High Priest Dekalon leaned back in his chair and let his hands steeple before his chest. “Or perhaps you won’t leave at all.”

One after another, I gingerly shifted the daggers where they levitated above the ground, aiming them upward in the direction of sixty-one necks and one stomach. “Bring me my father. Let me leave here with him unharmed, and I will convince my husband to spare your soul.”

“Would you listen to this woman?” His chuckle held more arrogance that Enosh’s ever had. “You have a great many demands.”

“My husband said the same.”

A moment of stiff silence passed between us, then his pout took on the gut-roiling sway of a smile. “I am afraid I cannot agree to this. See, dear Adelaide, your father never stepped a foot into this temple, and instead, suffocated on his own blood on his way here. It is my understanding that the priests left him by the wayside. Unfortunate.”

Suffocated on his own blood.

Left him by the wayside.

My heart shattered.

A sob built at the back of my throat, pressing painfully against my esophagus the harder I tried to contain it. An old man who’d never done anybody any wrong, and they’d just… left him without even a burial, wicked wayward mortals.

Beneath my dress, sixty-two bone daggers shook and trembled out of aim at the rage in my core, the utter disgust I held for these… monsters so sickening that—

No. I had to remain calm before the ground trembled, giving away what I was.

Except… everything remained still aside from the bone I carried on me, and that realization caused cold sweat to break out along my spine. My gaze flicked around the chamber, everything in here encased in polished marble.

Not a single speck of bone.

I took a deep breath, no matter how the sharp bite of pine irritated my airway. All the more reason to find my bearings and end this once and for all. No matter how meticulously they might have kept the bone out, I was about to make more available, anyway.

“My husband was right.” Sixty-one daggers waited patiently for my command. The last one I slowly reshaped in the grip of my closed palm. “You’re a terribly dreadful kind, full of wickedness and depravity.”

The high priest grinned. “Capture her, and chain her to—”

Bone daggers cut through the wool of my dress, whistled through the air, then embedded themselves into the throats of soldiers. A cacophony of thuds and clanks resonated the chamber as they collapsed onto the marble.

I climbed the dais, gripped the high priest by his robe, and pulled him from his chair. “I won’t ever wear a chain again, be it shaped of bone, iron, or the scrutiny of mortals.”

His lips parted and clenched shut several times before he managed another word. “Adelaide, let me—”

“You do not get to call me that, mortal, for I am the Queen of Rot and Pain.” One stab, and I drove my dagger between two ribs and into his lungs, so he may suffocate on his own blood like Pa had. “Kind enough to allow you a quick death, right before I tear down your damn temple and bury your bones beneath the rubble with the rest of you traitors.”

Ransacked by trembles, he stared down at his blood-drenched robes, then lifted his stuttering hand onto the metal ring of the fire basin beside him until his flesh sizzled. “May H-Helfa save… save y-your soul.”

He pulled on the metal.

The basin tipped.

Clank.

Coals rolled from it and skipped down the dais. They scattered across the chamber, over the amber glass—

Whoosh!

A massive flame shot toward the ceiling, so potent I let go of High Priest Dekalon. He rolled down the dais, his body coming to a stop near the emblem as fire broke out all around him. It followed the amber lines, spread out in all directions from there, climbed the walls—

No, no, no…

I stumbled back as panic gripped my heart and squeezed the battering organ. That wasn’t glass; it was pine pitch, dried into the furrows of the marble to set the entire temple aflame.

And me with it.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter 26

OceanofPDF.com

Ada

My nostrils burned with the smoke quickly filling the chamber as flames came together into nothing short of an inferno. Worse was how the corpses littering the ground caught fire, skin melting to their faces like wrinkled leather—something they hadn’t done for two-hundred years.

Enosh must have lifted his curse, but I commanded them to rise, regardless. If they tossed themselves onto the flames blazing along the furrows, I might be able to escape, but where to? The corridor I’d come from had been full of pine pitch and was likely already roaring.

Eyes burning, I glanced back at the metal screen, trying to blink it into focus against the violent heat that brought tears to my eyes. If I ran that way, what were the chances they hadn’t poured the amber resin into the stone there as well? Small.

With a single thought, I commanded the corpses to throw themselves onto the flames back toward the corridor. At least there, I knew where I was going.

Obeying their mistress’ command, they collapsed onto the flames two and three at once. I sprinted down the dais and crossed pile upon pile of soldiers like bridges.

Bridges doused in oil and set ablaze, for the flames engulfed them too quickly. They blackened the train of my dress, singed my hair until its bitter reek crept into my nostrils, scalded along my arms until it blistered.

Pain prickled my skin like a thousand needles driven into my flesh at once, ripping several whimpers from me until the first scream wedged from my throat. A cough doused it, doing my lungs no favors as I heaved and pulled boiling air into my chest.

Was I going the right way?

Orange flames depleted the air as they frantically danced all around me, suffocating me, making my mind go blank. Floor, walls, ceiling… everything burned.

W-where is the temple?

Where…? Oh my god, which way lay the gate?

A sudden roar ripped through my focus as my dress finally caught fire. Dissolving one of the corpses into nothing but bone dust, I let it sprinkle onto me, extinguishing the flames. Another end of my train caught fire instead.

My chest heaved in tight convulsions as my legs gave underneath me. I collapsed to the ground, screaming in silent agony as the fire burned me alive, causing such havoc on my focus that I couldn’t sense a single speck of bone. This was it. I would crawl out of here charred to—

Gravity shifted around me.

No, I shifted as someone picked me up, pressing me against the ungiving hardness of a familiar chest.

Enosh!

He said something, his voice nothing but deep vibrations against the roar of flames as I tossed in his arms. Darkness devoured me as he let something form around me, leather perhaps, shielding me from the worst of the flames while they certainly devoured him.

I jostled about, screaming against his chest as the heat continued to bite at my body. The pain was agonizing, but it had nothing, nothing on the shock of gnawing cold that suddenly drove its sharp fangs into my flesh. Were we… outside?

Enosh shook the leather off me, hushing me from lips black with soot, set into a face almost as disfigured as the day I’d died. He looked like the monster people made him out to be. But this one was mine, my god husband, who had gone through fire to save me.

“Soldiers are coming,” he ground through his teeth, visibly in pain as he spoke. “The valley is too narrow to escape them easily.”

Mind reeling, I only reached up, watching my fingers, charred to the first knuckle, cup his blistered cheek. “You saved me from the fire.”