He turned back toward Selene. “What was that?”
“Will!” she yelled, trying to warn him.
Will looked back and saw the dead sorcerer’s strange elemental just before it crashed into him. It seemed to be made of black, smoky flesh, and within it he saw claws and teeth. His sword found nothing when he tried to fend it off, and he found himself wrapped in powerful arms. Streamers of black turyn whipped around him, burning whenever they touched his skin, but they couldn’t seem to do serious harm since they faded soon after touching him. It was the claws and teeth that scared him most. He felt powerful jaws latching onto him in several places, and though they didn’t penetrate his mail he felt them begin to clamp down with bone-crushing force.
He was helpless.
Then something slammed into him from behind, knocking him free from the strange creature that had been trying to devour him. When he looked up from the ground, he saw a bizarre spectacle: Selene was battling the beast, her body covered in stone plates, while each of her hands held an incandescent blue blade.
Unlike his sword, hers worked to devastating effect, destroying whatever they touched. They ripped through the monster, and when they came in contact with other things, such as the ground, they tore through it, leaving deep grooves. Her first two attacks caused gouts of black blood to spray from the shadowy thing she fought.
Will watched in shock. What kind of elemental has blood?
For a moment it seemed as though she would win easily, but the monster wasn’t done yet. Slipping past her next swing, it fell upon her, wrapping itself around her body in the same way it had done with Will. With claws and teeth, it pried at the stone protecting her, and black mist began to seep into the cracks. He heard Selene shriek with pain and rage as the black substance touched her skin.
Her stone fists released the blue blades and they transformed, becoming broad, spinning circles that buzzed as they spun around her body, cutting and destroying anything they touched. Within seconds, they had shredded the beast clinging to her, sending bits of blood and gore all over the intersection. The black smoke slowly dissipated, leaving an odd assortment of arms, teeth, claws, and talons on the ground. Will didn’t think it would have resembled any living creature he had ever seen, either before or after Selene had disassembled it.
She sank to her knees, and the stone plates crumbled to the ground, becoming dust, while the blue circles stopped moving and rediscovered gravity. They fell to the ground like ordinary water, soaking into the dry earth.
Will ran to her side. She seemed unhurt, but her face was red and sweat was dripping down her forehead. “What the hell kind of elemental was that?” he asked.
“Not an elemental,” she panted, her breathing heavy and irregular. “A demon. He was a priest of Madrok.” Then her eyes rolled back into her head and her body began to shake violently.
He spotted something dark on her shoulder, just beneath the collar of her shirt, and he pulled it open to reveal an ugly darkness that seemed to boil beneath the surface of her skin. The black mist, he realized. He clamped his hand over her shoulder and tried to draw it out, but had no success—it wasn’t a spell. He decided to try something else, and a second later he cast the source-link spell, connecting himself with Selene.
As always, a sense of duality washed over him, and while he was able to separate his sense of self from his sense of Selene, he could feel the searing evil that was trying to destroy her from the inside out. Without any other options, he began drawing out her turyn, pulling it from her body faster than he had ever done with anyone before her.
The evil came with it, and because of his haste, his body couldn’t change it quickly enough to protect him from the inevitable turyn sickness that came with foreign turyn. Yet this was far worse than the nausea that had he had experienced after drinking his grandfather’s elixir of turyn. The same burning pain he had felt in Selene afflicted him for several minutes, until his body finished absorbing and converting it.
With his ordeal over, Will realized his eyes were closed, and he opened them. A sense of vertigo washed over him and he promptly vomited onto the lane. Off to one side, he saw Selene lying prone, her eyes open as she watched him. “Are you all right?” she asked, exhaustion plain in her voice.
Spitting to clear his mouth, he nodded. Selene sat up and began gingerly getting to her feet.
That surprised him. Normally after being drained of their turyn, people were helpless for hours. “How are you recovering so quickly?” he asked.
“The elementals,” she said simply. “I can draw from them.”
“It doesn’t make you sick?”
She shook her head. “The heart-stone enchantment converts it for me.” She gave him a worried look. “How about you? That was pure demonic turyn. It should have killed you.”
Will got to his feet, doing his best not to stagger. “I guess my whole body is like the heart-stone enchantment. It converts anything I take in, just not as quickly.” He walked over to the man they had killed. The black-robed stranger looked ordinary enough, but as he searched the body, he noticed a strange symbol tattooed on the man’s chest. “What’s this?”
“The symbol of Madrok,” said Selene. “We need to move.”
He had briefly considered moving the man’s body into the guardhouse with the others, but there were shouts coming from several directions. It was too late. Selene grabbed his arm and slid it over her shoulder as a mist rose seemingly from nothing to surround them. Both of them had been through an ordeal, but she seemed to have recovered from it first.
She led him down a different lane, the one that headed to the right. Gradually, Will’s balance returned, and he used his turyn to adjust his eyesight so he could see through the dense fog. He started to remove his arm, but Selene seized his torso, pressing her face into his chest. “I thought I was dying,” she said into his shirt.
“We both would have died if you hadn’t destroyed that thing,” he replied, unsure what to do. Slowly, he relaxed, putting his arms around her. As the stress in his body began to drain away, he felt his arms begin to shake with a faint tremor. That thing scared the shit out of me, he realized. Things had happened so quickly before then that he hadn’t had a chance to register how much it had shaken him.
Selene pushed him away, and her posture straightened as they began moving again. There were shouts in every direction now, and Will saw people running past them through the mist, heading toward the scene of their battle with the demon. He was forced to steer them toward the center of the lane as most of the responders ran along the sides.
“What did you do to that sorcerer?” he asked.
“Not a sorcerer,” she corrected. “He was a priest of Madrok, a warlock.”
“Oh.”
“It was a water drill, a spinning vortex of water,” she told him.
“And that thing with him was a demon?”
Selene nodded.
“Why didn’t it vanish or go dormant after he died, the way elementals do?”
“A sorcerer controls an elemental through their heart-stone enchantment. When they die, the elemental becomes incapable of doing anything until someone new takes control. Demons are different—they’re intelligent. The priests of Madrok sell their souls to him and he grants them a demon to assist them. The tattoo is a mark of that, but they aren’t controlled like an elemental is. Once the warlock dies, they can do whatever they want,” she explained. “What bothers me more is that there shouldn’t be any priests of Madrok here. They come from the kingdom of Shimera. They’re supposedly enemies of Darrow.”