He stepped to me and crouched. “Ah, my dear Kara. When I had finally decided you were of no further use to me, then you prove otherwise. Resourceful and clever.” He turned his dazzling smile on me and stroked my cheek with the back of his fingers. The gray receded a breath as the dizziness faded. Returning my stolen essence to me, I realized. Buying me a few more minutes.
“So now you call me to you.” He lifted his head, taking a deep breath. “And now you are slain. But that one,” and he gestured toward the sniveling Cerise, “would have contained me had you not called me.” He stood. “And thus I find myself in the most unpleasant circumstance of being in your debt.” He gave a soft laugh, not seeming at all displeased. He stepped to the edge of the diagram that had been painted in my blood.
“I am here in this sphere, unfettered, dearest one.”
I could only pant raggedly. Breath was harder to come by with every second, and the pool of blood before me continued to widen.
“And you lie before me, eviscerated most unpleasantly.”
What, there’s a pleasant way to be eviscerated? I thought, though I had no strength left to voice it. But at least I could die with sarcasm.
“A choice for you, then, in payment of my debt.” He turned back to me. “I can return myself to my sphere, relinquishing this opportunity to gain power in this realm.” He nudged a section of my bowels with the tip of his boot. “Or I can restore you. Choose.”
I sucked breath with effort. I’d already accepted that I was dying. I already knew the calm of it. And there was no way that I could let him roam free in this world.
I shook my head. It was probably just a millimeter of motion, but it was enough to tell him my choice.
He laughed softly. “And for once you are predictable. Very well. I will return myself to my own demesne.” He strode over to Peter Cerise and seized him up by his hair.
“No!” Ryan shouted from within the circle. “No, you have to help her. Restore her!”
Rhyzkahl paused, then slowly turned to look at Ryan. He lowered his head. “And what do you offer me in exchange?”
I could see Ryan swallow and go pale, unprepared for the full force of Rhyzkahl’s potency.
“Me,” he gasped out. “She deserves to live through this. She defeated Cerise. She kept you from being imprisoned!”
Rhyzkahl inclined his head a fraction. “And I have already resolved that debt.” His eyes flashed. “And you would give yourself over to me that she might live?”
“No!” Had I managed to say it out loud? I was so cold. He couldn’t give himself. He didn’t know what he was offering! Ah, shit, Ryan, no. Just let me go. It’s all right.
Rhyzkahl turned his head to regard me, the summoner dangling from his grip like a kitten in the jaws of its mother. “Ah, so poetic. ‘No! Save the other in my stead!’” His smile was beautiful, but his voice mocked us both. “As tempting as your offer is,” he said to Ryan as he calmly set Cerise on his feet and wrapped an arm around him, holding Cerise’s back to his chest, “you are not fully aware of yourself.” Rhyzkahl wrapped his other arm around the whimpering Cerise’s head, then, as easily as twisting a stem from an apple, pulled off the man’s head. He dropped both head and twitching body to the floor at his feet, completely oblivious to the blood that sprayed over him, staining his white garments in chaotic patterns. “It would not be an equal repayment, even as treasured as Kara is.”
My eyelids drifted downward, too far gone to even be horrified by the gruesome means of Cerise’s death. My breath flowed out of me, and I had no need or desire to take another. It’s all right, Ryan. It’s all right.
“Come home with me, Kara.” Rhyzkahl reached down with a blood-covered hand and grasped mine. A flash of white light surrounded us, and then we were elsewhere.
I was lying on what appeared to be a dais, in front of a throne of white and gold stone carved in a familiar pattern. I was dimly aware of a sharp, tangy, and not entirely unpleasant smell and an unfamiliar language being spoken above me. I could see white marble walls beyond the dais, graced by vast open archways surrounded by intricate burnished gold ornamentation. Through one archway was a broad balcony and a distant turquoise sea set aglow by the rays of a rising or setting sun. Above the sea were figures in flight, and I realized with awe that I was seeing zhurn and graa and syraza wheeling above the sea in an intricate dance of wings and air, claws and teeth.
Just past the throne was what looked like a nude woman with hair that flowed to the floor, but the segmented wings like a beetle’s on her back and the mass of twining strands where a tongue should be told me this was a mehnta. To her right was a coiling of smoke and teeth and shifting colors, a demon I recognized as an ilius.