Chapter 158: Some Level of Control

Petra was done.

I felt it before anything else happened. Her silver thread, the one that had streaked across the room like a falling star, had gone dull.

The ring on her finger had burned through its time, and what it left behind was a woman standing in the middle of the corpses with nothing in her.

Her stamina had ended.

Her soul sagged at the edges like a candle in its last inch of wax, and she was barely standing, held up by nothing but stubbornness.

I wanted to shout at her to move. I had no voice to do it with.

Scharlott stood twelve feet tall in the center of the room, wings half-open, horns black against the red.

The chains were still around his legs. They were groaning. His closed third eye sat in his forehead like a shut door.

He looked at Petra.

Then he was in front of her.

I did not see him cross the room.

I could not have seen anything.

But I felt it, and the feeling was worse than sight.

His thread was in one place, and then it was in another, with nothing between them.

It was as if the distance had been cut out of the world with scissors.

He was not teleporting.

He was running, and the speed was only so far beyond anything I had ever known that it looked like a jump.

The chains did not hold him.

They did not even slow him.

I felt them shatter, link by link, in the half second after he had already gone.

Petra did not have time to raise her morning star.

His fist went into her stomach.

I felt it land.

It was a short, flat, terrible thing, a pulse of force that rolled outward from her body into the stone.

I felt her ribs go.

The breath left her in a single push, and her silver thread jerked and went thin.

She flew backward.

I felt her hit the wall, and slide down it, and stop.

The thread did not go out. It flickered, fluttering weakly, like a moth against a window. I clung to that.

She was alive.

I told myself that over and over, and I could not feel any part of my body telling me it was true.

Something rose inside me.

It was anger.

I had been calm for a long time.

In the Realm, you learn to be.

You learn that anger makes you slow, that it makes you stupid, and that stupid people die in the first hour.

I had not been truly angry since I was a boy, since the day my grandfather’s chair had been empty at the table.

I was angry now, and I did not push it down.

I closed my hands around the thread that tied me to his soul, and I stopped being careful.

I had been looking for something the whole fight.

A weak spot.

A crack.

Some small place in that black mountain where my power could grip and not slide off. Pulse after pulse I had sent into him, and each one had vanished like a pebble into a lake.

I had told myself that I was doing something. I had told myself it was working.

It was working. I only had not known where it was going.

Now, with Petra’s thread guttering against a wall and my anger running through me like fire through dry grass, I felt it.

A drop.

It was small. A single point, buried deep inside the dense dark of his soul, so far down that I would never have found it by looking.

It was not part of the mountain.

It was something that had been pressed into the mountain and sealed there. It was cold, and it was heavy, and it was human.

It was regret.

I did not know whose. I did not know what for.

But I knew its shape, as clearly as I knew my own name.

I reached for it.

I did not grab it. I bound my consciousness to it, thread against thread, the way you tie two ropes.

Soul’s Screech took the knot and tightened it. I felt the drop answer me, small and cold, and I knew that I had it.

Then I pulled.

Drr!

It came out of him like a nail out of a plank.

Scharlott screamed.

I felt the sound go through the room. It was not a falcon’s wrath now. It was the cry of a man having something torn out of his chest.

His voice cracked and broke apart in the middle, rose and cracked again, and I felt the whole soul of him convulse.

His threads, those long dark ribbons rising toward the sky, began to scream like guitars.

They shook. They shrieked.

Each one rang at a different pitch, high and wild and out of tune, a whole orchestra being strangled at once.

His soul was being attacked, and for the first time, he knew.

I did not stop.

There was one more thing I could do. I had never done it with anyone this strong.

Soul’s Screech had a price, and it also had a gift.

The price was my senses, all five, gone at once. The gift was that the price could be lessened. If I half-extinguished the earring, I could take two of them back.

But it only worked once I had a hold on the enemy’s soul.

Not before. If I tried it too early, the whole thing would collapse, and I would be left blind and deaf and helpless in front of a monster.

I had a hold now. I was holding his regrets in both hands.

I reached for the earring, and I let half of it go dark.

Something came back all at once.

I chose sight and hearing.

The light hit first.

It was grey and red and smoky, a ruined corridor with its walls split open and its ceiling coming down in pieces.

Dead soldiers lay everywhere, in gold and green and black.

The air shimmered with dust. I could see my own hands, shaking at the ends of my arms.

Then the sound.

It was Scharlott’s scream.

I had been feeling it, but now I heard it, and it was a thousand times worse.

It filled the room from wall to wall.

It was a high, raw shriek with the voices of other people tangled up inside it.

It made my teeth ache.

It made me want to cover my ears, and I did not, because I wanted to hear it.

He was standing right in front of me.

I had not seen him coming, because I had not been looking.

I saw him now.

Twelve feet of red wings and black horns, bent forward at the waist with both clawed hands pressed to his head.

His third eye was still shut, and I saw that it was shaking.

Blood was running from his nose. His threads, the ones I could not see but could still feel, were howling around him like a cage of wild animals.

He was distracted. Completely.

His mind was no longer in the room. It was somewhere deep inside him, being dragged back to whatever I had pulled out of the dark.

I felt his regeneration falter.

The wounds that Eva had cut in him, the ones he had been closing as fast as they opened, were closing slower now. I could see a long red line across his chest that had stopped healing halfway.

I would never have another chance like this.

I drew my sword.

It came out of its sheath with a clean ringing sound that I could actually hear. I dropped low, ducked under the reach of those enormous clawed hands, and stepped in with my whole weight behind it.

I swept the blade across his belly.