What is going on?
The blood moved as if it had a life of its own until it formed into the shape of a girl, materializing in the center of the room. Iron spikes wove through an auburn braid. A thick black book hung from straps on her hip. Her face was covered by a crimson mask crafted in strips. It left only her eyes visible, black as onyx. Blood dripped from her bony shoulders.
“Perfect. Saves me a double trip to this wasteland,” the girl said. Her voice sounded wrong. Everything about her was off-putting and otherworldly, as though Nadya’s brain couldn’t comprehend she was even real.
Blood was leaking from the corners of Malachiasz’s eyes again. He looked down at his hands with something too close to resignation, shaking as iron claws grew and lengthened from his nail beds. Blood fell from his lips, landing on the back of his hand—crimson on pale skin.
Nadya was still too close to him and now there was nowhere for her to go. The Vulture girl stepped closer, her movements odd, too fast and jerky, like Nadya’s eyes lost seconds as they tried to track her.
“Look at you,” the girl said. Nadya shuddered at the sound of her voice. It was like death and madness clashed in dissonant chords when she spoke. “Debased, unmasked, diminished.” Her hands looked perverse: the fingers too long and the joints thin and spindly. Her nails were also iron claws.
A vein pulsed in Malachiasz’s neck. His gaze was flinty as he eyed her. There was blood dripping from his nose now, catching on his upper lip. Rozá stepped closer. Malachiasz was trembling. Not from fear, though, it wasn’t that. It took her longer to put a name to it: restraint.
“How much further do I have to rile you before I can make you face me as you truly are?” Rozá asked.
She was much shorter than him, probably Nadya’s height. Even so, she leveled to him, reaching up with an iron claw and trailing it down the side of his face. It opened a thread-line cut, welling blood.
“Not much further,” he replied.
He had said there were two other Vultures. Three of them was too many, Nadya knew, but at least the Vultures were outnumbered. She drew her voryens.
Rozá’s head shifted, birdlike, her onyx gaze honing in on Nadya. There was no warning before she struck. She was there and then she was gone. Nadya didn’t have the opportunity to defend herself, she barely had enough time to realize the Vulture had moved.
Then the world shifted. Two more Vultures materialized into the room, then a third. Nadya’s heart plummeted in horror as she realized there were more than just the three that Malachiasz named.
The others jolted into motion. Rashid sidestepped a flash of dark magic and whipped two Akolan blades from the weapons rack. He spun one in a lazy arc, a smile on his face. Anna’s terror had chilled to something deadly.
A split-second, a blink, and Rozá was impaled on Malachiasz’s long iron claws. He gritted his teeth and Nadya felt her chest tighten as metal glinted in his mouth; his teeth rows of iron nails, too-sharp canines now deadly fangs. Pale eyes darkening as his pupils dilated, expanding to swallow the ice of his irises, then more, further, until the whites of his eyes were gone.
“It won’t count if I don’t kill you as you truly are,” Rozá said. There was no hint of pain in her voice, nothing to suggest she was even injured as she pulled herself almost elegantly off Malachiasz’s claws.
He sneered.
The air stirred behind Nadya and she whirled, drawing her voryens up in time to catch a second Vulture’s claws. Tall, probably male, likely Rafał. His mask was studded with jagged spikes and he retracted his claws and lashed out at her again so quickly that when she jumped away she jolted into Malachiasz’s back. Her magic swept out around her with her movement and it brushed against him. She shuddered involuntarily. The power roiling underneath his skin ached like a poison, a blackness that spread in his veins and coursed out into his aura. She didn’t want to be this close to him but if she was going to get out of this alive she was going to need a monster who knew how to fight monsters.
Nadya gathered her divine magic around herself like a shield, throwing it back over Malachiasz as Rozá and Rafał struck at the same time. The magic only barely held against them.
Malachiasz tilted his head back. Nadya felt him shift his footing and then suddenly he was leaning against her. She stumbled as a spray of blood precluded her spell shattering in front of her.
Malachiasz had looked dizzy when they were outside the church. Blood mages could only press so far before their resources needed to be replenished. But then he straightened and moved away from her and Nadya frantically murmured words in holy speech as Rafał’s claws came perilously close to tearing open her chest. A sphere of light formed at the tip of her voryen and she flicked her wrist down, shooting it off into the Vulture in front of her, slamming him back into the wall.
Rozá vaulted past Malachiasz to get to Nadya. For a tense heartbeat, Nadya thought he had let her, but he was moving toward the Vulture that had a defenseless Anna backed into a corner, her sword just out of reach.
Nadya tugged her second voryen from her belt, fusing Krsnik’s heated magic into the metal. She spat out symbols of smoke and pulled threads from Marzenya’s death magic into her other blade.
“This is what the Kalyazi have rested their hope upon?” Rozá said when she was steps away. “This is pathetic.”
“You talk too much,” Nadya snapped. She pulled the essence of Bozetjeh’s power and cut the distance between her and the Vulture, slamming her flame-tinged voryen into her shoulder.
The blade passed through as if the girl was made of blood and nothing more. Rozá’s clawed hands snapped toward Nadya’s torso, but she slipped out of her grasp, fluid with Bozetjeh’s power. She slammed the other blade—coated in the essence of the goddess of death and magic—into the Vulture’s stomach.
Rozá choked, pain fluttering over her visible features. Her eyes closed and she pulled herself off Nadya’s blade. She took a step back, pressing her hand to her abdomen. There was blood pouring from the bottom of her mask.
There was movement at Nadya’s side and she turned, but Malachiasz was already there. A spray of blood arced between his hands, shifting into blades, slamming into Rafał. He grabbed the Vulture by the front of his shirt, driving the nails of his other hand into the opening of his facial mask.
The magic in her head was growing more insistent, aching to destroy. She was already pulling on so many threads. It was far more than she had ever used before and she didn’t know how much her body could take, how much divine abuse she could channel before it ruined her.
But the Vultures were shaking off her attacks as if she was nothing but a mild irritant. Rashid grasped at Rozá’s moment of distraction and attacked; she slammed him into the wall where he crumpled like a discarded doll.
Nadya heard Anna’s sword clatter to the ground, the sound too loud yet distant, as if it came from miles away.
They’re here for me. Rozá’s claws sunk into Malachiasz’s chest. They’re here for him, too. One of the smaller Vultures slashed open Parijahan’s side.
Malachiasz freed himself from Rozá’s grasp and staggered back. His inhuman, onyx eyes locked with Nadya’s and she experienced a moment of clarity. A passage of a singular thought between her and this nightmare of a boy she did not know and did not trust.