Chapter 188 — A Taste of Death I

Chapter 188: Chapter 188 — A Taste of Death I

Alice’s blade hung above Finn’s throat and did not finish the last inch.

She was not looking at Finn anymore. She was not looking at James either, not at his face. Her eyes had gone past him, to the broken eclipse shaking behind his bowed head, leaking its thin silver-black light across the marble.

Her lips moved.

"Azrael..."

James opened his eyes.

The throne room arrived in him all at once, and it was too much.

He could hear Finn’s heart. Beneath the smell of blood and burnt silk, under Marcus’s ragged breathing, there it was, hammering fast and thin against Finn’s ribs twenty feet away. He could hear Maeve’s heart too, and Saoirse’s, and the slower, wronger rhythm inside Alice that was not quite a heartbeat but wanted to be one.

He could feel Declan’s body cooling. He could feel exactly how much heat it had left and exactly how long that would take. Orla’s too. Every corpse on the floor of the hall spoke to him in the same quiet language, and he understood all of it without being taught.

He could see the fractures in Alice’s rebuilt wing. Under the red-gold thread and the ash-black feathers, the joint Finn and Marcus had broken was a map of hairline cracks, and each crack pulled at James’s attention like a loose thread on a sleeve.

Okay. Okay. Breathe.

He didn’t breathe. His chest stayed still. He remembered why and made himself stop waiting for it.

He remembered everything. The scythe going through him. The floor. The black water. The hand against his chest. Then taste it.

His fingers tightened on the scythe haft, only to confirm it was there.

The marble beneath his hanging boots split. A crack shot out from under him, forked twice, and ran ten feet toward the throne steps before he caught himself and eased his grip, and the crack stopped growing.

Careful. Careful with all of it.

Across the hall, Alice’s shock burned off her face. Her arm flexed and the blade dropped the last inch toward Finn’s throat, fast, because whatever had climbed into the dead boy was still hanging there with its head down, and Finn’s neck was one inch away, and one inch was nothing.

James was not hanging there anymore.

The blade stopped.

Alice looked down. A hand was wrapped around her wrist, holding the point of her sword a finger’s width off Finn’s skin, holding it there without shaking. She followed the hand up the arm to James’s face, and James was standing beside her on the broken floor, and no one in the throne room, not Alice, not Marcus, not Saoirse, had seen anything cross the space between.

James looked at Finn first.

Finn stared up at him from flat on his back, one hand pressed over the hole in his side, and whatever he was searching for in James’s eyes, he found it, because his shoulders came down off the floor half an inch and his jaw unclenched.

James turned his head to Alice.

"No," he said quietly. "I’m James."

Alice wrenched her arm back.

Her wrist stayed exactly where it was. She wrenched again, hard enough that her whole body swung around the fixed point of his grip, and the grip did not move, and then it tightened. The bones in her wrist cracked one after another under his fingers like green wood. Her hand spasmed open and the sword rang off the marble.

Her other palm came up at his face and burst.

Red-gold threads erupted from it, dozens of them, the same threads that had rebuilt her wing, whipping toward his eyes and mouth to climb inside him and take what they touched.

They never reached him.

A foot from his skin the threads lost their color. The red-gold turned grey, then black, and they crumbled midair and drifted down between them as ash. Alice stared at the ash falling past her own knuckles.

James brought the scythe up.

One short, controlled arc. The blade passed through her arm above the wrist he was holding, and then he was holding a hand that was no longer attached to her, and he let it go. The severed hand and her fallen sword lay on the marble together.

Alice screamed and swung her remaining arm at his throat, a blade of hardened red-gold light already extending from the palm as it came.

James turned the scythe over and took that hand too.

She reeled back from him, both arms ending in stumps, and her authority was already working, red-gold muscle threading out of the cut surfaces, winding, building fingers.

The new flesh got half an inch and died. It blackened, cracked, and sloughed off the stumps in wet flakes. The threads tried again. They died again, faster, because something was still inside the wounds where his blade had passed, something that sat in the cut like frost in a pipe and killed every living thing her authority sent into it.

