Chapter 154: Trump Cards

The dread had a name, and it was the man standing at the far end of the corridor.

I did not see him arrive. I only felt the air change. My lungs forgot how to fill. My knees wanted to bend.

Nobody had time to say it out loud. We all understood. We had walked into a nest and counted the wasps and forgotten to ask who owned the hive.

So we stopped fighting like people who wanted to win, and started fighting like people who wanted to live.

Khan moved first.

He slid one hand down his left forearm and pressed his thumb into the skin. A band of dull metal pushed up through it, thin and ugly, the size of a bracelet, and sank in until the flesh closed around it like water around a stone. I heard him grunt. Blood ran down his wrist in a single clean line.

I knew what it was. We all did.

It would multiply the force of his next five attacks, of any ability his affinity could make, by three hundred percent.

The price was written on his face before he paid it. Every drop of spiritual power in his body would be swallowed in one gulp, and the gift would keep eating, even as the power came back, until its hunger was fully fed.

Once the fight was over, he would not be able to walk for a full day.

Khan only smiled.

Eva held out her palm, and a crystal ball appeared on it, clear as a drop of water, no bigger than a plum. She looked at it for half a heartbeat. Then she closed her fist.

It crushed like sugar. A fine, glittering dust ran out between her fingers, and she lifted her hand to her face and breathed it in. The dust rose. It slid into both of her eyes like smoke up a chimney.

When she opened them, a soft purple glow floated in the irises, deep and still.

She looked at the end of the corridor, and her pupils moved, following something I could not see.

She was reading the future. Every move the enemy was about to make, laid out before her like a map. She could do it for seven minutes. After that, the purple would fade and take her sight with it, and she would walk in darkness for three days.

Petra did not say anything.

She raised her right hand, and a plain ring materialized around one finger. It was thin and black and it looked like nothing. She pressed it against her own chest.

The ring melted. It ran across her skin in a line of dark ink and spread into a tattoo, curling over her collarbone, down her arm, around her wrist. The pattern pulsed once.

She was already gone.

I did not see her move. There was only a blur at the edge of my vision, a sound like a sheet tearing, and a soldier at the far end of the room folding sideways with her morning star already through his chest.

Seventeen times her usual speed, added on top of what she already had. A gift that fast crosses nine feet in the time a man takes to blink.

She did not run. She simply stopped being in one place and was in another.

It was a Bound rank Gift, and she had one minute and three-quarters to use it. After that, she would not be able to walk for a week.

All three of them. Trump cards, every one. Gifts you save for the moment you think you might die.

All of it had taken less than five seconds.

Now it was my turn.

I had saved mine for last, because mine was the one I hated most.

It had belonged to my grandfather, and to his father before him.

A thing handed down through every generation of the Mitchells, from one tired hand to the next. It was the only inheritance I had. I did not like to think about what it had cost the others who wore it.

I reached into my Core, and I summoned it.

Soul’s Screech

It was a piece of jewelry, small and cold. An earring of dull grey metal, shaped like a curled ear, with a thin chain that I clipped through the lobe of my left ear. The metal was already warm. It had been waiting for a long time.

I put it on.

And the world went out.

It did not fade. It simply stopped.

The light vanished first, a hand over my eyes.

Then the sound, so completely that I did not even hear my own heartbeat.

Then the taste of dust and blood in my mouth.

Then the smell of burnt hair and iron.

Last, the feeling of the floor under my feet. I could not tell if I was standing or falling.

Five senses. All of them, gone.

I should have been afraid. I was, for about half a second.

Then the other thing arrived.

Spiritual sense...

It came up out of the dark like water filling a well, slow at first, then all at once. I could feel everyone around me. Not their bodies, not their faces.

Something deeper.

Threads, thin as spider silk, rose from every living thing in the room and drifted upward, toward a sky I could not see. Each thread was a different color. Each one hummed.

I could see them. Not really see. I did not have eyes anymore. But the knowledge was there, as clear as sight, and clearer than anything I had ever known.

I could see their souls.

Khan’s was a furnace, burning too fast, flaring red at the edges where the bracelet was feeding on it.

Eva’s was a still violet lake with a shimmer on the surface.

Petra’s was a streak of silver, impossible to follow, flickering from place to place.

The soldiers were small and flat and gray, like candles in the wind. I could count them. I could count every one.

Then I turned toward the far end of the corridor.

And my spiritual sense screamed at me.

He was there. The bastard. Emperor Scharlott.

I could not see a body or a face or a crown. I could only feel the soul, and it was dense. Impossibly dense. It sat in the room like a black mountain in the middle of a field of grass, with the thread of his life rising from the top of it, thick as a tree trunk and straight as a spear.

He was strong. Immensely strong.

Stronger than anything I had ever stood beside.

My mouth was dry. I could not feel it, but I knew it was.

I did not hear the next sound, because I could not hear. But I felt it through the floor of my spirit, a long, slow ripple spreading outward. Khan’s bracelet bit down, Eva’s purple eyes turned, Petra’s silver streak froze in the air, waiting for me.

It had been five seconds. All of it.

And now, it was time to fight. To do what we were here for.