The Ripper Affair

Chapter Forty-Two No More

The prick of the knifetip made a vast stillness inside Emma Bannon. The world shrank, Time itself stretching and slowing.

And so I die.

It pressed further, and the smoke-egg floated free of the obsidian’s tethering influence. As it did, it grew heavier, blacker, and the block of glassy stone crackled. Thin fissures threaded its surface, and the lamplight now reflected wetly from its shifting planes.

Ah. Much more of the inner workings of Llewellyn’s creation became apparent to her. The insistent pressure at her throat mounted, and the following moments were, paradoxically, endless… and too quick to contain everything that occurred within them.

Emma turned inward, into that stillness, her eyes forgotten in that quick motion. It was not a physical movement, and her slackened muscles meant the restraints about her loosened.

Raw aching places inside her woke in a blinding sheet of pain, and she trembled on the thin edge of forcing her spirit free by an effort of will, stoppering her lungs and heart before the mad Prime she had once loved could cut her throat.

To do so would deny him his victory–where else would he find such an apt victim for this, the last murder to fuel an unholy transformation?

No.

They burst upon her, the murders she had felt and those she had not. Cleaving of flesh and bright copper fear, gin fumes and desperation. Their lives, colourless drudgery and danger, painful except when the gin soaked through and insulated against hunger, the men and their grasping, hurtful hands. A sweet word in the darkness, coaxing them to take one more customer. A faceless thing, and the blade so sharp it almost did not hurt as they were unseamed… hot blood, the merciful blackness swallowing them whole.

I could have been any one of them.

None knew from whence sorcerous talent sprang. A lucky chance, and she had been lifted from the mire–but her skirts were still draggled, and she would never be allowed to forget.

At the very floor of Emma’s consciousness, a barred door.

He seeks to give life. I am of the Black, my Discipline is Endor… and there is no better way to cheat him of his prize.

Her throat swelled, a trickle of blood tracing white skin. The restraints, sensing a gathering, tightened. The constriction, sudden and unbearable, roused the same blind fury that had once caused sickly green flame to sprout from a drunken man’s skin and clothes. The same will, fed and exercised, grown monstrous, able to endure temporary confinement only because she had suffered it, in one form or another, her entire life.

The door at the bottom of her soul creaked. No more.

A shattered hulk of a sorcerer, his rasping voice raised in a chant of a Discipline not his own, tensed. Next would come driving the knife home, and the creature–his only issue, a son who might be grateful–would feast upon this sacrifice. And she, she, would be given a gift of blackness and no more pain.

Black chartersymbols woke, racing along Emma Bannon’s skin. Her eyelids snapped wide, and each pupil kindled with a bright, leprous-green flame. The charter symbols crawled up her legs, rushed over her torso in a wave, devoured her arms–still encased in shredded mourning cloth–and flowed under her hair, smearing across her slackened face in their hurrying.

They reached the knifepoint digging into her flesh, a cascade of pale green sparks fountaining from the contact.

Inside her, the hurtful flower of her Discipline bloomed.

Llewellyn Gwynnfud, still chanting, pushed down.

He dragged the razor-sharp blade across his former lover’s throat.