Page 171 of A Tower of Half-Truths
She leaned forward and pecked him on the lips. The kiss was too brief for her liking, but time was not on their side.
“Come on, we need to hurry.”
She seized her pack and headed back to the tower’s front door, taking care to avoid tripping over exposed rocks and uneven ground.
“Er, say youdoneed to remove any bullets,” Alain said as he followed closely behind. “How are you planning to do that?”
Mavery’s fingers slipped against the matted fur. From the floor, she’d recovered two of Neldren’s bullets that had missed the creature entirely, so she needed to search for only one. Even with an orb of light directly beside her, it was hard to differentiate the creature’s blood from his flesh and fur. It was all various shades of black on black on black. But then her finger slipped into a small divot—a bullet hole.
She dug her finger in deeper. Behind her, Alain groaned at the squelching sound. Her fingertip brushed against metal.
“Found it,” she said.
When she removed her finger from the wound, her skin was coated in tar-black blood. She grabbed the pliers Alain had found among Aganast’s alchemy supplies. She probed the bullet hole again, but the bullet itself was lodged between two walls of flesh that were beginning to grow stiff.
“Damn, it’s in there tight.” She put the pliers aside as she pondered what to do next. At most, she had ten minutes until the serum would be useless. “Say I were to cut the wound open, make it larger. Would the serum heal that, too?”
“Er…yes,” Alain said weakly. “It will return the body to its pre-death state. That was why I had a fractured sternum, even after you revived me, as that injury occurredbeforeI suffocated. Mere seconds before, I’ll wager, as the serum is quite precise in that regard. Fascinating history behind its development, too, now that I think on it…”
Mavery knew his rambling was to distract himself from how she was about to perform impromptu surgery on a creature that may or may not be a demon. Perhapsautopsywas the correct word, seeing as how the creature was already dead. Or, perhaps they needed to invent a new word for a situation as absurd as this one.
She unsheathed her dagger. As she sliced into the creature’schest, Alain bolted to a corner of the room and retched.
“I would’ve thought you’d have an iron stomach, considering you’ve had your own chest sliced open… Remind me again, how many times was it?”
“Three,” Alain said gravely. “But I never had to bear witness to that procedure. It’s the advantage of being, well, dead.”
Mavery snorted as she laid down her dagger, then widened the wound open with her fingers. She could see a glint of metal peeking out from the heart. Instead of giving in to disgust, she treated it as picking a rather complicated lock. She held the wound open with one hand as her other worked the pliers and prised out the bullet. She then tossed both pliers and bullet aside.
As she’d done once before, she grabbed the syringe and plunged the thick needle into the heart, dispensed the serum while counting to thirty, then pulled out the emptied syringe. She got to her feet and backed away, just in case the creature turned violent upon awakening. Alain joined her at her side, hands half-raised and prepared to summon another protective ward.
And then they waited.
Seconds passed, then a full minute, and the beast remained as lifeless as before. After another minute passed with no change, Alain lowered his hands.
“It appears the serum doesn’t work on these creatures,” he said, touching her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
Mavery sighed.
“We still have Aganast’s books, not to mention his journal,” he said. “If he was a Senser, as the creature claimed, perhaps we’ll find our answers in there.”
She nodded, then stepped forward and kneeled beside the corpse again. Acting on impulse, she gently stroked the creature from the crown of his head, down to where his wings joined his shoulders. In this state, he was nothing more than an oversized cat taking a nap. His fur was much softer than she’d expected, despite the rigid muscle beneath it.
Her hand stilled as she gasped. The incision she’d made with her dagger was smaller than she remembered. The serumwashealing the beast, albeit very slowly. Maybe it needed more magic tospeed up the process.
She placed her palm against the broken skin and channeled a little of her arcana, performing the same spell she’d once used on Alain’s hand. The wound glowed with a turquoise aura that quickly faded.
“No.”The voice in her mind was barely a whisper.“Paper.”
“What?”
The creature did not speak again. But his torso rose and fell in the tiniest increments. She pulled her hand away and considered whether she’d heard the creature correctly. She looked around the room at the piles of books that had been reduced to nothing but leather covers and…
Arcana.
“Grab a book!” she cried. “Find one that still has its pages.”
Alain’s staff clattered to the floor as he sprung into action. Mavery focused on the creature while Alain opened tomes and tossed them aside.
