Chapter 41

~~Mia~~

This wasn’t happening.

She scanned her horizon. Back on the surface of the Black Valley, remnant innards flowed past her, slowly making their way to the canyon she’d created, and they poured from its edge into the depths below. The demons and angels had crashed nearby, some too far to see as more than blurs, some very close, half buried in the muck. She hadn’t been able to aim the rising platforms she’d created anymore than someone trying to aim throwing a baseball onto a rooftop. But they were out of the canyon and alive, tossed into the black swamp, and now they had to deal with Asmodeus.

They wouldn’t stay alive much longer. Asmodeus roared down at them as he approached, and reached out with a dozen limbs, some holding the canyon wall, the larger limbs coming for Mia and the group.

A flash of gold lit up the black fog, and Asmodeus roared as one of his titanic hands came to a dead stop against the gold barrier. Azreal. A rapholem. He’d summoned his armor, his spear, his great shield, and he slammed the shield down and created his barrier of gold, bright enough it lit up the black fog like a flare.

It shattered against the colossal arm, and the angel fell to his side. Asmodeus set his other hands down to support his long, heavy body, and the titan pointed his many eyes at the angel who’d stopped him.

Only half of Asmodeus’s body had escaped, lower half dangling in the canyon, and the similarities between demon and abomination centipede were now too clear. But he was wounded, had been wounded for who knew how long, and trapped underground. And even now, the creature burned, hellfire from the canyon depths coating his arms, his belly, and who knew what else that churned below.

It, he, didn’t care that he was literally on fire. Asmodeus roared down at them, two mouths opening wide and hot air drowning them in the smell of blood.

“The song will be mine. She will listen to me, once I have devoured you, unmarked. I will make Heaven weep!” He swung out again.

Mia slammed her staff down through the guts up to her knees, and sank deeper into the song. Thoughts drifted above the current, pulled away from her. She could see down through the surface of the ocean, to the little ginger girl disappearing into the flowing waves. She could see up at herself, the little ginger girl, floating at the top, unable to follow.

Save her demon friends. Save the angels. Save her egg. Kill Asmodeus.

Asmodeus was the size of several neighborhood blocks, and even as hellfire burned on his body, he didn’t stop. She could not fathom the song that would kill him. But she could fathom the song to bury him again.

For all his limbs, the creature couldn’t multitask. Noah, the mikalim back in his armor again, ran past his comrade, raised his glowing sword high, and swung it at the creature. A gold arc of holy energy shot out from the blade and crashed into the demon’s face, and Asmodeus reared back and shrieked down at them. A hint of blood trickled from a fresh wound, nothing more than a paper cut.

Mia found the strings and played as hard as she could. Somewhere in the muck, her friends were injured. Somewhere in the muck, her egg lay, exposed and vulnerable. Images shot through her mind of the Old One crushing Adron, crushing Kas, crushing Vin, and lava burst through her veins. Images of the titan squashing her egg and the precious, innocent life inside sent heat into her eyes, and she slammed her staff down again. And the presence in the ocean spoke.

I will help you, young one.

The presence in the ocean didn’t just copy Mia’s song or dance to it. It emphasized. Empowered. Completed a song too grand and epic for Mia to play. What was a simple tune in Mia’s mind became a full orchestral piece.

The canyon began to close.

“No! The music is mine! I will not be denied!” The verbose, stupid creature swung out again, and again the rapholem got up in time and summoned a gold wall for him and his companion. But the titan shattered the barrier, and this time his arm kept going, crashing into the two angels. The arm’s wrist was thicker than they were tall, and both angels disappeared under it, broken bodies crushed and pushed down into the muck.

He was distracted. Mia hit the notes again, and readied herself against the oncoming hellquake, both hands wrapped around the staff. Legs spread and knees bent, somewhere the girl above the ocean currents screamed in pain. Mia didn’t feel it. She barely felt the vibration as it shook the swamp and turned the endless streams of black ooze into churning, bubbling rapids.

“No!” Asmodeus latched onto the canyon edge, like a bug holding onto a wall, and struck the strings, as well.

She expected a punch. With how big his two larger arms were, killing her would have been easier than squashing a grape. No punch came. Maybe she’d have summoned some blackstone around her to guard herself, like she had against the angels. Maybe she’d have thrusted stone up toward the creature’s face, and buried his eyes in black ooze. But Asmodeus did not crush her. He wanted her alive, so he could eat her alive.

Her song stopped, buried under the invisible weight of the Old One’s grip. Mia froze and stared down at the swamp around her knees. It no longer boiled. The canyon no longer closed. And the burning Old One roared a laugh and leaned down toward her as he pulled more of his body out of the depths. He’d muted her song.

“Her song. I can hear it, unmarked. She plays your song!” Laughing, he crawled closer, half on his belly, and reached for her. “She will play my songs. She will dance to my music, unmarked. She will—”

The ocean currents twisted and twanged, and the entity flowing in the ocean of strings erupted. Mia didn’t ask it to. She didn’t play a note telling it to. Something shot up from the ocean depths, deep in the vibrating currents she could not see or hear or feel, until it crashed up against the notes. A symphony, an explosion of silent sound, shattered Asmodeus’s grip, and the Old One shrieked with a pain no living or dead thing could imagine.

