Page 92 of (Mostly) Human Resources

Let me, Alexys. Tell me you want me to, and I will save him.

Alexys choked on her gasping breaths. She couldn’t think, couldn’t understand anything more than her desperate need to save Nic. She could see him, barely, in a gap between the cultists.

He was pressed tight against the stone table, his face turned toward her. He had stopped crying, tear-tracks pale against his dirty cheeks. His eyes locked on hers, and she couldn’t look away. She was drowning in the terror held in his gaze. The terror he tried to hide in reassurance. A reassurance for her, as if this wasn’t all her doing. As if he wouldn’t be home safe, away from this horror, if it wasn’t for her.

Nic started to mouth something to her, but someone stepped between them and blocked her view. Alexys felt the loss of his gaze like a physical blow.

Make the deal, Alexys.

Agnes raised the obsidian dagger high in the air.

Alexys’s frantic gasps clouded the air. Her fingertips ached with the cold, and a layer of frost began to creep along the ground, her kneeling body at its center.

“Please,” Alexys whispered. “Please save him.”

The chanting reached its loudest, the cacophony of voices echoing off the walls and rebounding around her. The blade flashed in the lamplight then sliced through the air.

With sickening ease, the blade sank into Nic’s chest.

Alexys screamed.

Silas laughed.

And the stone altar shattered.

CHAPTER 49

“If She is sacrifice, He is death. One cannot exist without the other, and I fear their war will never cease. We cannot keep the Gray Man imprisoned forever.”

The Fairchild Grimoire,1591 Entry by Constance Fairchild

Hoarfrost sprouted along her fingers, up her arms with a biting cold, and the two men holding Alexys released her with a hiss. The ropes that bound her wrists and ankles fell away.

Silas’s voice whispered in her ear as she lurched to her feet.

I save you and your little friend at the expense of the ones who wish you harm.

A shiver raced down her spine. Alexys had no illusions about what Silas was insinuating, but the image of the knife buried in Nic’s chest was burned into her memory. It was all she could see.

There’s a balance I have to maintain. It’s a small price, considering, Silas crooned in his thick drawl. His disembodied voice echoed around her, traced frozen fingertips along her skin.They were planning to kill you both, anyway. A cult of the disillusioned. What are their lives truly worth in the grand scheme of things?

Alexys was barely listening. She scurried toward the remains of the stone altar as the cultists tried to collect themselves from the places they’d fallen. She found Nic sprawled among the wreckage, the blade hilt sticking out of his chest and blood soaking his once-white shirt. He looked horribly pale.

She raced to him, tripping and stumbling over frost-touched rubble, until she was crouched beside him.

“Nic?” Alexys carefully lifted his head and cradled it in her lap. His eyes were closed, and his hair was wet with blood that pooled beneath him. “Nic? I need you to stay with me, Nic. Please.”

She brushed curls off his forehead and pressed a few fingertips against his neck in search of a pulse.

“Come back to me,” Alexys begged. “I can’t do this without you. It shouldn’t have been you. It should’ve …”

“It’s not too late.”

She turned her head. Silas stood beside her.

He was in one of his gray, three-piece suits, a smug smile touching his thin lips, and the obsidian knife held carelessly between two of his fingers. He met her gaze, and his smile widened. Too many teeth, and not nearly enough kindness. “Hello, darlin’. Did you miss me?”

Alexys blinked several times, barely understanding everything that had happened so far. Did she see him pull the knife from Nic’s chest? Or walk into the room? She accepted Silas’s presence with the same dazed detachment with which she started to accept the rest of the night’s events and focused instead on Nic.