Page 106 of Love, Nemesis
Lethe picked up his pace as Ivan neared the last step. He exhaled a steady, measured breath, his pulse a rhythm in his ears. His feet moved to it.
As Ivan’s foot descended off the last step, the smoke around him billowed and his human shape collapsed inside of it like a sheet of sand. Jaws like a shark’s burst from the smoke, long claws, curving into hooks, extending toward Lethe.
Lethe rolled out of the way as a monstrous crash echoed throughout the room. He drew the flaming cherry knife through the smoke in one stroke. Fire cleared it and it recoiled, Lethe pursuing the density of it and ducking away from a blade like a scythe that emerged from the smoke and dissipated once it missed him. He leapt back as a spear of smoke shot up from below him, a solid weapon for a moment before dissolving. They followed his feet, Lethe stepping quickly back as they shot up only seconds after each heel hit the ground.
He coiled back toward the throne room wall when a black guillotine came down from above him. He intercepted it with the flaming dagger, the guillotine shattering before it burst into a swarm of wasps. Lethe drew a sword from one of the silent guards and struck a hanging oil lamp nearby with the sword, scattering it across the air before lighting the wet blade with his knife.
The wasps caught flame. Lethe drove through them to the heaviest point of the smoke. He heard a shriek and a roar as he broke into the smog, driving away one beast with his knife before another latched onto his arm and rolled him out of it with searing pain. It tried to drag him away with steel hooks for legs, and a head of a bear latched around Lethe’s shoulder. The hooks in the beast’s legs ejected, digging into nearby columns before retracting again, trying to pull Lethe away from the smoke and the essence of Ivan’s soul. Blood poured from his wounds as Lethe slammed the sword up through the base of the skull, and the creature threw him with a violent swing of its jaws.
Lethe felt the skin tear as his body spun through the air, colliding hard into a wall before falling back toward the floor. Something like a lion caught him in the air, jaws like a steel trap locking intohis ribs and hurling him across the room. Lethe fell and rolled at the feet of the guards, losing his knife a few feet away.
He could hear The Eating Ocean.
He pulled his arm over the stone, pushing up against the bloodstained floor. His body shook against the pain, but that was his body’s response, not his mind’s. Now wasn’t the time to stop.
Give me your fear, The Eating Ocean chided.Let me have your revenge.
The black waters started to surface between the cracks in the stone.
Something like the claws of a giant bird clamped down over Lethe’s back, forcing him down and nearly causing him to crack his skull against the floor.
Give me your skin.
He pushed himself up, intensifying the depths of the wounds on his back as the claws dug in.
Let me have your spirit.
Inch by inch, he separated himself from the stone floor. The Eating Ocean’s waters started to pool in a hallucination around his hands, dripping now from the walls.
He cursed.
He rotated his body hard, turning into the claws and feeling the skin and muscle give way as he rolled toward his knife, drawing it up fast and slamming it through the coming smoke.
The smoke dispersed and recollected behind him. Lethe pulled the nearest sword from another guard in time to block something like a mechanical vice that shot from the smoke and closed in around it, snapping the sword blade. He pulled back toward the wall, drawing up another sword before the smoke billowed and converged toward him.
He thrust the sword up into another oil lamp, pulling it down off the wall and disappearing into the smoke before lighting it.
It exploded, and he heard shrieking like broken music. The smoke dissipated around him. Searing pain eased the breath from his lungs, and he stood there, sword and hand alight with the fire.
The smoke completely dissolved. Ivan was nowhere to be found.
Lethe turned slowly as he searched the room. The pain lit up his brain, his pulse still drumming. “I’m not a survivor!” he shouted to the rows of dead-eyed guards, the rage a roar in his voice, his body covered in blood. “They picked me!”
A guard stirred to his left and lifted his head. The bodies around the room started to move. They drew their weapons and straightened.
The bodies charged. Lethe was taken back to another time. Between the flashes of spears and knives, he saw shadows of his fellow Riders.
They fought with him. Though they too were empty like the rest, those faces he saw in the fire, always in the fire, fought with him again. He caught sight of movement and saw the walls bleedingwith The Eating Ocean. It started to pour down like a waterfall, pushing through the room, between the feet of the guards.
Nothing stopped the empty guards. The blows he dealt lingered, but only for a moment. They kept coming and then Ivan burst from among them, engaging Lethe directly. Ivan drove a spear past his side, slicing a cut across his ribs.
Lethe grabbed it, yanking Ivan forward and driving the cherry knife directly toward his sternum.
Ivan vanished, his spear vanishing with him.
Give me your hands, The Eating Ocean said.Let me have your truth.
Lethe’s eyes remained open despite the blood that threatened to blind him. His wounds continued to heal. He clenched his teeth against the pain. The Eating Ocean kept whispering.
