Chapter 394 — Wrath Remembers Death II

For about a minute it worked.

They thought the demons were Turiel's guard. That was what they looked like, something between the raid and the platform.

Then Cillian put down a lean demon with a thin controlled bolt at the edge of the line, and James saw something leave the body.

It was a thread of crimson, thin as wire. It came out of the corpse and went into the channel underneath it, and ran away across the hall toward the platform.

Finn and Ren took down another heavy demon on the right. The same thing happened. A thin line of red came out of it and ran away up the channels to the steps.

It was not much, and it was nothing to stop fighting over. But James had been following that red for ten floors. He knew which way it went.

"The kills," he called. "Watch the kills. It's going somewhere."

"Every one," said Maeve, behind him. "Every one we drop. It goes up."

Alice was not watching the corpses. She was watching Turiel.

"He hasn't moved," she said. "He doesn't need to. They're filling something for him."

James looked at the platform. Turiel stood at the front of it with his hands loose at his sides and the red lines in his arms getting very slightly brighter.

"Change," said James. "Don't kill what you don't have to. Only kill what's breaking the line. Control the rest. Freeze them, slow them, go round them."

It cost them.

The demons did not stop coming because the raid stopped killing them. They pressed forward, and the raid had to give ground to keep its shape, back and back again, until the platform was nearer and the open centre of the hall was all round them.

Up on the platform, Turiel watched them change.

He did not smile. James saw his chin come down a fraction, like a judge whose clerk had finally read the right page.

---

Then he showed them what the Echo had been missing.

A heavy demon broke through on the left where Ciara had set a plane and it had cracked. It came straight at her.

Darragh moved the way he had moved fifty times in two days. His strongest mark went onto Ciara, and he stepped across the line of the attack to take it. That was what the mark was for. It would pull part of the hit onto him, and the two of them would split it.

James expected the impact to divide the way it always did.

Turiel lifted one hand.

The red that had come up the channels from every demon the raid had injured or killed lit inside him all at once. It did not come out the way the Echo's had, back at whoever had hurt it. It stayed. It hung in him, bright and held, while he looked down at the hall.

James understood the difference a fraction too late.

*The Echo retaliated.*

*Turiel judges.*

Turiel's eyes went to Ciara. She had stopped his soldiers again and again. He chose her.

The red came down off the platform at her.

Darragh's mark worked exactly as it should have. It pulled the punishment off Ciara and onto him.

Turiel saw that happen. James saw him see it. Turiel let it go where it had been pulled, deliberately, as if Darragh had stood up in front of the court and said *I'll take her debt as mine*.

It was far more force than one mark had ever been built to take. It was everything they had fed him for the past three minutes.

It hit Darragh full in the chest.

The mark flashed white. Darragh went off his feet and backward and down onto the black stone with his shield arm under him.

He did not get up.

`[PARTY MEMBER DECEASED — DARRAGH NOLAN]`

Ciara went toward him.

She did not decide to. She moved, because he was hers. Declan caught her by the arm. Mara was in front of her a second later, ice already coming up between them and the demons that had not stopped coming.

"Ciara—"

"Let go of me."

"Ciara, the line—"

The line was still coming. A dead man on the floor did not stop it.

James saw the System line while he was already shouting.

"Finn, in on Ronan, close the gap! Alice, take Darragh's side! Ciara!"

She looked at him.

"Planes for stopping only. Nothing else. Every one you've got left."

Maeve took one step toward Darragh's body, stopped, and turned back to Ronan, because Ronan was alive. James saw what that cost Ciara. She watched Maeve turn away from Darragh, and her face did something terrible and closed up again.

She did as she was told. Darragh had died doing as he was told, standing exactly where they had all agreed to stand.

---

Turiel came down off the platform.

He walked down the steps. He did not hurry. The demon ranks parted in front of him before he reached them, though nobody had ordered it. They stepped aside like a crowd making room for a judge, and he came through the gap.

As he walked, James saw the thing that made his stomach drop.

The red was still in him.

The Echo had emptied after a vent. It had gone dark for a few seconds, and they had built the whole of Floor 39 round those seconds. Turiel had just put enough into Darragh to kill him, and the lines were still bright in his arms and still moving at the roots of his wings. There was more where that had come from.

There was no gap, or not the gap they knew.

The plan that had got them through Floor 39 had just stopped being a plan.

---

Turiel crossed the hall.

He did not look at the wounded, or at the dead. He looked at James the whole way.

Alice moved first. She stepped forward between them and spread her wings, all four of them, black on black, across his path.

Turiel stopped a few metres from her.

"You've chosen," he said to her. He sounded almost gentle. "You stood beside the bearer of Death. You put yourself between him and what he owes. So you owe it too."

"I know," said Alice.

Turiel looked past her at James, and at the broken scythe in his hands.

James checked everything once.

`[HP: 839 / 2,048]`

`[MANA: 2,250 / 3,100]`

`[AUTHORITY RELEASE — 00:14:11 REMAINING]`

Darragh was on the floor behind them. Ronan was up, but only just. Maeve had spent half of what she had on keeping James breathing. Ciara stood white and silent with her hands at her sides, and she had nothing in her eyes at all.

The fallen angel they had come up here to kill had only now decided to fight them himself.

James raised Azrael's scythe anyway.

Turiel opened his wings.

They went out wider than the gap between the columns, and the pressure came off him like a wave. It hit the hall so hard that the demons still standing in their ranks went down on one knee, all of them, every rank, all the way back to the steps.

`[ENCOUNTER STATE CHANGED]`

`[PHASE II — WRATH]`

`[TURIEL HAS ENTERED THE FIELD]`