissolved the forward pressure of my condensed shield from the inside, which should not have been possible and was, and she came through the gap directly at my throat.
I stepped sideways.
Not fast enough.
Her claws caught my neck on the left side, and the blood came fast and immediate, and the pain was significant enough that my vision went bright at the edges for one disorienting second.
She laughed.
I pressed my palm flat against the wound and ran healing magic through it, feeling the cost of that working somewhere distant, some Omega in Valcourt paying the price for my continued functioning, the life exchange completing before I could think too carefully about it.
The wound closed.
"That cost someone their neck," I said. "Maybe. Every time you do that to me, another innocent person pays for it."
The wraith paused for a second.
Something moved through her distorted features that I recognized even through their wrongness. Something that had been Prim’s before Prim was this.
My familiar used the stillness to his advantage.
He drove three successive workings into her in rapid sequence while she was occupied with what I had said, binding her feet first, then her midsection, then throwing a containment loop around her upper body that he locked at both ends with anchors pressed into the floor. The effort of it cost him visibly, his form, for the first time, flickering at the edges, his definition softening.
She fought the bindings with everything she had.
The floor cracked under the anchor points.
I added my own holds on top of his, layering them differently, using different points of contact and different mana material so that when she attacked one set the other would still hold. The room groaned around us. The frost on the windows spread inward, crystallizing across the glass in patterns too fast and too complex to be natural.
For a long stretch of seconds that felt considerably longer than they actually were, we held her.
"If we had the materials," I said, not taking my attention off the holds, "how long would the rune take?"
"Longer than this is going to last," he said.
He was right.
She burned through the floor anchors by pulling the stone itself apart, the cracks spreading outward from the anchor points like a map drawn in damage, and when the anchors went, the whole structure destabilized again, and she came through it with the momentum of something that had been building force while it was contained.
She came for me again, and I met her with unseen hands, sixteen grips becoming twenty, driving her back step by step across the room while my familiar rebuilt his working and brought it down on her from above rather than behind. The wraith twisted and contorted against the holds, her form going less human and then more human and then less again as she fought for the energy to maintain both her shape and her resistance simultaneously.
"We have to run!" My familiar maintained as more holds broke.
"No," I argued. "We can take her. I can take her. You go and find all the materials we need. We bind this thing and get this over with!"
"Mistress..."
"Obey me!"
He nodded, and I turned back to face her as the binds broke again.
She came for my throat again.
I hit the wall before I could redirect. Her claws raked across the same ghost wound she’d carved open earlier, splitting skin that had only just been knitted back together. Blood ran warm and fast down my collarbone.
I healed myself like before. Which surprised her, and she rushed for a third, even more brutal attack, which then made me yell.
"Did you hear me the first time? That cost someone their neck. Every fucking time you hurt me, another innocent person pays for it. Another innocent Omega suffers till they die."
The wraith went still.
Something moved through her distorted features that I recognized even in their wrongness.
"You haven’t changed," I said when it actually worked. "Still worried about them. Even dead."
That brought back the rage, and she rushed at me.
"Do it then," I said. "Kill me. Every time you try, someone else dies. You cannot hate me for what I do and then do the same thing yourself. Wasting your eternity on me instead of praying for a new, better life."
She stopped.
The white light around her flickered.
"On the other side," she said, her voice distorted but carrying something underneath the distortion that was still distinctly hers, "some of them find it amusing. What will happen to you. How you struggle." A pause that felt like breath even though she no longer breathed. "I do not care about fate. I want your ruin to come from my hands. My family did not deserve what you made me do to them."
"The weak always fall," I said. "The weak will always be pawns in the games of the strong. That is the way of the world."
Her form contracted toward something more human, and the shock on her face, the genuine recognizable shock, pleased me in a way I was not proud of.
"So are you going to kill me," I said, "or not?"
She looked at me for a long moment.
"The only one I want to kill is you," Prim said. "And I will not drag those poor girls who were like sisters to me into hell alongside me to do it."
"You killed my grandfather," I said.
"He deserved it." Her voice carried no hesitation. "He was not guiltless. He was a monster. Just like you."
She let that sit for a moment, and then something shifted in her expression, the rage settling into something colder and more deliberate.
"I might not be able to hurt you directly right now," she said. "But being this kind of spirit has its advantages." She tilted her head. "I happen to be able to split myself into several places, and if I cannot kill you, I can kill your Alpha instead. And let me tell you, I am so close to killing him"
"No!"
I threw everything at her, all of it at once, unseen hands and fire and binding threads layered on top of each other, driving her back across the room while I looked over my shoulder, only to see that my familiar was still there.
"Go," I said to my familiar. "I told you to get the materials for the rune. Why are you still here?"
"I am not leaving you alone with this thing."
"That is an order—"
"We teleport out," he said firmly. "Both of us. Now. We mask ourselves, and she cannot follow. That is the only rational move here."
I did not answer him because the wraith had started fighting through my holds and I needed everything I had to keep them intact. She moved through fire like it was weather and tore through the unseen hands one by one, and I rebuilt each one as it fell, the effort of it pulling at something deep and finite inside me.
She hurt me three times in quick succession while I was rebuilding, each strike deliberate and placed, and I felt my familiar moving to intercept her before I could stop him.
"I told you to go—"
"I heard you," he said, putting himself between me and the wraith. "I chose not to."
The wraith stopped.
She looked between the two of us, and something almost like amusement moved through her distorted features.
"I can stop my attempt on his life, you know," she said. "Right now. All of this ends." She looked at me directly. "Break the link you have on those innocent women. Fight me fair, with nothing else to draw on. And I will leave the Alpha alone."
"And die? No."
The word came out of my mouth before I had finished hearing the offer, fast, absolute and completely unthought.
I pressed my hand over my mouth.
The wraith went very still.
Then she said, quietly: "Oh."
A pause followed.
"Oh."
She laughed, and it was not the manic laughter from before. This was something smaller, more knowing, and somehow considerably worse.
"You do not love him," she said. "Not really. You want him. You want the way he made you feel, the way he looked at you, the shape of yourself reflected in his attention." She studied me with something that almost looked like pity. "But you do not love him. And if you do not really love him. No point killing him like I did your grandfather."
I did not answer.
"I will be back," she said. "There may be someone who can break your marks without your permission. The whisperer."
My familiar’s hand closed around my arm.
I looked at him.
His eyes were wide in a way I had never seen from him before, not wide with alarm exactly, but with something more specific and more complicated than alarm.
"Stay afraid until then , witch," her voice said finally, from somewhere that was no longer the room.
And then she was gone.
I stood in the ruin of my grandfather’s bedroom with blood drying on my back, healing magic still cooling in my palms and the silence where a fight had been pressing against my ears.
"What is a whisperer?" I asked.
My familiar’s grip on my arm tightened rather than loosened.
"I will tell you everything," he said. "But we have to leave right now."
I did want to fight. But there was no point to it. He had the information, and I did not. I looked at my grandfather one last time and wished him well in his journey to the afterlife.
Then I let my familiar take me.