Alice stood there in the ruin of her throne room, holding up two smoking stumps, watching her own regeneration lose the same fight over and over.

Then she spread both wings and threw herself backward into the air.

There was no pride in it. Her wings hauled her toward the high dark above the throne like a bird out of a burning tree, and for the first time since the raid began, Alice, First Disciple, Fallen Angel of Lust, was running.

James stepped after her.

The step took him across the entire throne room.

The hall smeared past him and he was above her, higher than he’d meant to go, the distance folded away by the authority before his intention had finished forming. His unfinished wings snapped open behind him to catch the motion, shedding black ash across the air, and the broken eclipse trembled behind his head with the effort of holding him there.

Too far. Adjust.

He adjusted.

He turned the scythe flat and struck her out of the air.

Alice hit the marble like something dropped from a cathedral roof. The floor failed beneath her, tiles bursting outward in a ring, and before the dust had committed to a direction James came down through it and set one boot between her shoulder blades and put weight on it.

She stopped moving.

None of the survivors moved either.

Finn lay where he was, because his body still had nothing to give, but his eyes never left James. Not once, not through any of it.

Marcus stood on the throne steps with his remaining hand clamped over his stump. He had fought beside S-ranks. He had watched floor bosses move on high floors that killed camera drones. His eyes were trained for speed, and they had lost James three times in the last minute, and each time his gaze had to jump to where the sound was instead of following the boy who made it.

Maeve knelt in the blood with the circlet guttering on her brow. When James had passed her, the cracked stone gave one weak pulse, reaching for him the way it reached for any wounded ally.

The light bent.

It curved away from his body a hand-span out, the way a stream bends around a stone, and returned to her dimmer than it had left.

Maeve pressed both red hands flat against her own knees and stayed very still.

Under James’s boot, Alice twisted her head against the marble, and the whole room changed.

Her authority came out of her all at once, everything she had left, not aimed at his body but flooding the floor, the walls, the air, the way water floods a sinking ship.

The reflections in the marble moved.

Finn looked down into the tile beside his face and his mother was there, reaching up toward him with both hands, mouth shaping his name the way she’d shaped it when he was small.

Marcus saw Finn. Grown, whole, standing at his shoulder the way they used to stand before every gate, and there was nothing in his son’s face but the old easy trust, none of the years, none of the hatred.

Maeve saw Declan. Upright, shield on his back, rolling his shoulder the way he did after every fight, looking around for her to confirm she was unhurt, because that was always the first thing he did.

And James saw the kitchen.

The old one, in Ballymun, the radiator under the window that knocked twice before it warmed up, the tea towel folded over the oven door handle. His mother stood at the counter with her back not quite to him, and she was crying, and she turned, and she said, come home, love, please, just come home, you don’t have to do any of this—

James stopped.

His hand closed hard around the scythe haft. His jaw set until his teeth hurt, and for one full second he stood inside that kitchen with the radiator knocking, and every part of him that was still eighteen wanted to stay.

Then the authority in his blood looked at the kitchen too.

And the kitchen could not survive being looked at. There was no life anywhere in it. There had never been. The edges of the counter went soft and rotted like fruit. The window furred over with black. His mother’s face held for a moment longer than the rest, because Alice was clever and cruel and knew what to spend her strength on, and then it came apart into red-gold threads that thrashed once and dissolved.

The throne room came back. The reflections in the marble were only reflections.

James breathed once. He didn’t need to. He did it anyway.

The pause had cost him two seconds, and Alice had used both of them. Her wings hammered the broken floor and she dragged herself out from under his boot, tiles shrieking beneath her, three feet of distance, four—

James caught the base of her rebuilt wing.

Alice froze.

Every part of her stopped at once, wings, legs, breath, because his fingers were closed around the root of the wing where the red-gold thread met her back, and there was only one reason to take hold of a wing there.

Then she fought like an animal.