The ocean sped away beneath them. The peaks of the waves reached for them, but never touched them, or even so much as cooled them with mist at their passage.
Odin-Vann was like a child next to Judith’s bloated form, stumbling uncertainly atop the waves, his robes and hair battered by wind and rain. Ignoring him, Judith stalked forward, made of the ocean and drawing it up into herself, feeding from its power to grow to behemoth proportions, intending not only to kill, but to terrify first.
Petra did not slow to confront Judith. Instead, she raised her fists and blasted through the hulking figure at shoulder level, plunging into her back and bursting from her engorged sternum, emerging fully dry on the other side even as the water demoness half-collapsed, cascading over Odin-Vann, who fell into the waves, spluttering.
Judith roared and rebuilt her form, sucking dense green ocean back into herself and bulging even larger and more terrible.
“How are you here?” she bellowed in rage and surprise.
She reached with tentacles like freight trains, groping for Petra and James where they floated in their personal typhoon of light and warmth.
Petra’s voice boomed over the thunder. “Be still and resume the form that granted you entry into this world!”
The tentacle arms fell away, breaking into rushing torrents of loose water and crashing to the waves below. The behemoth herself shrank and writhed, mounting an agony of resistance, but seemingly unable to disobey. She screamed and twisted in on herself, constricting into a shape like a hundred tentacles, bound into a thrashing, tightening knot. And then, the tentacles obliterated into spray and Judith herself emerged from their centre, soaked and streaming, her robes dense with icy water, her hair hanging in sopping, coppery streamers around her face.
She dragged up into the air, captured in the iron grip of Petra’s implacable power, thrashing and screaming, her face contorted into a rictus of affronted hate, apparently robbed of words.
Petra lifted the Lady of the Lake before her, suspended her with a barely raised right hand and a calm glare, until they were eye to hateful eye, ten feet apart. Judith spat and hissed, twisting like a snake, snapping her body in enraged convulsions.
“Come, Donofrio,” Petra said, and lowered her left hand. With a slow flick of her wrist, he lofted up from the waves to join them, gasping and cascading torrents of water. He arose alongside Judith, and James saw that his eyes were utterly terrified. His throat constricted rhythmically, as if he was trying to scream but couldn’t summon the breath.
James did not pity him. The horrible, deluded little man deserved no remorse. And still James found himself turning aside to Petra.
“Don’t kill him, Petra,” he said, and found that his own voice resonated like thunder over the storm and waves. “He may deserve to die. But you don’t deserve to kill.”
Petra looked askance at him, blinked at him with her inscrutable shining eyes. Judith and Odin-Vann twisted and writhed in the force of her effortless power. And still James saw the intent on her face, even as she seemed to reconsider, if only for a moment.
Judith screamed, roared, clawed with her hands. Her hair whipped and flailed about her head, stuck to her face in clumps.
And James saw Petra’s face harden again. Slowly, she turned back to the pair suspended before them.
Her gaze swept from Odin-Vann to Judith, then focused on Judith’s wet robes. They were dark, as always. But something glimmered softly beneath her left shoulder. It was the brooch. Its pearlescent moonstone flickered with the lightning, shimmered in the reflected glow of Petra’s swirling power.
With a flick of one finger, Petra caused the brooch to pluck from Judith’s robes. The demoness shrieked and swiped at it, clumsily, unable to reach. Behind the brooch, a ribbon of pale light streamed, connecting back to its origin on Judith’s breast, a tentacle of intent.
Deftly, Petra maneuvered the brooch between them. It turned gently in the air like a ballerina, its moonstone shining, its silver scrollwork flashing with lightning.
But Petra did not take it back.
Instead, she returned her gaze to Odin-Vann. The brooch lofted toward him at her direction, still trailing its streamer of strength.
His eyes bulged. He gawped with his mouth, but managed only choked gasps. His Adam’s apple jerked up and down in the stubbly stalk of his neck.
His robes stretched across his shoulders, and then tore open, revealing his heaving, skinny chest. James watched, equally curious and horrified, as Petra used her powers, her innate understanding of the human body, to open his skin like that of an orange, to peel back the muscle, and lay bare the white cage of living ribs beneath. Odin-Vann looked down at himself and screamed. It was not a scream of pain, James understood, but of abject terror. His own body was flaying open before him. His breath came in hyperventilating gusts, each plainly visible as a spastic expand and contract of his ribs, a shuddering bulge of the pulpy lungs beneath.
James glanced at Petra, afraid but speechless. Was she slowly killing the awful little man? Torturing him as she did so? She seemed to be studying Odin-Vann’s open chest, squinting with clinical intent. She manipulated the fingers of her left hand.
With a crackle of cartilage and marrow, Odin-Vann’s ribs opened like laced fingers, splaying wide, revealing the naked muscle of his heart. It clenched like a fist, red and thumping with terror, hung between the lobes of his gasping lungs.
Petra nodded to herself. Deftly, she manipulated the brooch directly in front of Odin-Vann’s palpitating heart. It revolved softly, casting prisms of light over the hollow of gore beyond.
And then, with an apparently reluctant flick, Petra plunged the brooch directly into Odin-Vann’s heart, sinking it deep into the muscle, burying it completely. In response, a wave of stunning heat and light exploded from the point of entry, blasting out in a shockwave, encompassing Judith and blowing past James and Petra.
Odin-Vann shrieked and jerked backwards in his cocoon of force, and this time James sensed that it was indeed an exclamation of monumental pain. But there was surprise in it as well, for Odin-Vann’s heart did not stop beating. Despite being impaled with the brooch, the organ continued to clench rhythmically between his lungs, pumping desperate blood, so fast and hard that it appeared to convulse. Only now, the silvery thread extended from his heart, spread through the air like a ribbon of smoke, and stabbed into Judith’s breast, where the brooch had been pinned only moments before.
With a cold flick, Petra closed Odin-Vann’s ribs again, and then sealed the meager muscle and pale skin back into place, leaving not so much as a scar.