A sword forms, races for his heart, but it’s gone in a burst of sparks, too.
“Now you’re just embarrassing yourself. I am the Alpha. The Omega. The beginning. Beauty, and life, and death all at once. If you think your little efforts can dispatch me so easily, I beg you to reconsider. If my whelp couldn’t best me, a weakling like you has no chance. It’s going to take me ages to condition you, isn’t it?”
One of my mini-suns forms in my bloody hand, but before I can throw it, it explodes, sending me down onto the ground once more.
Laughter swirls around me “This is what the worlds have come to: a Creator who is nothing more than an embarrassment.”
Flashing light—not the good kind, but the hazy, blinding kind—fill my vision. Agony twists through my palm, racing up through my veins.
“Fear not, though, little Creator. I have ways to fix your deficiencies. It will just take us a little longer than I initially expected.”
I literally have to swallow the bile back that rushes into my mouth. Jesus. I can’t move my hand. I don’t even know if I still have a hand.
A soft cry sounds nearby. It’s my father, I think. I blink blink blink but I cannot focus in on him. Words, thick and sticky, fall out of me. “Leave him alone.”
“You and I,” Enlilkian says, “will remake the worlds into what they should be.”
A shudder rolls through my body. I need ... I need to—
Something sharp cracks against my head, sending me sprawling again. Gravel tears across my cheek and all those lights threaten to wink out and turn black.
Get up, I think to myself. Get—
Something strikes me again, this time against my spine. A loud cracking sound fills my ears. Somebody is screaming bloody murder.
I fear somebody might be me.
The gravel around my face spins. I think ... is he squatting down next to me? I snake a hand out, grope frantically, only to find laughter instead. “Be a good girl and hush. You need to listen carefully to me.”
“Let him go.” Invisible hands strangle my throat, making the words difficult to pass through. “Please. Let ... my ... dad ... go.”
Something is said in a language I can’t understand. Without warning, my scalp burns as somebody grabs me by the hair and hauls me up until I dangle by my toes. I thrash like a fish out of water, arms swinging in hopes of touching something, anything, but my back spasms until I scream.
One thought filters through this agony: I will kill them all, even if it kills me.
“Is that what you want? What you really, really want?” Enlilkian is saying somewhere nearby.
A chunk of hair is ripped clean off my head as I thrash about.
“Then that will be your gift today instead, little Creator. We’ll wait until later for the other.”
I blink frantically and just when my vision finally clears enough for me to make out what’s happening, Harou and Earle are dragging my father toward Enlilkian.
NO. NO. NO.
I’m screaming and things are exploding around me but it doesn’t matter, none of it matters, because my father’s face is cupped between Enlilkian’s hands.
“When you obliterated Cailleache, you made a crucial error,” Enlilkian is saying. He’s smiling, just ... smiling. “You didn’t take from her. What a mistake. Think what you could have been, with her essences mixing with yours? To destroy a sentient being, to truly destroy them, they must become a part of you. Mercy is weakness. But to take what makes them them? That is true power.”
My father groans faintly. Weak hands bat at Enlilkian’s rotting ones. “The key,” the first Creator tells me as more hair yanks away from my head in my efforts to free myself, “is to strip them from the inside out.”
The high-pitched noise I’d last heard in the restaurant bathroom fills the air around us. It hums and builds until every molecule of my body is vibrating. My father is crying horrible, keening wails that shatter me in until I match him sound for sound.
Oh my gods. He’s dying, he’s dying, and it’s because of me.
Blood gushes out of my father’s nose, out of his eyes and ears. He keeps keening until it transforms into gurgling. And then Enlikian punches a hand into my father’s chest and all our screams turn rabid.
Just when I think I’ll literally go insane from the awfulness, my father falls silent, head bobbing back, eyes glassy and flat.
I ... I ...
Enlilkian leans over what is left of Noel Lilywhite and runs his graying tongue from the base of my father’s neck to the forehead hairline. I throw up right then and there, all over myself. My father is dead. He killed my father.
The thing in Earle says, “Her absence has been noted.”
My father’s body hits the ground like an unwanted bag of trash. “How many?”
So much fight clamors in me, yet all that seems to want to escape are sobs.