CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
LIGHT SHOT FROM the bowl, a hundred times brighter than Zach at his most dazzling. The bowl shattered and the ceiling disintegrated the moment the light touched it. Then that light widened and Adrian flung himself over me. Now I couldn’t see anything except his chest and part of his shadows, which looked like they tried to cover me, too. But before my gaze, they burned away, until nothing was left of the ones that I could see.
My ears were ringing from the blast, so I didn’t hear it at first. Moments later, I realized the other high-pitched sounds partially deafening me were screams coming from every direction, none louder than the one with the voice I most hated.
“No!” Demetrius’s shout cut through all the others. “NO!”
I couldn’t see what had him howling in despair, and I really regretted that. Whatever it was, I loved it.
Suddenly, Adrian was gone and I was back on the floor. I looked up to see Adrian wrestling Demetrius away from me. The demon’s eyes were wild from rage, and dark rivulets ran from them, his ears and his nose.
“She did this!” Demetrius howled. “She stopped the spearhead from turning into a cursed object. It has to be her!”
It absolutely wasn’t. I couldn’t even scoot out of the way to avoid them, let alone stop a hallowed object from turning dark. Then Demetrius spun Adrian around, and I got my first look at Adrian’s back since that light had exploded from the golden bowl. If I’d had enough breath left in me, I would have gasped.
His shadows were completely gone. All that was left to show that they had ever been there were scorch marks on his now-bare back. When the light had burned them away, it had burned them to the point where they’d caught his shirt on fire, too.
It left Adrian with nothing but his strength to fight Demetrius, and the demon was stronger. But he’d expelled a lot of his power earlier, plus been injured by the light explosion, judging from him bleeding out of every hole in his face. Demetrius couldn’t summon his minions to help him, either. If the demon looked to be in bad shape, his minions were in far worse.
They were on their knees, that same inky substance shooting from eyes, ears, noses and mouths, but in far greater quantities. It looked as if their bodies were convulsively purging out all the evil that Demetrius had given them when he tethered his soul to theirs and turned them into minions. I wasn’t surprised when they started turning into ashes, their bodies unable to handle the effects of the supernatural assault.
“Let go of me, Adrian!” Demetrius shouted. “I tried to spare her for you, but the spearhead didn’t transform. It has to be her fault! Can’t you see that she must die now and stay dead in order for this to succeed?”
“If she dies forever, then so do you,” Adrian snarled, spinning Demetrius around so that the demon was farther away from me. “Costa!” Adrian yelled. “Connect the pilum to the spearhead!”
“No!” Demetrius screamed. “Don’t! I’ll kill you!”
Costa, who appeared to be the only one uninjured from the massive explosion of light, ran over to the remains of the golden bowl. The only reason he almost fell was because the ground started shaking. Then Costa plunged his hand into the pile of sawdust and withdrew the spearhead. Grains from the cursed tree still fell from it when Costa shoved it onto the top of the pilum.
Another shockwave blasted into me that no one else seemed to feel. It brought back all the pain that had previously dimmed, until my body felt like it was being scalded within and without. The agony was so intense, it cleared the haze from my mind and even brought my vision back to momentary clarity. That was how I was able to see the pilum go from deepest ebony back to its normal brown shade. Attaching the spearhead to the pilum had somehow cleansed it from being a cursed object. Now the pilum was hallowed again, and the fully reassembled, supercharged weapon was only a short distance away.
“Give it to me, Costa!” I shouted, reaching out with the only hand I had left.
I don’t know how I had the strength for those words when I couldn’t speak before, but I did, and my voice rang out with all the hopeful desperation in me. I even managed to twist myself into a sitting position. I must be siphoning energy from the rejoined hallowed weapon. That was the only explanation.
“No!”
Demetrius’s assault became so frenzied that it pushed Adrian back toward Costa. Then he shoved Adrian so hard that Adrian lost his grip on him. But he tangled his feet in Demetrius’s at the last second, and both of them ended up tumbling to the floor.
Costa looked at the tangle of bodies in a life-and-death struggle in front of him. They blocked his way to me, and the fighting was so fierce, it could overtake him at any moment.
Costa muttered something in Greek. Then he hurled the reassembled spear at me while yelling, “Catch!”
Who throws a spear at a one-armed dying woman? I thought incredulously. But, as if that single word activated a muscle-memory reaction in me, my left hand shot up and I caught the wooden part of the spear as if I’d been snatching spears out of the air my entire life.
Demetrius met my eyes at that exact moment, and I saw something in his that I had never seen before.
Fear.
Then power crashed into me with the same force that had burned away Adrian’s shadows, killed the minions and severely injured Demetrius. I felt it killing me, too, but I felt something else, and it made the indescribable agony of all my blood vessels suddenly bursting worth it.
I felt light blast into every demon realm, blowing them open as easily as that other light had blown the roof off this building. Felt the legions of minions they contained being struck by the same violent, deadly convulsions I’d seen here, and felt the demons recoiling in crippling pain, too. I also felt where those new passageways of light led to: the Archon realms, reminding me that Zach had said every time demons made a new realm, Archons struck back by making one of their own.
More important, like a whisper across my soul, I felt the same emotion from the countless trapped humans who were finally seeing light after too many years of darkness.
Hope.
Demetrius had often taunted me that I never stood a chance. Too many times, I’d believed that. But the last thing I felt was the knowledge that the power behind the unstoppable third hallowed weapon had never been in danger of being used by demons. Demetrius had been right about one thing: all of this had been planned long in advance. It was he and the other demons who had been doomed from the start.
With that final, satisfying thought, I died.