Rohan jerked away. “That’s not funny.”
“I’m not kidding.” A maelstrom of jagged edges and burning gusts swirled inside me. Lilith voicing her displeasure. My lawyer father would have hung his head in shame that I’d negotiated without reading the fine print about the consequences of breaking this deal. The section pertaining to my death. I grit my teeth. “There’s no separation in our lives and it’s too much. I can’t breathe.” For someone without blade magic, I fired those metaphoric knives like a pro. “We can’t be together.”
I stood up, crashing into the table, bent over double, feeling for my way out, wondering if I’d even make it to the door before the searing pain ripping me apart, consumed me. My vision tunneled down into a single dot.
“Nava! Come back here. Please.”
His pleading was wrecking me. One touch and I’d take it all back. I sped up so that couldn’t happen. “I’m sorry. This is how it has to be.”
“You can’t.” That hadn’t been Rohan. That was Lilith, roaring up inside me. “Nice try. But you can’t get out of our deal that easy. I’ll take it from here.”
My consciousness was shoved to one side, manhandled into a tiny ball, and stuffed into a black box. I fought her with everything I had, but my efforts were laughable. You said I wouldn’t even know you were here.
“You won’t,” she purred and slammed the black box shut.
I woke up the next morning naked in my bed. The scar was gone.
I turned over to find Ro watching me. I cast about for the appropriate salutation after one had dumped one’s boyfriend and then been unconscious through body-possessed sex. “Have fun last night?”
“You tell me,” he replied in a bland tone that clarified exactly nothing.
Oh, how I wished I could. I stretched out my limbs, checked in with Cuntessa, tested for unfamiliar soreness. Nothing. Whatever had gone down last night, Lilith hadn’t been freaky. “About what I said last night?”
“Forget it.” He got out of bed and pulled on his pants. “We’re going to try contacting the other oshk again. Meet us out back.”
There was no good morning kiss before he left.
I pressed my fists into my eyes until I saw stars.
Rohan knew. I don’t know how, but he did. I’d broken up with him thinking it was my one way to save him, and instead Lilith had tricked me and fucked him and I’d lost him anyway. There was no point being mad at the duplicitous witch. My self-loathing, on the other hand, was endless.
My phone trilled merrily with my Word of the Day notification. Specious: adjective. Having deceptive attraction or allure; having a false look of truth or genuineness.
I deleted the app.
23
Drio deposited our oshk bait on a stump in the woods behind our back fence–outside the wards. Her body was wrapped in iron chains, not that she was in any condition to portal or fight back. Her sores hadn’t healed on her human torso, and her oshk skin had turned the color of rust. She was vibrating, emitting a sound like sizzling butter, and she smelled like mold.
The three of us were back in full protective gear from head-to-toe. Drio gripped one of the iron poles with the curved blade that he and Ro had been fighting with in the Vault, while Rohan had three canisters of liquid nitrogen, modified with spray nozzles. He’d volunteered for the position, saying that with Drio’s flash stepping and my magic wielding from a distance, we were better equipped to deal with the direct attack. For Ro to take this support position was huge. He’d always been ready to sacrifice himself for the people he cared about–like me on more than one occasion–which wasn’t healthy.
I was proud of him recognizing that fact and desperate to know if him not wanting to throw his life away in a fight he didn’t need to have was tied into our future at all, but he was sticking close to Drio. I could have pushed the point but things were so strained between us that any conversation was likely to explode into ugly truths and put the mission at risk.
I kept telling myself that was the reason, anyway.
Drio kicked the oshk. “Call the rest of your spawn squad.”
A laugh burst out of me, dying at the look of malevolence he fired my way. Situation normal all fucked up. I wouldn’t forget again.
I squatted down on the ground, scratching at a gnarled tree root through my gloves, not bothering to check for any support from Ro. Other than a quick glance when I’d first arrived, after which he’d pulled his mask down, my boyfriend hadn’t bothered with me. Though he might not be that anymore so… I snapped the root in half and kicked it aside.
A faraway truck backed up, its beeping drifting in on the breeze and a neighbor had left their dog outside barking, but no matryoshka.
The sun rose high in the sky. We’d pulled off our head gear and unzipped our suits, moving from shadow to shadow to stay cool. Waiting for the rest of the matryoshka to show was tense enough, couple it with the fact that the men barely acknowledged my existence the entire time, and I was ready to snap harder than that tree root.
The oshk’s torso became brutally sunburned, and still the other matryoshka didn’t show.
“This is bullshit.” Rohan drove the curved blade that Drio had tossed on the ground through the oshk’s heart. The demon disappeared, her chains slithering off the stump into the dirt with a rattle.
“Way to make a unilateral decision there, Ro.” Drio scuffed one foot back and forth in the dirt.
The forest stilled like a sound-dampening blanket had been tossed over it. The air shimmered and the remaining six oshk appeared.
We scrambled to suit up.
Drio grabbed the weapon and fist-bumped Rohan.
“Go forth and fucking conquer,” Ro said.
I wasn’t included in the rallying cheer.
With my own war cry, I bombed the shit out of the matryoshka, keeping them disoriented enough for Drio to slice and dice them open for one of us to reach their heart kill spot.
The ground became littered with oshk parts. Ro doused each one with liquid nitrogen, stomping it to dust beneath his feet so that it couldn’t reattach to the demons. The liquid nitrogen swirled around him like an eerie cloak.
Drio and I had whittled a couple of the oshk down enough that one more well-placed strike would open them up, but the two melded with each other, resulting in instant regeneration, before separating once more hale and hearty.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” I snarled.
The battle raged on, trampling saplings, overturning mounds of dirt, exposing startled spiders that skittered away, and decimating one long ant formation. Not only were we starting from scratch with the two regenerated demons, but we had to keep them all away from each other so that regeneration couldn’t happen again.
The outsides of our suits dripped from their secretions, eating away at the protective material. By the time we killed two more of them, I was slick with sweat, my limbs jerky from the magic I was expending.