Dreams of Gods & Monsters(97)
Author: Laini Taylor

And there was Eliza to think of, too. Even if they glutted themselves on wishes, gifting themselves superpowers willy-nilly and soaring off to save the day, they couldn’t just leave her sitting here, could they?

Hey, wait.

Zuzana looked at Eliza, then at Mik. She perked an eyebrow. Mik looked at Eliza, too. “Well, yeah. Of course,” he said at once.

And so, quickly, feeling the press of time and need, they formulated the best words they could think of for the mending of a young woman whose ailment was a mystery to them. In a reverent hush, Zuzana spoke them to the gavriel in her hand. It felt almost as though she were talking to Brimstone.

“I wish that Eliza Jones, born Elazael, will be granted full power over herself in mind and body, and be well.” Something possessed her to add at the end, “May she be her best possible self,” because it seemed, in that moment, to be the truest of all wishes—not a betrayal of self that came from coveting others, but a deepening of self. A ripening.

When a wish exceeds the power of the medallion it’s made on, nothing happens. Like, if you held a scuppy and wished for a million dollars, the scuppy would just lie there. Mik and Zuzana didn’t know if what they were asking was within the realm of a gavriel’s power. So they watched Eliza closely for some small sign that it might be taking effect.

There was no small sign.

That is to say… the sign was not small.

Not even a little bit.

62

THE AGE OF WARS

The word that Akiva spoke was Haxaya, and Jael might have had no notion what it meant, or even that it was a name, but the result was clear enough.

One second.

The air beside him was empty and then it wasn’t, and the shape that filled it—a streak of fur and teeth—was in motion. He saw it and it hit him. Two halves of the same second. He was dragged swiftly backward.

Two seconds.

His soldiers were all before him. They only turned when he felt the steel against his flesh and gasped, and by the time their heads craned around, he was in the doorway on his knees, a blade to his throat and his attacker behind him, out of their reach.

A caterwaul went up. It matched the roil of outrage in Jael’s head, but it wasn’t coming from his own lips. He didn’t dare scream, not with the press of the blade. It was the Fallen who screamed, writhing on the bed, still struggling with the girl.

Three seconds.

The blade bit. Jael thought his throat was slashed and he panicked, but he could still breathe. It stung—just a cut. “So sorry,” came a voice—a feminine whisper close to his ear. The blade was sharp and she was not careful with it. Another sting, another cut, and a laugh from over his shoulder. Throaty, amused.

All that his men had had time to do was swing their heads around to stare. The space in between seconds was strung with their shock and clotted with Razgut’s cries. “No no no!” The fallen thing’s voice was dark with fury. “Kill them!” he raged. “Kill them!”

As though following his command, one of the soldiers made a move toward Jael, raising his sword toward the chimaera who held him. Her arm tightened around Jael. Her claws sank into his side, through his clothing and into his flesh, and her knife sank a little deeper, too.

“Stop!” he cried. To her, to his men. He was not pleased to hear that it sounded like a yelp. “Stand down!” And he was trying to think what to do—five seconds—but he had sent every soldier before him as a buffer and kept none behind. By pulling him into the doorway, his attacker gave herself the whole wall as barrier—and his body as barrier, too, and behind her there was nothing but an empty room. No one could get to her, and this was Jael’s own fault, for hiding behind a wall of soldiers.

“How easily comes the blood,” she said. Her voice was animal, guttural. “I think it wants to be free. Even your own blood despises you.”

“Haxaya,” said Akiva, warningly—and now Jael understood that the word was a name—“Our imperative was no blood.”

It was too late for that. Jael’s neck was slick with it. “He squirms,” was Haxaya’s response.

Razgut was still wailing. The girl was free of him now, standing at the bastard’s side, the three of them abreast: human, seraph, beast, the three he’d been alerted to expect, and what of this fourth he hadn’t looked for? How had it happened? How?

When Akiva spoke again it was to Jael, casually, as if picking up a dropped thread of conversation. “Other factors,” he said, his voice damnably smooth and certain. Other factors may turn the tide, he had said a moment before. “Such as placing special value on one life above others. Your own, for example. If numbers were all that mattered, you could still win here. Not you personally. You would die. You would die first, but your men might take the day, if they decided not to care whether you lived.” He paused, let his gaze move over them, as though they were entities capable of choice, and not mere soldiers. “Is that what you want?”

Who was he asking, him or them? The idea that they could answer, that they could choose his fate, appalled Jael. “No.” He found himself spitting out the word in haste, before they might venture another response.

“You want to live,” Akiva clarified.

Yes, he wanted to live. But it was unthinkable to Jael that his enemy would permit him to. “Don’t play games with me, Beast’s Bane. What do you want?”

“First,” said Akiva. “I want your men to lay down their swords.”

Karou had had enough of Razgut’s purring chuckle and his sweating hand clenched around her wrist, and so at the moment that Akiva pronounced Haxaya’s name, she dropped an elbow hard into the thing’s eye socket and pivoted, using the instant of his sharp surprise to wrench free. Even so, she almost didn’t break away. Sweat-slicked though it was, his grip had the crushing power of talons, and her skin, when she braced a foot against the bed frame and pulled with everything in her, came away gouged and bleeding. But it came away, blessedly, and she was free.

Razgut was holding his eye and screaming—“No no no!”—and the other eye was open and wild, rolling and malevolent, as Karou paced backward, away from him, drawing her moon blades now as she took up a position by Akiva’s side. She on one side, Virko on the other, watching Haxaya subdue the monster Jael.

Haxaya, alive again, and—thanks to teeth pilfered from the Museo Civico di Zoologia—in her proper fox aspect, lithe and very fast.

She wasn’t part of the plan. Not initially. Back in the caves, when the idea had first taken shape in Karou’s mind, Haxaya’s corpse—or Ten’s corpse, most recently vacated by Haxaya’s soul—had been its inspiration, but Karou had not in any way intended her to play a part in its fulfillment. She had gleaned the soldier’s soul with the thought to decide later what to do with it. The thurible was a small one, and she’d hooked it to her belt and forgotten to place it with the others before leaving the caves. Serendipity? Fate? Who knew.