He slipped. Several of his hands sank gargantuan claws into the muck, but the creature’s weight pulled on them, and his colossal mass dragged him back down into the canyon. Partly.

“No!” He set his eyes on Mia and roared. Buried in the sound, he hit the strings, and the Black Valley erupted. The ground shot up around Mia and her demons, giant black pillars that pierced up through the ooze, and they came by the hundreds, monumental pieces of rock and stone that shook the ground. The pillars twisted in the black muck, and from underneath them an explosion of rock pushed up and toward Asmodeus, but from behind Mia and the group. A tsunami of death rushed their way, and Mia stared back at the boiling wave of remnant guts and bones crashing toward them. If that hit them, they’d get sucked along with it and straight into Asmodeus’s awaiting maw.

He did all that with his own song. He didn’t summon the entity in the ocean currents. He played the strings himself, plucked them, crashed upon them, and an orchestra of doom buried Mia’s ears. But it wasn’t as loud as the gentle voice that spoke to Mia.

Bury him.

Mia summoned stone of her own. Walls, many of them, as thick as she could muster. Blackstone erupted from under the muck, the same as Asmodeus’s pillars, but lower, wider, thicker, and she swallowed herself, her friends, and the angels in the wall. A half circle a hundred meters wide, something they threw themselves against, and Mia stood with her back to it as the tidal wave crashed over them. Black ooze poured over the wall, over and past her, and crashed into the swamp before her, a waterfall of obsidian grossness, and it rushed into the canyon Asmodeus still struggled to escape from.

He tried to use a tidal wave to pull her and the others toward him. He failed.

She slammed her staff. It pierced the muck, crashed into the stone below, and summoned the song. Another crack shot through the rock, a splintering canyon of shattered glass, veins of destruction that flowed out through the swamp in front of her and toward Asmodeus, cracks hidden under the muck. For all his strength, the Old One was injured, and had been trapped in a hole in the ground for millions of years. He could barely handle his own weight. And once the cracks reached him and his canyon wall, the canyon couldn’t hold his weight either.

Bury him, young one. Bury him.

“Unmarked!” The creature screamed at her, two mouths drowning Hell in rumbling bass that rattled her aching brain in her skull. But his fury didn’t help him. The canyon wall he’d latched onto broke away, rocks peeling, boulders falling, and the centipede monster sank into the canyon. “I will have you, unmarked! You shall be my meal! The song will obey me! She will obey me!”

Mia slammed her staff again, and sent another lightning crack through the ground. It wasn’t as strong as a tidal wave, but it didn’t have to be. The canyon wall crumbled, and for all his frantic scraping of his many sets of claws, the Old One sank back into the black. It almost looked like slow motion, the creature’s size disguising how fast he was truly falling. He disappeared past the edge, and it was an eternity before the thud of impact resonated through the canyon and swamp.

Mia pointed her staff. Vision blurred. Pain sneaked back into her mind, radiated from her arm and leg, and she almost screamed. But the ocean currents washed it away, the song took her, and again she played the note. She found the scale she’d used to open the canyon, and played it in reverse, high to low, a sinking sound that conveyed the swallowing of depth and existence.

The canyon closed, burying the land in a hellquake as rocks ripped each other apart, until the two sides of the crevice fit to each other and crushed all between into powder and mulch. Asmodeus’s voice disappeared.

She looked around and leaned on her black staff. Her demons were missing. Her egg was missing. The angels were missing.

“Vin!” She stabbed her staff into the muck, took a step forward, and fell.

The ocean quietened. She floated upward. The closer her mind grew to the surface, the heavier everything became. She’d heard about how the human body actually sinks instead of floats at around fifteen meters deep in water, and when she’d played the song, it’d been like that. Wearing the batlam rune had been easy, deep down in the ocean depths. But as her mind broke through the surface, the weight of the rune hit her, and knocked the wind out of her.

She fell on her ass. Batlam disappeared, potram replaced it, and agony slapped her in the face.

Her arm and leg. She stared at them and the unnatural bends in their shape, and a scream bubbled up in her throat. She bit it down.

“Adron!? Kas!? Someone!”

“Here,” Kas said, and he climbed up out of the muck. “Adron?”

“Here.” The vrat pushed himself up, too, not too far from his friend, and dragged himself back to his feet. “Mia, you okay?”

“I ... I’m...” She stared at her arm and leg again. Broken. Seeing other people, remnants especially, with broken limbs, had become a normal part of everyday life. Seeing her own flesh bend where the bone wasn’t aligned anymore was a different thing entirely. The screaming pain pouring from each break was the only thing keeping her from fainting. “Puppers! Where’s my egg!?”

Adron stared at her with his single eye before laughing and looking around. If the fact they’d just fought a literal Old One bothered him, he didn’t show it.

Slowly but surely, everyone climbed up out of the ooze. The incubi seemed mostly uninjured. Julisa popped up, hissing and snarling, one of her arms dangling, and she gave it a hard yank. Pop. Mia cringed, and clenching muscles tightened and sent more pain pulses through her brain. Don’t cringe. Cringing bad. Moving of any kind bad.

