should be here. He needs…I need him to be here, Berserker.”
“Rune. I am here.”
“I need Z,” she cried. “He has to be here.”
“How do you know?” Snow asked, urgently. “How do you know that?”
Rune shook her head. “The same way I know the witch is rising through the ground right this fucking second. I just do.”
“Z’s down there, then,” Snow said. “She’ll have left him in the least accessible place and will try to use him to bargain with you later.”
“I know that,” Rune said. “Everyone quiet.”
The earth rumbled.
The fighters were coming, answering the call they all heard. The call of the princess.
That was their destiny.
“Why?” Lex whispered.
“Because I need to become something I’m not and I need to do it now.”
No one moved.
She closed her eyes and concentrated on the power inside her, the latent power she’d felt before, the power that was waiting for her to use it, to command it, to own it.
The power had been hiding there, waiting for Skyll—Mother Skyll—to activate it. It was time.
Magic had no logic. It needed none.
So she closed her eyes and gave herself over to the power. She became darkness and light and hatred and hunger. She lost herself in that stew of magic, of power, and only for one tiny spark of a second did some part of her wonder if she’d ever get herself back.
She didn’t wait for Damascus to rise from the bowels of crawler hell. She understood that the witch might kill those waiting on the surface before she returned.
She couldn’t care about that.
Not then.
She went after Z.
Chapter Fifty
She didn’t go to save him because of love. She went to save him because the mother—the world—told her he was necessary for that world’s survival.
Her world’s survival.
It was not a coincidence that he was in Skyll.
Of course it wasn’t.
The crawlers had taken her to hell before. She didn’t need them to take her beneath the ground any longer.
The soil was like cake to her.
Layers and layers of something delicious and dark and creamy.
She sank into it, coiled and weaved within it, opened her mind to taste it.
Z was standing against the wall as the crawlers advanced on him, but he didn’t cower or beg or scream.
He hadn’t been there long enough to lose his mind or his pride or his will. He stood with his fists curled, his eyes so hot and blazing they seemed like the only color in the room.
The crawlers inched closer to him, beginning to draw out his fear, playing with him.
But then Rune was there, and they had no chance to do anything but die.
She made them explode. She made them aware as chunks of guts and flesh and thick, dark blood splattered and thumped against the floor and walls.
She made them suffer.
She forced every fear they’d ever triggered or produced back on them, much as Snow had sent Ian’s attack back at him.
When she was finished, Z stared at her, something in his eyes she didn’t like.
“Z,” she murmured. She walked to him and wrapped her bloody arms around his waist. “You can’t forget me. You can’t.”
“I haven’t,” he said, at last. But there was anxiety in his voice.
“There is nothing here for you to fear,” she told him.
“Oh, there is, Rune. There is.”
She drew slightly away but kept her arms around him—not to hug him but to hold on to him as she lifted him out of the darkness.
“My sweet thing,” she thought he whispered.
They shot through the ground and it expelled them forcefully from its warm depths. Up top she found exactly what she knew she would find.
Damascus killed with unchecked magic, her rage boundless as her enemies and allies clashed in one last, vicious battle on the crawlers’ boneyard.
People streamed in, stomping out onto the battleground with a single-minded rage they’d been unable to unleash through years and years of abuse.
The witch sat on the back of a kelper, but hers was three times bigger than the one Rune had ridden. They surveyed the battle from a steep, grotesque hill of bones.
Even as Rune watched, Damascus sent a ball of fire into the midst of the battle, hitting a dozen fighters who fell to the ground, white bone and gray ash.
The kelper squealed and reared up, his paws clawing at the air, and Damascus’s laugh raced down the hill to spear those fighting below.
Some of the fighters fell right then.
Just fell to the ground, covered their heads, and refused to move again.