Page 104 of Sanctifier

And when Lyr’s blow came to the base of her neck, when she should have fallen unconscious, a horrible reverberation shook her body, and she watched in detachment as Lyr’s sword clattered to the floor. And then the man himself collapsed, the force of his own blow rebounding back to him.

Somehow, the artifact had protected her.

Good, she thought.Destroy them, then. Turn them to ash. Everyone. Everyone.

Vengeful anger and pain flooded her and left nothing behind. Ru saw nothing but darkness, misery, and a world that would burn no matter what she did. All she knew was that Gwyneth and Archie were gone, and Ru would destroy everything in her path until she was either stopped or ran out of souls to reap.

CHAPTER 38

Taryel

He felt her call for him at the back of his neck, where spine met skull. It rattled through him like a bell of onyx, the artifact thrumming in echo. A loud and dire warning.

It was a wild thing, his connection to Ru. He thought of it as a jagged slice through the veil, a seething window that she could open and close at will, and reach through with loving fingers to pull him anywhere.

And he let her do it gladly.

But she did so very rarely. She had only called for him a handful of times in the months he’d loved her, unaware that she was doing it.

Had there ever been a time when he didn’t love her?

But her call now was tormented, wrathful, despairing. It slammed against the corners of his mind, tore at his heart with thrashing limbs and fingers, clawing and screaming. The pain of it was visceral, a pounding against his skull, a fist closing on his heart.

It terrified him. Something was terribly, unspeakably wrong.

Moving purely by reflex, he ran to her. Skidding through corridors, breathless and panicked, his breath loud in his ears. He cursed himself as he ran, hating that he couldn’t travel directly to her, that his powers had reached their limit. If she hadn’t been so adamant that they needed to visit that horrible temple…

But she had asked, and so he had taken her. As if he was supposed to refuse her. As if hecould. She could have asked him to put a knife to his own throat and press until the skin broke, until he was drenched in red, until his blood stopped flowing and his heart stilled. He would have done it. Without question.

He would haveloveddoing it, for her.

Ru’s scream was wordless and unending, and he needed to save her. He pushed past courtiers, his boots slamming on wooden staircases as he barreled through the palace, down and down, toward Ru’s agony.

Wait for me, he thought desperately.I’m coming.

He followed Ru’s call all the way to a downward stair, narrow and claustrophobic. He skidded down the stairs, nearly falling as he went, his footfalls echoing. Because Ru was tormented and pained, but there was something else, a sickly and bitter thing that stuck like tar in Taryel’s throat.

Something was very, very wrong.

As he came to the bottom of the stairs, the scene there stopped him dead. Lady Bellenet and Lord D’Luc cowered against the far wall, Hugon white with fear, his lady’s eyes blazing wildly with hunger. Lyr lay crumpled on the floor, half lying on his sword pommel.

“Stop her,” Lady Bellenet hissed, her voice shaking. “It is too soon.Stop her.”

Taryel took everything in with a glance.

All he cared about was Ru. His counterpart, the other half of him, the goddess at whose altar he worshiped.

She held the artifact above her head like a beacon. A sphere of inky darkness expanded from it like a tide. Her hand was fully engulfed in the darkness, and so was her arm down to the elbow. Her eyes, usually a lively brown, shone solid black, as if her pupils had expanded to fill the irises, the whites.

And she was screaming. A wordless shriek of pain and rage, a howl of horror. Blood flecked her lips and encrusted her nose.

“No,” Taryel said, his own heart gripped by fingers of cold terror. “No, no, no,” the word tumbled from his mouth, over and over as he went to her, taking her in his arms. “I’m here, it’s me,” he murmured. He touched her face with anguished fingers, desperate to bring her back. What if it was too late? What if she was lost to him, consumed at last by her own despair?

“Ru,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. He would be her anchor, holding her in life, in joy, in love. “Ru. Ru. You don’t want to do this.”

But her scream was unending, as if she wanted to devour the world and spit it out, bloody and gnawed.

The darkness had expanded from Ru’s outstretched hand to her shoulder; her entire arm wreathed in swirling blackness. The sphere of destructive magic was halfway to the stone ceiling and had already begun to erode the table and a low-hanging stalactite. A pile of ash gathered on the floor where the darkness ate away at the wood and stone.