Page 222 of The Mercy of Dawn

The impact rattled her bones.

“Fucking hells,” Cyril groaned. She coughed and wiped at the blood trickling down the corner of her mouth.

Of course, this one wouldn’t be easy.

She pushed off the stone and made it a few steps forward before that energy rippled again, sending her crashing back against the stone wall and straight down to her knees. The blooming pain in her side was making it hard to breathe.

“Stop this!” Cyril pleaded, trying to pull herself up the wall, a single blade still left in her grip. “You are killing innocent people. People who—”

“What about our people?!” The woman’s seething voice carried a frighteningly familiar lilt to it as she stood, her milky green gaze fixed on Cyril. “Our people are suffering, our people are dying, our women cannot bear children! You and your filthy people have come here and tainted our lands.”

The runes on the ground pulsed, and the air became impossibly thick, too dense to breathe. That deep-seated pain in Cyril’s chest cracked and splintered again, heat pouring through every fiber of her being.

Darkness shuttered her senses and her body hummed again with that strange surge of life that pulled her pain away with it.

“You have upset our balance, and it is my obligation to restore it. I will not allow you to—”

Cyril’s hand curled itself around the woman’s throat almost of its own volition, gripping and pulling her head back as she pressed her blade to her throat. Cyril shot a glance back over her shoulder, at the wall she had just clung hopelessly to.

A dozen feet away.

Did she just…

No.

There was no fucking way…

“You filthy bitch,” the woman growled as she clawed at Cyril’s arm, her free hand flying back to the gaping wound in Cyril’s thigh.

Another ripple of force tore through the air, and the snaps that reverberated up through Cyril’s leg and into her body sent a surge of bile clawing up her throat. Darkness clawed at the edge of her vision as she fought for breath.

She couldn’t waste another second.

In a jagged line from left to right, Cyril ripped her blade across the woman’s throat, and an arc of blood sprayed out in its wake. A burst of desperate, gurgling noises came spitting out of her before she went slack in Cyril’s arms.

The air in the cellar thinned, and the room dimmed as the runes lost their glow of life.

Cyril collapsed to the floor as a torrent of searing pain surged through her.

She barely had time to shove the woman’s body away before her stomach turned itself inside out, tears rolling down her cheeks as she heaved and retched.

The pain crested in frightening degrees as Cyril tried to pull herself back against the wall.

Away from the bodies and the blood.

Away from the terrifying reality of what had just happened.

Away from her own fucking vomit.

Her back hit wood and Cyril clutched at her side, at the gaping hole that soaked her shirt a burgundy red.

The gaping hole that continued to soak her shirt, no matter the pressure she put.

Cyril let her head drift back and stifled down a sob with a slow, shaky breath.

This was it.

Chapter 57