Page 94 of Of Song and Scepter
“I paid my blood price.” My lips curl around the words, snarling. “You didn’t win his heart. I did.”
“Don’t make me kill you, Enna. I have a job to finish.”
Bad things usually happen in slow motion: the moment I made my first kill, the moment the dredgebeast impaled me on its tooth.
This moment is no different. Odissa grins from ear to ear, her teeth glinting with yellow flame. Her muscles tense, then bend, then snap. With a whistle of stale wind, the trident spirals across the room, straight for Soren’s heart.
Chapter sixty
Soren
Enna slams into myside. Her shoulder connects with the hard plane of my ribs and I teeter off balance a split second before the trident whizzes past my face. The tip of the trident grazes my shoulder with a burst of searing pain. Blood sprays my face. Metal clatters as it collides with the wall of knives behind me.
I hit the floor with a grunt. Enna lands next to me, narrowly avoiding several knives now scattered on the floor.
“Soren!” Her hands find my arm, slicking with my blood. I groan, rolling to look at her. Her eyes flood with fear, hurt, anger.
I roll my shoulder and gasp as the pain throbs through the muscles. There’s a deep gash missing from my shoulder, a bloody trench carved out by the trident’s tine. “Just a scratch,”I tell her. “I’ve had worse.” I try to roll my shoulder but cannot. My left arm hangs limply by my side, dead weight. A whimper escapes through my lips as I push off the floor, standing with great effort.
Odissa curses, marching on. Her eyes flash with chaos, darting around the room. She grabs the glass bell jar and hurls it at me with a manic screech. The glass shatters on the floor, the spray of shards slicing across my legs.
I hiss as the blood swells and the residual sting settles in. Enna grasps a knife and takes aim. The blade slices a piece of Odissa’s hair, narrowly missing her ear.
“You don’t really want me dead, do you? You would have hit me if you did.” Odissa pauses, eyeing the cushion where the bell jar had been. With slow, bloody fingers, she picks up the necklace. She eyes me, and with a smile, lifts the necklace above her head.
“No!” My Voice extends with rapid speed, slicing through the air. But I’m too late. As soon as the pendant touches her skin, I cut off the sound with a clack of my teeth. With that necklace on, my magic is more a danger than a useful tool.
Teeth bared, eyes flashing, she zigzags across the room, dodging Enna’s flying knives as she tries to reach me. Enna empties her personal arsenal in seconds, but Odissa dodges them all, save a slice on her arm, another across her cheek. Not enough to stop her.
I heft the discarded trident with my good hand, settling into my fighting crouch as Odissa draws near.
“Your heart is mine, princeling,” she growls. “And I will take it, dead or alive.”
She scoops up one of Enna’s knives and hurls it back. The blade lodges into Enna’s thigh, and she stumbles.
With a screech and flail of limbs, Odissa launches toward me. I stab with the trident, but she’s faster. Like a clingerfish, shelatches to my chest and sinks her blunt teeth into my open wound. I bite back a silent scream as the pain sears through me. I whack her with the broad side of the trident, but she stays hooked on, her legs tight around my waist, her hands burrowing into my hair, those teeth biting deeper and deeper into my flesh. I seize her by her scalp and pull until a chunk of her hair releases, blonde and bloody. Still, she clings firmly.
Enna crawls along the floor, dripping blood. She reaches for a discarded dagger, glaring at Odissa with hatred. I turn my body, giving her a better shot. She hurls the knife, striking true. The blade lodges between Odissa’s ribs.
I wait for Odissa, now gurgling and spitting blood, to loosen and fall. But she reaches behind her, grasping the hilt of the knife, and dislodges it. She smiles at me as she twists in my arms, trailing the tip of the blade across my chest. She circles my heart, cutting a thin, stinging line.
“Forgot your next line, Soren? Pity. You were never very good at pageantry.”
One wrong move, and that blade will sink into its mark. I study the plane of her cheek, weighing the repercussions of an attack on her.
“You could have made this easy, Soren. Painless. But you didn’t choose that path, did you? You chose the half-blood traitor.”
My fist connects with her cheek with a crack of bone. Her head snaps back and two teeth break free, but the punch seems to have little effect on her resolve. The skin around her eye begins to swell. She coughs and spits the teeth out, tightening her grip with her legs. Her fingers dig into my wound, and I clamp my teeth, eyes stinging with the pain.
My vision swirls, dots of color pricking my line of sight. My chest squeezes in panic as I realize I’ve lost track of Enna’s position in the room.
“Careful, prince. I hold your life in my hands. If you will not love me, you will bleed for me. You willboilfor me.”
Her feet jab into the pit of my knees, and I buckle from the impact. Teetering sideways, I land on my good arm. Odissa pins me to the floor with her knees. The pendant dangles between us, taunting me with its seeking red glow.
“This heart is mine in the name of the goddess. I will carve it out of you if I must,” she says. “Tephra said I must win your heart? So be it.”
I glare into her cold, hostile eyes. I cannot speak it aloud for Enna to hear my dying confession. Even if I knew this is how it all would end, I would still choose her. Again and again, I choose her. My heart is hers already. What right does Odissa have to it?
