Covenant's End - Ari Marmell Page 0,90
you care about them!”
Shins's breath came quick, now. Her clenched fingers left divots in the wet wrapping of the rapier's hilt. She felt it roaring up inside her, not merely her own anger but Olgun's, too.
“Then I guess,” she spat, “I'll just have to not die tonight!”
Lisette jumped, laughing, from the roof.
She landed hard in a crouch on the building's stoop, the impact spraying puddles in every direction. Although the nearest streetlight shone clear upon the doorway, she remained partially obscured. Shadows rolled and dripped from her arms, her legs, her shoulders, as though she were ridden by a variety of dark and fidgeting serpents.
Still, they were not so thick, those shadows, as to obscure her from Widdershins's sight, not with divine power augmenting the young thief's vision.
“Gods! You look terrible!”
A statement that was rather akin to telling a vampire he appeared “a tad pale.”
That crimson hair seemed straw-like, brittle, noticeable even matted and wet as it was. Her lips were cracked and broken, her gums—as Shins saw when she snarled—shrunken and retreating from her teeth. But worse, far worse, were her eyes.
Or what had been her eyes.
Sunken sockets held pools of a lumpy, viscous black, like ink mixed with the congealed fats scraped from atop an old stew. It sluiced down her face, leaving tarry streaks on her skin that the rain seemed powerless to touch. Water dribbled away from it, polluted and dark, but failing to dilute the stuff even slightly.
“You should see it from my side,” Lisette sneered. “I'm going to need months to recover. Maybe I never will.
“Oh, but it's worth it! They're here with me, you see—and they're painting the walls with my other enemies, at the same time!” Her face twisted into an almost conspiratorial smirk. “That's people you care about, dying horribly as we speak, in case you weren't sure. If a part of me is the price they need to manifest like that, I'm thrilled to pay!”
Oh, gods! No, no, no, who else has she—
A steadying hand and whispered emotions stopped her before her thoughts drove her to hysterics. Don't think about that. Can't be distracted; that's what she wants. Focus on her, worry about the rest later…
As if there would be a later.
Instead, hoping the sounds of the storm would hide any of the tremor she couldn't quite banish from her voice, Widdershins said, “You may feel different when you're too shriveled up and pathetic to use a chamber pot without a pulley, three assistants, and a mule.”
Honestly, she barely knew what she was saying. It didn't matter. Lisette was arrogant, a talker, always had been. So keep her talking and taunting! Every extra second Faustine and Sicard have…
Either the Gloaming Court had added mind-reading to the powers they'd granted her, however, or—more likely—Lisette had simply grown tired of trying to get a rise out of her enemy. Perhaps, even in the midst of her overconfidence, she'd recalled what happened the last time she'd taken the opportunity to gloat, to draw things out.
The shadows about her swirled faster, sliding over her skin, a dancer's train of dark silk, as she took her first step from the stoop. “I may awaken feeling like the floor of a stable,” she sneered as she approached. “But for tonight, I—we—are as strong as ever. How does that make you feel, little scab?”
“Like I'm still waiting for you to actually come here and prove it,” Shins snapped. At which point, despite her defiant words, she did the only sane thing she could.
Olgun's power pumping through her body, augmenting muscle and blood and bone as never before, Widdershins ran.
Every extra second…
The first time she had nearly fallen, her bad leg scooting out from beneath her against the treacherously slick cobbles—the first time she'd been saved from a short, painful stumble only by the sudden tightening of Faustine's grip around her waist—Robin had only yelped aloud, startled and a bit embarrassed.
The second and third times, she'd cursed a blue streak, profanities that would make the average longshoreman sound more like Widdershins.
This, in the lee of an old gothic building, its gargoyles huddled miserably against the storm and cringing from the lightning that made them visible, was the fourth.
“Go on without me.”
Faustine turned her head, dragging a snake of wet hair across her neck, to gawp. At first Robin assumed it was disbelief, until she realized that her words had been swallowed by the latest crash of thunder.
“Go without me!” she shouted.
Now it was disbelief. Then the older woman's