Abolisher [Drothiker #2]

30.

World appeared in sharp stabs of venom.

She was still in the alley, but everything hurt.

Someone was beating her. Her body was limp; she didn't feel her limbs. There was blood everywhere. It dripped from her waist, her severely bruised face. It cascaded from her heart, her spirit.

Someone was carrying her over his broad shoulder—thick mass digging into the blinding wound in her stomach.

There was no life left in her. She was dying. She was dying—

The man slammed her into a stone wall nearby—hard enough that she was surprised her body didn't burst in mass and organs. Her skull met the stone with a pitiless impact. Starlit night came across her sight.

"Get up," he growled.

The voice—that voice ...

It'd been a year, but dread and venomous wrath still woke in her, lit up her insides in a fierce fire.

She felt her power surging to meet with her, felt the support and the destruction it offered. And for once, she didn't fight it.

Her limbs came alive, her whole body did, and a roar tore from her throat—inhuman, unearthly. Under any other circumstances, she might have shrunk away from it, might have let question of humanity break her.

But today, Syrene Alpenstride embraced the monster.

For there, before her eyes, stood the Overseer of Jegvr, the Voiceless Pits. There, before her eyes, stood the man who'd drunk out her life drop by drop.

And, behind him, lay the Prince of Cleystein's lifeless form.

A raging sorrow came across her sight.

Darkness pulsed beneath the overseer's pale skin, in his eyes. Profane and otherworldly.

But Syrene saw none of that, she only saw the twisted grin on his face as he watched her, once again, bleeding and broken, before himself. Watched her drained and vulnerable. Syrene wasn't surprised when the lively force inside her gripped her legs and dragged her to her feet.

She wiped the blood from her mouth. "You're a dead man."

There was no whip in his hand today. No, the fingertips of his hands were inky black. Then—

That black spread like molten night, until it took over his entire hand. The Darkness rose over it, obscured the hand behind itself as if it were something precious. Then it warped and took shape of the head of a spear.

Syrene forgot the pain, forgot the noise. The only bellowing in her head, in her body, was kill him, kill him, kill him

The overseer charged with a spearhead—where his hand should've been—with an uncanny speed. The force—or maybe her roaring instincts—wrenched Syrene away before she could even register.

The overseer's spearhead slammed into the wall. No—

Syrene watched, struck, as the shaped weapon cracked the centuries old wall—as if it were any other fruit.

The man whirled, and when Syrene saw that grin again, her blood thrummed with rage.

This time as he came, the hand shaped itself into a hammer. Syrene whirled and ducked. As she did, her eyes swept across Azryle's dead body.

Her chest twisted, and the sound from Syrene's throat was pure animal.

Then she was burning.

No—she was on fire. Flames erupted from each inch of her. Bluer than the sky, the sea—not to burn, but to bite into the skin with a cold not of this world at all.