tower, eyes on the daemons, then turned to the carnage. The other Galante Blades were scattered around the ruins, bleeding or dead. Violetta was on her knees, blood spilling in ruby rivers from between her teeth, trying to stuff her bowels back into her body. She looked up as Hush stepped lightly from the tower, over to the broken ground where Bishop Tenhands lay.
“H-Hush…,” she blubbed. “H-Help…”
The boy ignored her, too. Silent as death. Reaching down to his dead bishop, the ruin Mia’s blade had made of her neck. Tenhands’s head still hung by a strip of muscle and skin, her spine cleaved clean in two. Hush fished about in the human wreckage, finally grasped a leather thong and snapped it free.
At the end hung a phial of silver.
“Hu … ush…,” Violetta begged.
The boy marched back up into the tower, into the guttering firelight. Mia’s passengers were stood by her body, hissing and growling, but the boy paid them no mind. Instead, he knelt by the flames, held the silver phial up to the light. Breaking the dark, waxen seal, he poured the contents onto the stone, thick and ruby red.
And using his fingertip like a brush, he began to write in the puddle.
Four Blades dead.
Boy and traitors captured.
Advise.
He glanced out into the rain as the thunder crashed, watched Violetta sinking onto her back in a pool of her own guts and shit. Shaking his head in disdain.
weak
And then the blood began to move.
Hush turned his attention to it, waiting for his instructions. The vitus belonged to Adonai—every bishop had a supply in chapel, used it to send blood missives back and forth between the Mountain. Whatever was written in the red, Adonai knew. But more, because the blood was still bound to the speaker even over impossible distances, Adonai could manipulate it as easily as the blood in his pools.
Hush watched the blood bead and shift, moving like quicksilver along the damp stone. It formed itself into letters, four in a gleaming red row.
PRAY
The pretty assassin frowned. He glanced out into the storm again, flawless brow creased as he searched for meaning in Adonai’s instruction.
Pray?
What in the Mother’s name was the speaker talking about?
Hush smeared the blood back across the stone and began writing again.
Do not understa
The blood moved. Forming itself into a glistening tendril and coiling around his finger. Hush pulled his hand back, but the blood moved with him, slurping around his hand like a serpent and slipping up his sleeve.
The boy stood, eyes widening in alarm as he felt the blood crawling up his forearm, shoulder, and from there, to his throat. He clawed at it, gasping on instinct as the scarlet flood crept up over his chin, his lips, and into his open mouth.
“Gnu-uuuhh!” he gurgled, lips peeled back from his toothless gums.
A bubble of blood popped in his throat, he tried to inhale, gargling and coughing instead. Clutching at his neck, staggering back and almost falling into the cooking pit, the assassin stumbled out into the rain. Hands at his throat, blood streaming from his nose and eyes back into his mouth as he choked, pale face turning red, whirling on the spot, searching for some—
The blade split his head clean apart like an axe chopping wood. Brain and skull splashed onto the ground at his feet as he fell face-first into the broken stone. Tric placed his boot on the boy’s back and dragged his gravebone scimitar free, slipped his second sword into Hush’s heart, and twisted for good measure.
Lightning tore the sky, white hands clawing at the clouds in fury.
Black hands held with palms upturned.
“HEAR ME, NIAH,” the deadboy said. “HEAR ME, MOTHER. THIS FLESH YOUR FEAST. THIS BLOOD YOUR WINE. THIS LIFE, THIS END, MY GIFT TO YOU. HOLD HIM CLOSE.”
“… about time you showed up…”
Tric turned to the shadowcat, sitting on the broken wall and licking at its translucent paw. The wolf made of shadows peered at him from her mistress’s side.
“… A LITTLE LATE FOR A DRAMATIC ENTRANCE…”
“DRAMA WASN’T MY INTENT,” he replied. “I KILLED HIM QUICK AS I COULD.”
“… he was already dead…,” the not-cat sighed.
“… LOOK…”
Tric sheathed his blades, stared down at the wreckage of Hush’s skull. Amid the fragments of skull and dashed brains, his eyes caught a hint of movement. A thin ribbon of blood, crawling upward in defiance of all gravity, pooling among the rain on the back of the fallen boy’s leather doublet.
It struggled to hold itself together, more and more washed away