Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #3) - Laini Taylor Page 0,100

ugly, black hope that one might, by killing, stay alive awhile longer.

Kill or die, no other choice.

Bodies litter the crater and more are falling. Ziri has a flash image of how it will be filled with corpses as though the mountains have cupped their hands to offer up the dead to Nitid, goddess of tears and life, and to the godstars, and to the void.

The bodies are chimaera, too, and Misbegotten, and then—

—a second darkness falls.

Overhead, a second sky of fire is falling, wing to wing to wing, and even the ugly, black hope can’t outlast this. Another wave of Dominion as great as the first, and today Nitid is the goddess of nothing but tears.

“Karou!” Ziri calls, and it doesn’t surprise him anymore to hear the Wolf’s tenor come from his own lips—a voice to cut through battle clangor and rally tired soldiers to keep on, and keep on, as though life is a prize to be won by bloodletting. Kill and kill and kill to live. How many, and for how long? It’s just a calculus in the end, and though the real Thiago had surmounted impossible odds in battle, none of them had been this impossible.

And besides, he isn’t Thiago.

He calls out orders; chimaera and Misbegotten alike take heed. By the time he reaches Karou, there’s a buffer of soldiers forming with Karou, Akiva, Liraz, and Thiago at its center.

“You two need to go,” the Wolf says. His voice is raised above the chaos, and his eyes are intent but not cold, not mad. This White Wolf will tear out no throats with his teeth today. “Get clear of this. Use the glamour. You have a job to do.”

Karou objects first. “We can’t leave you now—”

“You have to. For Eretz.” For Eretz. It’s understood that this means: If not for us.

Because we’ll be dead.

“I’ll only go if you designate a safety,” Karou says in a choked voice. “Someone. Anyone.”

Someone to wait out the killing in safety and come back to glean souls after it’s all over. It’s pointless. Now that the seraphim know about resurrection, they take measures to prevent it. They burn the dead, and guard the ashes until evanescence is certain. But Ziri nods anyway.

It’s time to part. The reluctance that envelops them all is a complex web—a cat’s cradle of loves and longings and… even the earliest tender unfurlings of a possibility so remote it should have been laughable. Ziri glances to Liraz as she glances to him, and both look swiftly away again: Ziri to Karou, Liraz to Akiva. A second only—an eternity—do they permit themselves for farewells. They wish pointless wishes, and let their what-ifs fall to the ground with the corpses.

In the legends, chimaera were sprung from tears and seraphim from blood, but in this moment they are, all of them, children of regret.

As Karou and Akiva begin to turn toward each other for their last look, both their faces falling blank with unfathomable loss—no please no not now please oh—the Wolf speaks up. “Akiva,” he says. “Take them. Get them to the portal. See to it.”

Akiva blinks twice rapidly. He doesn’t want to refuse, but he’s going to. He should be here, fighting—

“It may be guarded,” says the Wolf, anticipating his argument. “They may need help.” The battle around them is reaching a fever pitch. “Go!”

Akiva nods, and they go.

It’s Liraz’s gaze that Ziri holds as they vanish. There’s no period of transparency, only a sudden lurch from there to not-there, and at the hard and final edge of there, Liraz wears no killing, cutting smile, no scorn or coldness or lust for vengeance. Her features are soft with sorrow and her beauty takes his breath away.

And then she’s gone. Within the center of the sphere of soldiers, the White Wolf is left alone. Lucky Ziri, he thinks, gutted, hollowed. Not today, and not tomorrow.

He looks up. The passage of armies has chased back the mist and he sees ranks of soldiers.

And soldiers, and soldiers, and soldiers.

He laughs. He gathers his stolen body, bares his fangs, and leaps.

He climbs them. They’re thick enough; they make it easy. He has only to leap and catch one in the air and, catching, kill him. Leap to the next as the body falls. To the next, to the next, until the ground is far below and they’re tangling their wings in a rush to escape him. Still more are closing behind, and he has no shortage of prey. No shortage of blood to