Page 90 of Kazimir

Then he changed angle mid-pressure in a move so fast I barely saw it. His blade sheared down the length of mine, struck my hilt, and the golden sword tore free of my hand.

It spun away in a bright arc, hit the wall with a metallic crack, and skidded out of reach down the corridor.

For one impossibly loud heartbeat, I stared after it.

Sariel’s hand closed around my throat.

He lifted me as if I weighed nothing.

My back hit the wall hard enough to jar my teeth. My boots left the floor. Wings flared violently, smashing feathered edges against plaster and molding. His grip was iron and light, and old rage combined. I clawed at his wrist on instinct. It did nothing. His thumb pressed under my jaw, cutting off breath and leverage together.

His face came close.

“You should have stayed broken,” he said softly.

I kicked. My heel connected with his thigh. Meaningless. I drove my knee up. He took it without even blinking. Black stars crowded my vision. The corridor seemed to lengthen and narrow at once.

Through the bond I felt Kazimir know.

Not guess. Know.

The fury that hit from him was so vast it almost eclipsed my own pain. It came with a sound too, though he was nowhere near me yet—the shape of a roar, not through ears but through every place we joined. It shook something in my chest that had nothing to do with fear.

Then I did hear him.

A roar tore through Obsidian from far off and everywhere at once, so savage the walls seemed to answer it. It was not human. It was not civilized. It was grief and wrath and possession stripped down to their oldest teeth.

Images flashed across the bond in broken violent fragments as he fought toward me.

His skin had gone alabaster white, that dead, beautiful pallor sharpened into something monstrous by rage. His eyes had bled fully black. Fangs extended past his lower lip, no longer hidden, no longer domesticated for the comfort of weaker creatures. He tore through Sariel’s warriors with a primal ferocity I had never felt from him so nakedly before. One celestial lost an arm. Another went down under a strike that shattered bone and armor together. He moved through blood and white fire like a vengeance too old to surprise itself.

Too far, though.

Too far.

Sariel felt it too. I saw the satisfaction in his gaze when he glanced toward the distant battle and understood Kazimir would not reach us in time.

He tightened his grip until my vision pulsed.

“You polluted yourself for a creature of carrion,” he said. “You bound celestial essence to undeath. Abomination would be too kind a word.”

I wanted to spit in his face. I did not have enough breath.

My hands found his wrist again, then failed. My body was becoming heavy in the wrong way. Edges dimmed. The bond blazed brighter than the hallway, brighter than the pain. Kazimir’s desperation hit me then—not weakness, never that, but the terrible knowledge of distance when what you love is being hurt and your body cannot break physics quickly enough.

No, he sent.

The word was a wound.

Sariel raised his free hand.

Light gathered there, not gentle and not warm. It condensed into something narrower than a sword and more absolute than any mortal weapon. Unmaking. I knew it before memory supplied the name. The instinctive horror of it nearly froze me. This was not meant to kill a body. It was meant to erase what animated it. To strip me down past personhood into raw extinguished essence.

He meant to leave nothing.

The air changed.

At first, I thought it was my failing consciousness inventing mercy. The pressure in the corridor deepened, but not with Sariel’s cold celestial force. This was older. Wilder. Vast in a way that did not care for rank.