The shadow shaped into a spear point and pierced into my mind. In a single instant it all came clear. The memory/vision of the bloody body on the bloody wood as the Sons of Darkness sacrificed their sister to bring their father back. Biting through her fingers. The Son of Shadows had eaten the girl alive. Black magic. Blood magic. The most heinous of dark magics. And by that rite, he had taken in the soul of his sister. She was the insane shadow in his mind. The trapped soul of his sister.
Had the witch circle given her autonomy? Had the time magics Shimon was using given her extra power too?
Shimon encircled my throat and began to crush the life out of me. Not just suffocate me. But crush my head from my shoulders.
I had one weapon left. I slid my brain-sludged hand down my body, into my pocket. Grabbed the Glob. My star magics stuttered. Twisted. Pain shot through me as my magics, now cut through with the steel blade, tried to realign and sought out the power in the Glob. When it wanted to, the Glob absorbed magical energies, and the shadow was energy. Not a magic I had ever seen, but still, energy. With the last of my strength, I shoved the Glob into the cranial cavity of the Son of Darkness, the Flayer of Mithrans.
Instantly the stone and its components heated, began to suck the power from the Flayer.
Something grabbed my wrist. It wasn’t the Flayer.
It was the charcoal shadow. It formed into a vaguely humanoid shape. Female. Small. The shape of a child. The . . . the soul of a child. His sister. She opened her mouth and laughed silently. She touched the flayed strip on my shoulder and slid into me. Inside of me.
She ripped and tore at my mind, her claws leaving flashes of the two millennia of memories, of the slavery that been her life: pain and blood and violence and pleasure and torture shackled to her brother. Quick still shots of torture chambers, of pleasure temples, of dying enemies, of war and misery. Men and women broken on the rack, dead by plague, skinned, dissected while screaming. Dismembered. Roasted to death. Thousands and thousands of humans and vampires and witches and weres she had helped to kill, against her will, at first. But later with glee, dancing on their mangled bodies.
And further back, to the beginning. The sacrifice that had brought her father back from the dead. Her brothers bending over her as she bled out on the holy trees. Shimon. Eating her alive. Stealing her magic. Stealing her soul.
Her manacles were broken now, her mind a mad, gibbering violence with the freedom to destroy. Her hatred wanted vengeance on the world that had allowed her to suffer so long.
I shoved the horror called the shadow back. Away from my mind.
And we fell into my soul home. Beast and I were suddenly there, in the cavern. With her.
She was human-shaped, naked, spindly, with wild red sclera and huge pupils like a vamped-out vamp, but she had no fangs. She was . . . Not. Not a human. Not a vamp. I didn’t know what she was, but I was stunned from the images of her past, and I hesitated a second too long.
She slashed at me with claws that hadn’t been there a moment past. Blood flew from my forehead. I dodged. Far too late. Hit the stone floor in a rolling fall.
She was spirit made flesh, here in this place. She was the sister of the Sons of Darkness, sacrificed to bring Judas Iscariot back from the dead. She was the power the Sons of Darkness used to create vampires. She was the beginning. The Origination. The title thrummed through her mind and into mine.
She was trapped in my soul home with me. With Beast. Here we could die. But that meant so could she. Too slow, I moved to my feet.
Beast attacked the shadow. Claws and fangs and solid muscle of killing energy. She dragged the wild girl to the floor of the cave and savaged her. Snarling and growling.
The girl grew talons and stabbed them all into Beast’s body. Impaling my other half.
Beast screamed.
I tried to move toward them but my feet were stuck to the cave floor. My body wouldn’t move. I looked down. Dudley was hanging out of my middle, from the wound given me on the