arms, gave her a mocking bow. “Lady, you’re welcome to try, since I must kill you anyway. I won’t be as easy to stop as an animated corpse.” His smile fell away. “I’m sorry. This is not my will.”
She barely called her shields in time to stop the wall of flame that crashed over her. Heat and chill shattered each other. She flung witchlights in his face, but he batted them away like gnats. He was stronger than any other demon she’d fought; he was stronger than her. They might duel for a time, but eventually he’d wear her down.
She sent a ghost shrieking toward him—it couldn’t harm him, but he flinched. She closed the distance between them in three strides, slammed her shoulder into his chest. His flesh might not age or die, but it still functioned; the air left his lungs in a grunt and he stumbled back. Isyllt kept close, ripping his coat as she clawed for the collar.
It was ensorcelled, of course. Layers of spells wound the thick work-hardened wire, shielding and strengthening and reinforcing.
She expected him to throw her off, braced against the blow, but he only wrapped his arms around her, gentle as an embrace. Why fight, when he could burn her to ash?
Letting her ring hold the shields, she concentrated on the spells on the collar. It was cunningly wrought—a pity she couldn’t show it to the Arcanost. Three different mages had layered the wards, each style reinforcing the others’ weaknesses. She found a loose end and tugged, but the spell only unraveled a little before catching in another knot. It would have been a lovely puzzle if the air in her lungs weren’t already painfully hot. Sweat dripped from her face, slicked her hands and blurred her eyes. Asheris murmured something in her ear, but she couldn’t hear the throb of her pulse.
Abandoning finesse, she called the cold. Too soon since she’d last done it; a shudder racked her. Her bones ached, and the force of it scraped her veins like glass splinters. But it answered. Death, decay, the hungry cold that waited for the end of everything, spiraling through her like a maelstrom. She tightened numbing fingers in the collar’s loops and whorls.
Asheris shuddered now and caught her shoulders. His magic rose to answer hers: a sandstorm, a whirlwind, smokeless flame. Two faces hung before her—the man’s, and a fire-crowned eagle. She closed her eyes before it dizzied her.
Her spells were failing. The heat bit deeper; her hair was burning. But the spells on the collar died too, slowly corroding beneath the entropy in her hands. Asheris caught her left wrist, gave a raptor’s shriek of rage and pain. She smelled her skin crisping, but she was already numb.
“Stop,” Asheris gasped. “Please.”
He was more powerful than she, but not more powerful than the force she called. Storms stilled, flame smothered, and in the end even stars chilled and died. She could stop his undying heart.
But she’d die first. Ice within, fire without, more than her fragile flesh could withstand. If she left herself open to the abyss too long, it would claim her.
The last of the ward-spells dissolved, leaving nothing but gold beneath her frozen fingers. Gasping, she broke the channel. The pain of it made her scream and she might have fallen, but her hands were locked stiff around Asheris’s throat. He cried out too and stumbled, and they both fell to their knees.
“Please,” he whispered, “please—”
She had exhausted her magic. His fire would burn her, and she had nothing left to stop it. But she wasn’t dead yet, and gold was soft.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered back, raw and ragged. Then she kneed him in the groin as hard as she could.
He groaned and tried to curl around the pain, but she forced him back, driving her knees into his stomach and tugging at the collar. Blood slicked her hands, hers and Asheris’s, as wire bit their flesh. Her vision washed dull and spotted as she began to feel the pain, but she held on, shaking like a terrier with a rat in its jaws. Metal twisted, bent, broke. Strand after strand. She sobbed with the pain, tears and sweat and blood from a bitten lip splashing Asheris’s face.
Snarling, he pushed her off and backhanded her across the face, sending her sprawling on the stones. She choked on her own tears and curled into a pain-riddled ball. She couldn’t stand, could only lie shuddering and wait for the death stroke.