A Caress Of Twilight

Chapter 44

I'd taken only a few steps when the pain returned, my blood boiled in my veins, and I stumbled to my knees, hand still out toward the creature — but I was betting that Kitto had stopped bleeding. I screamed and watched one huge eye swivel to look at me, to truly look at me for the first time. The pain clouded my vision and finally stole my voice, my air. I was suffocating on pain. Then it eased, just a bit, then a bit more. When my vision cleared, blood was trickling out of the wounds in the mountain of flesh, trickling out not like blood should flow, but like water, faster, thinner. The last of my pain vanished as blood began to pour out of every wound the creature had sustained that day. Every bullet hole, every blade mark burst scarlet. The blood began to rain down the sides of the thing.

The Nameless began to move toward me, ponderous, and unnerving like watching a mountain roll toward you. I knew if it reached me, it would kill me, so I had to stop that from happening.

I thought not of blood alone, but of wounds; I thought not bleed but die. I wanted it to die.

A wound opened like a new mouth, slashing down its side, then another, and another. It was as if some giant invisible blade was hacking at it. The blood flowed faster, until the Nameless was covered in a slick red coat from top to bottom, covered in a dress of its own blood. Then blood gushed out of it in a nearly black wave, like a lake being dumped out upon the grass. It spilled and flowed and billowed toward me, until I knelt in a hot pool of blood, and still it bled.

The more it bled, the calmer I became. A stillness filled my body, almost a peacefulness. I knelt in the growing spread of blood, watching the thing quiver toward me, and I had no fear. I felt nothing, was nothing, but the magic. In that one instant I lived, breathed, and was one spell. The hand of blood rode me, used me, as surely as I had tried to use it. With the old magicks, who is master and who is slave is never sure.

The Nameless rose above me like a great bloody mountain, one curl of its body reaching out, out toward me, and only a few yards away, I heard it take a breath, a sharp sound, almost a sound of fear, then it exploded, not its body, but as if every last ounce of blood in that vast shape had burst forth at one time. The air became blood, and it was like trying to breathe underwater. For a second I thought I would drown, then I was choking in air and trying to spit out blood at the same time.

Something large hit the side of my head, and I fell to the bloody ground. Even in its death throes it had tried to take me with it. Kitto's crimson-washed face with a blood-soaked Sage on his shoulder was the last thing I saw before darkness swallowed the world.