Hollow Palace (Wattpad Exclusive)

Chapter Twenty-Two

Twenty-Two

Everything went black and cold.

Eli forgot herself and everything.

Then she heard a papery voice whispering to her, “Summon me.”

Her eyes flew open. Her body was no longer in pain. Her hand was still pressed against Kiran’s wound, his hand over hers, but his was limp. Eli stood and turned away from him. Her mind cleared. Her focus was complete, a dark rage simmering inside her.

The flames around Naga were beginning to diminish, turning from blue-black to blue to orange, shrinking and uncoiling like a snake slithering down a hole.

Eli dug her nails into her palm, which was healed from the wound she’d given it only moments before. Blood trickled between her fingers. She was so damn tired of blood.

Her throat was tight, parched, but she forced the words out. “Adra, you are my servant, I summon you.”

She caught a glimpse of Naga’s ebony face, looking human and yet too beautiful to be human, with long glossy coils of black hair and dazzling white-blue eyes, her skin embedded with jewels in geometric designs and bands of gold around her limbs. She smiled, a seductive, triumphant smile. Her hands ran over her chest and down her sides. “I am complete! I am alive!”

A dark shadow emerged behind Naga and grew and grew. Naga must have felt the presence, because she spun and backed away. Smoke unfurled from the shadow, filling the hall.

A towering figure emerged, darker even than Naga had been in her god-form. The blackest pitch made blacker and shaped into the gigantic silhouette of a woman.

“You have no power over me, I am your master!” Naga shouted up at the woman, whose face was shadow. The flames were gone now, but smoke rolled around Naga like a flood, encircling her. “Return to your prison!”

Eli stepped out of the bowl. Jena and Uma were as she’d left them. Jena on her knees, a knife at her throat, Uma standing behind, but they were both staring up at the shadow goddess with their mouths open.

“Your bow, your arrows,” Eli said to Uma, breaking her sister from her trance.

Uma blinked and then stared at Eli. “What—”

“Quickly!” Eli snapped.

Uma took her knife from Jena’s throat. Jena leapt to her feet and began to swing her sword at Eli, but the blade sagged and melted, so by the time she’d swung it round, all she had left was the pommel. Eli hadn’t even needed to speak, she’d only envisioned the sword melting and it had.

Jena dropped the pommel to the floor. The metal clatter sounded faint and faraway. She turned to Eli, her face vehement.

“I require no steel to leave you quite dead,” she said, though she was sobbing.

Eli gazed at her cousin. She couldn’t feel anything now but cool resolution.

“Aim true, my sister,” she said to Uma, pointing to Naga’s back.

Uma slid her knife into her belt and took her bow from her back.

“Daughter of my flames,” Adra’s voice was still the papery whisper that Eli remembered, but somehow, it was deafening. “Betrayer. Usurper.”

No much time left before Naga realized that her transformation into a living deity was not complete—that the power of Adra’s covenant resided in Eli now, preventing Naga from taking it from Kiran and, thus, also preventing her from achieving true immortality in the living world. Had she taken the last covenant from Kiran, then Naga would have been both alive and immortal. She would have been able to kill and drink the blood of whomever she chose, gaining immeasurable power. But because Eli and Kiran had been married, because their blood was one in the eyes of the gods, Eli had been able to take Adra’s covenant from Kiran before Naga could. Naga was alive, but she wasn’t immortal.