Page 161 of Decimation

He produces a second knife. Smaller than the first, a dagger with a bone handle and a blade that gleams with something dark, something that might be rust or might be old blood.

He drives it into the side of my throat.

The pain is immediate and absolute, it is white-hot and freezing cold at the same time. It is the feeling of metal pushing through skin and muscle and something deeper, something vital. I feel blood, hot, wet, too much of it, pouring down my neck, soaking into my collar, pooling beneath me on the stone floor.

I jerk. I kick. My body is trying to reject what has happened even as my mind struggles to process it.

Ezekiel is smiling. He is leaning close, his face inches from mine, and I can smell his breath, like something rotting.

“The prophecy,” he whispers, “is everything.”

And then a weight slams into him from behind.

Leandra.

She has the curved knife in both hands now. She drives it through his back, through his robes, through his skin, through the cage of his ribs. I hear the sound it makes. Wet. Grating. The sound of steel finding the thing it was made to find.

Ezekiel’s eyes go wide.

His mouth opens, but no sound comes out. His hands reach back, grasping, clawing at the hilt protruding from his spine.

Leandra pulls the blade free.

Ezekiel topples sideways, and then the other women are on her.

They are no longer singing. They are screaming, a discordant, furious sound, and they are swarming her like insects. There are four of them now, four veiled figures with grasping hands and hate in their eyes. One of them grabs Leandra’s hair. Another tears the knife from her grip. A third drives a fist into her stomach.

I try to move.

I can’t.

The dagger is still in my throat. I can feel it with every heartbeat, a foreign object lodged in the most vulnerable part of me. Moving could kill me. Pulling it out could kill me. But Leandra is fighting four women alone, and I am lying on the floor bleeding out and⁠—

One of the women grabs a torch from its sconce.

The flame is bright, too bright, searing against my vision. I see the woman raise it. I see Leandra turn. I see the torch come down, and it drives into her face.

Oh God, the sound she makes, I will hear it for the rest of my life. However long that is, however many minutes or seconds I have left.

The smell hits me next. Burning flesh. Burning hair. The woman is still pressing the torch against Leandra’s face and Leandra is still screaming. I am still lying here with a knife in my throat and this is not how it was supposed to end, this is not the plan. I was supposed to protect her, I was supposed to save her, I promised her revenge, I promised her safety, I promised her…

“ENOUGH.”

The voice doesn’t come from me. It doesn’t come from Ezekiel, who is lying in a spreading pool of his own blood, his eyes glassy, his chest barely moving.

It comes from the doorway.

The chapel floods with men. My men. My guards. They pour through the shattered doors in a wave of black tactical gear and drawn weapons. They move with precision, with purpose, sweeping the space like they’ve trained for this exact scenario.

The women are pulled away from Leandra. I hear one of them screaming, not in fury now, but in fear. Another is trying to run. A third is being forced to her knees, her veil torn away to reveal a face I don’t recognize.

Leandra collapses against the altar.

I can see her face now. One side of it is, God, one side of it is burned. The skin is blackened and blistered, already beginning to peel away. Her eye on that side is swollen shut. Blood from the cut on her face mixes with the burns, creating something that doesn’t look human.

“Kill them,” she gasps, her voice raw from screaming. “Kill them all.”

The guards hesitate, looking to me. I try to give the order. I try to tell them to do what she asks, to butcher those women where they stand, to spill their blood across the stones until the chapel runs red, but the words won’t come. There is a knife in my throat, there is blood filling my mouth. There is darkness creeping at the edges of my vision.