Page 195 of The Last One
The moths darting around my head flit away. They’ve brought me here, to my amulet; their job is done. And now it’s time for me to do mine. I slowly pull Fury from her scabbard and hold my breath as the guard swings my amulet from his grubby finger, not looking quite as frightened as he should. I slowly release that air, and it wraps around my head like smoke. “I suggest,” I say, starting off politely, “that you return my property. Unless you want to end up buried beneath a tree like your friend.”
“AndIsuggest,” the soldier says, “that you kiss my arse.” And then he pulls down his dirty breeches and shakes his dirtier ass at me.
His comrades laugh.
I smile. “Go ahead and laugh.” I meet each soldier’s eyes. “I hope each of you have put all your affairs in order—that you wrote those last letters to your sweethearts, that you’re wearing clean underwear.” My hand now buzzes around the hilt of my sword.
Ready to work.
Three soldiers rush me, swords and axes held high above their heads.
I sweep my hand, knocking all three into the sharpest, craggiest boulder. I don’t even wince hearing that abrupt crunch of three separate spines against rock.
That’s…sixty-eight.
Two more soldiers flank me.
I send wind from my hand, lifting both high into the sky—they scream and scream—and then swipe my hand down, dropping them—they scream and scream until they don’t.
Sixty-nine, seventy…
“Why don’t you fight without your sorcery, bitch!” another soldier spits.
I twist my hand in the air.
The soldier clutches his throat. His veins push against his forehead.
I cup my ear with my wind-whipping hand. “What’s that you said? Bitch, what?”
He gags until he’s the purple of turnips.
I’m striving for eggplant.
I twist my hand once more.
Seventy-one!
The soldier with the filthy ass and my pendant backs away from me. “You put that sword down,” he says, “and I’ll give it to you.”
“Put my property down,” I say, easing toward number seventy-two, “and I’ll let you live.”
Nasty Ass spits on the ground, then spits on my pendant. “There. How you like that?”
I pluck Little Lava from her sheath and whip her at Nasty Ass—but I don’t aim for his head. No, I want the hand holding my amulet. But I’ll have to be satisfied with taking all five of his fingers.
He screams, and his severed fingers fall into the dirt.Plop, plop, plop, plop.The last finger, the one still wrapped around my gold chain, pops into the air and lands at my boot. Shrieking, the soldier clutches his bloody hand and collapses to the ground.
Pain shoots through my chest and my bones, my heart, my core… Too much exertion. But at least my amulet isright there.My body begs for it.
But there are three remaining soldiers to dispatch before I can find release.
Before I can muster up another blast of wind or swing Fury, though, the surviving three soldiers scatter in every direction. Saloroaches have more courage than these men.
Alone now—well, among the living—my eyes fill with tears, and I kick away the soldier’s thumb. Finally freed from one captor after another, the amulet swirls with colors, and now those colors blur because I’m crying and can barely breathe and my head bangs and I want to tear off my clothes and dance naked in the woods. Moths, hundreds of them, swoop down from the sky. Sparkles and dust everywhere—the moths are happy, too.
I drop to my knees and crawl over to my amulet, creeping like it’s a grasshopper and will bounce away if I move too quick. But the pendant doesn’t move. It just beats, and the beating in my body keeps time with it.
Hand shaky, I slowly reach for the pendant. My finger touches the moth’s onyx thorax. “Hello, beloved.”
