“I have told you I would stand at the center of flames for you and our child, have I—” Enosh stumbled, and everything spun once more before he sunk to his knees with a hiss. “Listen to me, little one. Gather bone with me as fast as you can from wherever you mind reaches and pile it around us, yes?”

It wasn’t so much his words that instilled blood-curdling fear in me, but the tension in his voice. When I looked around the distorted landscape, I understood the urgency.

A frigid breeze numbed my face, amplified by the sight of mounted soldiers galloping toward us. Hundreds of them, maybe even a thousand. Their hoofbeats drowned beneath the roar of flames coming from the open gate of the temple, and smoke rose in raven-black billows from the stone buildings.

Chaos surrounded us, trapping us between a large army storming ahead, archers running to the wide arrow slits in the battlement behind us and chains of hills to our left and right. How could we possibly escape this without—

“Ada!” Enosh shouted, startling me out of my daze. “Bone. We need bone!”

Bone. Yes.

Against the panic in my chest and the pain of my burn wounds, I focused on whatever bone was in reach. Skeletal remains of rodents trapped between boulders, beetle shells hard enough to break through the frozen ground, the corpses inside the temple… I gathered it all, letting it drift toward us like a snowstorm.

Arrows whistled.

One embedded itself into Enosh’s upper arm, ripping a grunt from him. More followed, thudding into the snow all around us as the hoofbeats of too many horses shook the ground on which we kneeled.

“Enosh,” I whimpered, fearing immortality more than I had ever feared death. “They’re closing—”

He threw himself atop me, ripping me to the ground with a hiss. Another arrow must have struck him somewhere with the way he flinched, and again, curling himself around me.

“When I say now, you blow the bone in all directions at once with as much force as you can!” His command was harsh because it needed to be, yet I sensed how his fingers stroked along the back of my head, offering comfort as he pushed me into the snow. “Wait.”

Pressed against the ground like this, I couldn’t see much. But I didn’t need to. I heard the sharp thuds of arrows puncturing the ground, sensed each flinch when one struck my husband, and felt how the beat of hooves bore all the way into my heart.

When the bone around us trembled, barely distinguishable from the snow, Enosh stroked my head with more fervor. “Patience, Ada. Patience.”

He jerked once more.

Another moan.

“Wait,” he mumbled as though he’d sensed the panicked rage build in my core, the brutal urge to kill all those out to hurt us. “Wait. Wait. Now!”

It emerged as a cry toward the gray clouds, the energy that thrust the bone we’d gathered into all directions like a deadly tidal wave, rippling on the surges of my rage and grief.

Trembles ransacked my entire body, stiffening my spine to such a degree, not even Enosh could hold me down as the surge of bone ripped through the line of soldiers.

Like a powerful gust, it threw everyone and everything back, lifting horses off the ground only to let the beasts collapse several feet away. Some of the spiked walls blew across the field, lancing soldiers and horses alike, leaving them to wiggle and squeal.

My chest nearly burst with glee.

The army was… gone.

Whatever was left screamed and wailed, but a loud rumble soon overshadowed it as parts of the bailey broke off with a deafening boom. The crumbling stone ripped the archers down, burying them and their pestering arrows beneath it.

A smile ached my cheeks.

The temple was gone, too.

Nothing remained around us but severed limbs, chaos, and a few soldiers who walked about the field of slaughter disoriented. But not much longer.

I struggled myself onto my wobbly legs and lifted my arms, my voice a mere whisper but the dead heard it just the same. “Rise.”

Soldiers pushed themselves up to stand, screaming in panic and confusion as their limbs moved at my will, their souls mere onlookers that would depart soon enough.

“Kill them,” I said. “Kill them all.”

They spread out like a mischief of rats, cleansing this place of its remaining depravity.

I kneeled back down where his upper body swayed, where he sat with at least five arrows protruding from his back. “Enosh.”

“Cannot die,” he murmured as he strained to lift his head, his face still badly burned, his lips black with soot and crimson red from the blood he coughed up.

“I’m so sorry.” For how I, one after another, pulled the arrows from his flesh, sending jolts and grunts of pain through him. “You’ll heal faster like this.”

“You have done so well…” Enosh wrapped his blistered arms around me and pulled me against him. “We will… rest here for only a moment, little one. Only… only a moment. Then we will go home.”

Home.

To our Pale Court.

Nodding, I allowed myself to go slack against him, only now noticing my badly burned legs, not a shred of wool left around them. No, he was right. We needed to heal before we would return home.

So there we sat for an hour or two or forever, a god and a goddess mending in each other’s embrace. Perhaps he was the liar. Perhaps I was the monster. I didn’t care.

Neither did love.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter 27

OceanofPDF.com

Enosh

A few months later…

“You are counting, yes?” Kiss after kiss, I pressed my lips to Ada’s swollen belly where she lay sprawled out naked in the grass of her garden.

Until something pressed back.

I jerked upright, barely able to contain the nervous excitement in my veins as I watched for more movement. Ada had told me how our child had begun to stretch in her womb, sometimes showing a hand, other times a heel. Always when I was out to spread rot.

Ada lifted herself onto her elbows and grinned. “Did you see it? Because I felt it.”

“Sensed it against my lips,” I said, my eyes fixed on her belly with rapt attention. “I am starting to wonder if I will ever—”

There!

What had to be a foot so small pressed against her belly from the inside, lifting the skin before it sunk back down. My child poked a limb up from the other side instead, letting Ada’s stomach ripple and shift with the movement, filling me with wonder.

Here I sat, a god undying, who sensed all the dead, all the living. An immortal who had witnessed the rise of civilizations and their downfalls. Had seen the world turn to ice and fire steam into oceans.

Decades. Centuries. Eons.

But never had I seen anything so precious.

There it was, my godly child, turning its father speechless, rendering him mute with astonishment. How small a limb it was, showing me that he or she was alive and well, growing beneath the beat of Ada’s heart.

“It is… beyond words.” I gently lowered my hand onto the protrusion, laughing at the way our baby did not yield, but rather, pressed into my palm. “As stubborn as its mother, to be certain.”

Ada turned onto her side with a smile and a groan, allowing me to behold the beauty of her condition and how it was changing her form. Her breasts had become fuller, her hips a bit wider, and a few pinkish lines of torn tissue appeared below her belly now and then.

I lowered myself down behind her, pressing my bare body against her backside. “Where is the pain?”

“Everywhere.” A sigh accompanied her hand as it motioned toward her lower back. “But especially there with all the kicking your child does.”