The Year of the Witching(99)
Darkness.
Immanuelle stepped forward to pick up the gutting blade from where it lay a few feet from the altar’s stairs. She turned to Lilith last and raised the blood-slick blade, cleaving the air between them. “Enough.”
Lilith didn’t heed her. Undeterred, the witch queen stalked down the center aisle, picking her way past the corpses of her fallen coven. She stopped just short of Immanuelle, so close that the gutting blade’s tip nearly pierced into the soft of her belly.
But Lilith didn’t flinch.
Instead, she cupped Immanuelle’s cheek in her cold, pale hand and pressed even closer, the knife carving deep into her stomach as she tipped her forehead to Immanuelle’s. She shuddered violently. Issued a low groan of pain.
The girl peered into the black of Lilith’s eye sockets and felt the forest’s thrall dragging her to senselessness. The sounds of slaughter died into the hiss of wind in the treetops. Shadows edged in from the corners of her vision and Immanuelle heard the woodland call deep within her, the sound like blood rush in her ears. The witch queen eased her thumb back and forth along Immanuelle’s pulse as if measuring the rhythm of her heartbeat, the gesture tender . . . even motherly. Immanuelle could almost imagine the kind of leader she might have been in a time, long ago, before the affliction of her vengeance and bloodlust turned her into the monster she had now become.
Lilith traced a finger along Immanuelle’s lips, then caught her by the neck.
A scream tangled in Immanuelle’s throat as Lilith ripped her off her feet. Choking, she clawed at the witch’s fingers, dangling above the ground as Lilith lifted her higher and higher.
In a panic, Immanuelle raised the gutting knife, slashing blindly. The blade connected first with bone, then flesh, piercing deep into Lilith’s shoulder.
The witch queen let out a shriek that shook the church. Fissures raced along the walls and the roof caved inward. Flock and legion alike fled for the doors as the cathedral collapsed around them. Through the mayhem, Immanuelle heard Ezra shout her name, and then his voice was lost to the tumult like everything else.
Immanuelle’s vision went blurry. She tried to stay conscious, clawing desperately for a last scrap of strength. With a snarl, she ripped the gutting blade from Lilith’s shoulder and raised it high above her head.
This time, her blow struck true.
The blade lodged hilt-deep in Lilith’s chest. The witch stumbled forward, crashed into a nearby pew, and sank to the floor. But to Immanuelle’s horror, no sooner had she hit the ground than the witch was on her feet again. She braced herself on a nearby pew, caught the gutting blade by the hilt, ripped it from her chest, and hurled it down the center aisle.
For a moment, they stood deadlocked, there in the center aisle of the cathedral. Both of them bleeding and wounded, barely able to stay on their feet. And Immanuelle knew then that the end had come and only one of the two of them would walk out of that cathedral.
Lilith raised both hands.
The wood floors began to buckle and ripple; roots burst free of the cathedral’s foundation and slithered—serpentine—down the center aisles. Saplings pressed through the floorboards, growing to maturity in a matter of moments, their branches spreading through the rafters. The crawling roots wrapped themselves around Immanuelle’s ankles, coiling so tight she cried out in pain. She staggered forward, struggling to free herself, but she couldn’t move.
The sigil cut into her forearm screamed with pain, as if she were being branded. She shut her eyes against it, reached into the depths of herself, and unleashed all that she had to give.
The roots slithered from around her ankles, recoiling back toward the breaks in the floorboards they had emerged from. The trees that sprawled overhead bent double, racked by some phantom wind that swept through the cathedral like the beginnings of a summer storm.
Lilith staggered back, pinned to the altar, as a powerful wind stormed around her so violently the skin on her outstretched hand began to slough away from the muscle, and the muscle from the bone. The witch lashed out with a scream.
The force of Lilith’s power ripped Immanuelle off her feet. She careened through the air and crashed to a brutal landing on a heap of upturned roots and floorboards. Her ribs gave a sickening crunch upon impact, and she gasped and struggled, clinging to the cusp of her consciousness.
The wind died to a low wheeze as Lilith pushed off the altar and started toward her, threading through the trees the way she did the night they first met. There was light in her eye sockets now—two glowing motes that moved like pupils and homed in on Immanuelle. Her rage was palpable—it turned the air cold and made the trees shudder. The witch’s every step seemed to shake the cathedral down to the crumbling stones of its foundation.
Immanuelle tried and failed to fall back; Lilith was far too quick. The witch leveled her with a single backhanded slap, and Immanuelle struck the floor again. The lights in Lilith’s eyes began to dance and multiply, scattering through the black of her sockets like embers from a windblown campfire. She delivered a cruel kick to Immanuelle’s ribs, and she screamed at the pain, clawing the floorboards for purchase.
There was a soft click, the sound of a bullet sliding into its chamber. Then Ezra’s voice. “Leave her alone.”
The witch turned from Immanuelle, faced Ezra in full. He stood in the gap between two pine trees, peering down the barrel of a gun, a finger curled over the trigger.