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“Ouch.” He looked my body over. “I think I hit a kidney there.”
“If you’re trying to hurt me, you’re doing a shit job,” I gritted between my teeth.
A feral grin lit up his face. He twisted the blade at a sharp angle, but I wouldn’t scream or give him the satisfaction of my pain.
“I can drain you enough that by the time Kaden gets back.” He lifted the blade driving it into my gut next. “You won’t be able to fight at all. Then you can sit and rot until the equinox comes.”
There we go.
“Oh, the equinox?” I grunted. “When is that again?”
His eyes burned a shade brighter as he growled. He twisted the blade in my abdomen, and I couldn’t hold back the scream this time.
“You’re a fool, just like the old gods, to think you could outsmart us. You will die just like them, just like her. Alone. You have no family any longer, no friends. No one to help you.”
He twisted the blade so hard I saw stars, and this time, I reached for it.
“I wouldn’t say that.” A feminine voice spoke.
Tobias turned toward that voice and screamed as an ablaze weapon ripped across his face.
He threw himself off me, cursing in a language I never heard. Neverra, whole and unbroken, stood at my side, holding her sword high. Tobias’s blood dripped off the end of her blade, defiance, and retribution burning in her cobalt eyes.
Logan appeared above me, yanking Tobias’s blade from my midsection.
“You were supposed to leave,” I hissed as he dragged me to my feet.
Logan looked at me as if I had grown three heads. “I think you’re in desperate need of new friends if you think we would ever leave you behind.”
Call it lack of blood or exhaustion, but I almost wept at his words and the support they gave me. Support I didn’t know I needed.
“You are all fools!” Tobias hissed, blood dripping from the open gash that ran from his jaw to his temple. “And now you will see why Primordials trembled, and gods bled. I will kill all of you and suck the marrow from your bones.” The ground began to shake.
“I hope you two are up for a fight,” I said, holding my bleeding side. “Because things are about to get a lot worse.”
Tobias’s form shook and bent as did the world around him. A thousand broken and reanimated corpses pushed through overturned steel and rubble, clawing their way free. The scent of death filled the destroyed factory as scales replaced Tobias’s skin, and he grew to almost fifty feet tall. He hissed, exposing fangs longer than my body. The large serpentine beast coiled and bellowed, his army of dead answering him as all eyes turned toward me.
“You are arrogant, like your World Ender, Dianna.” His lipless mouth turned up in a wide, serpentine grin. “And you will die like him, too.”
I raised my blade between us, every bit of defiance that burned in my soul reflected in my voice. “You first.”
The room erupted, and he charged at us.
Forty-Four
Logan
My blade blocked Tobias’s massive tail. He hissed, and the crown around his head flared in anger. The dead he’d reanimated, even the ones with broken and missing limbs, screamed as they charged.
I rolled away, and Neverra leaped forward, cutting at the snapping jaws of the great beast.
“You move like Samkiel,” Tobias bellowed at Dianna. “He taught you something when he wasn’t trying to get between your legs?”
“I swear, you all have a bigger hard-on for him than I ever did!” she screamed back, chopping two of the burned undead creatures in half.
She was skilled, but blood loss had slowed her down. Neverra took one look at her and her blood-soaked clothes when we first arrived and rushed in head first. Now I knew why. Regardless of Dianna’s cockiness, I could feel it too. Her power, normally so bright, full, and violent, was dwindling. It was no longer a burning blaze but a smoldering ember, and Tobias wanted to extinguish it.
“You really think you can kill me?” Tobias asked, his baleful glare sweeping over us. “You are no gods.” His massive tail whipped toward us. Neverra leaped out of the way, clinging to the wall nearest her. “You. You are nothing.”