Something black and white climbed out of the muck next. The angels. Azreal stood with Noah’s arm over his shoulders, and the angel locked his purple eyes on the rest of them. Noah looked barely conscious, silver eyes half open and head lulled to the side. Both wore their potram clothes, armor and weapons nowhere to be found. Their wings were mangled beyond recognition.

But no Vin.

“Vin!” Mia slapped the muck with her good arm. “Vin!”

Faust raised a hand, and his fellow incubi ran to his position. The group squatted around a pile of muck and got digging, claws in the black, and uncovered pieces of something big and red.

“I live,” Vinicius said, sitting up. The incubi helped him, and he tried to shrug them off. Tried, failed, half roared, half choked, and set his weight on two of his palms behind him. Asmodeus’s grip had probably broken every rib he had.

If Mia could stand, she’d have run over to him. Some inkling of an impulse even made her try, but she got half a centimeter before her muscles screamed at her.

“Egg! Puppers! Someone—”

“Here,” a different voice called out. Azreal. He pointed at a lump in the black.

Adron joined them, looked the two huge angels — shorter than him — up and down, and scooped up the egg.

“It’s fine, Mia,” he said, picked up its sling, eyed the two angels again, and joined Mia. “And you—oh shit, you’re hurt.”

“I’ll be ... I’ll be ... I won’t be fine. My leg’s broken! My arm’s broken! And I can feel Asmodeus below us, playing music, trying to make something happen!” The distant creature was too far and too weak to play the music very hard, and now that she was looking for it, it was easy to find the notes he played and silence them. Playing a song was so much harder than simply placing a finger on a string to deaden it. Even if she hadn’t, the Old One sounded weak and distant. He’d burned through a lot of energy trying to stop them.

They were safe? Maybe.

“Are we in danger?” Kas asked. He drifted closer to the angels, rumbled, and forced his tail side to side in the muck. Very much like a crocodile.

“I think so,” Mia said. “For now. Let’s put some distance between us and this place, soon as we can. Maybe I’ll find a way to ... hide my song? I don’t know. I’ll think of sssssssow!” She glared down at her broken arm. This was bad. This was so very bad.

“And these two?” Julisa asked, three swords pointed at the two angels. “Easy meals, and I would love to taste angel heart.”

“Don’t,” Mia said, and she bit down the urge to cry. There was pain, and then there was the pain of two broken limbs hitting once the adrenaline wore off. “Don’t. Just ... Azreal, Noah, can you come here? The bitch won’t hurt you. The boys won’t, either.”

Noah lifted his head long enough to glare at her, glare at Julisa, and glare doubly long at Vin. But he didn’t say anything. His head lulled forward, and Azreal’s grip tightened.

“I suppose,” Azreal said, taking a step forward and dragging his friend with him, “we have no choice. But we must make haste. The others will find us soon.” His voice was dark, grumbly, and exhausted.

“Others?” Adron asked.

“The angels. Noah and I came to speak with you, but the council has decreed full battalions march on Hell and search for the unmarked, with orders to kill on sight. Not everyone agrees with that order, but...” He shook his head. “Noah will explain.” The rapholem didn’t like talking. He’d probably get along with Kas.

“Hide?” Mia asked.

“The angels saw this battle, or at least heard it. They’re coming. We must hide. Now.”

“I ... I mean ... Maybe I can create a bunker for us? Or something?”

Azreal stared at her. “You can do this?”

“I think so? I ... I mean, I did some other stuff, and this’ll be harder, and...” And unless it was to do something big, and only when in full panic mode, she couldn’t ask the thing in the ocean to do it for her.

“Then do it. Now. We have minutes.”

“Minutes?” Okay okay okay. Think. They needed a place to hide. The only way to hide in the middle of a big black swamp was underneath something.

Her inner fingers ached, but not nearly as bad as the last time she’d done something crazy. Maybe she could make something happen?

“Okay, uh ... Shit. Everyone get in close.”

That was easier said than done, for more reasons than just how big some of them were. Vin got up, managed two steps, fell, and dragged himself the rest of the way. Julisa didn’t help him. Adron and Kas didn’t, either.

“Julisa! We don’t have time!”

She grumbled, but listened and helped Vin. Of course the big guy resisted, and of course Julisa chuckled at the demon and helped him, anyway.

Azreal and Noah stood a ways off. While the mikalim was barely conscious, Azreal kept his glare on Vinicius, even as he came close enough that any of them could have jumped him. He stood near Mia’s feet, and the rest of them stood around her, Vin on knee and palm, and they all shared uneasy glances with each other.

Adron knelt beside Mia, her egg and sling hooked under an arm.

“How you gonna do this?”

“How long are angels going to scout the area, Azreal?” Mia asked.

Azreal frowned. Thinking, or maybe he didn’t like she recognized him and recalled his name.

“They will scour the area until twilight.”

Shit. She nodded, reached for the strings, and hit them hard. Something similar to, but not quite pain struck up her arms, and she bit down until her face pulsed with her heartbeat. The ocean of vibration responded, but only to her impact. Whatever swam in the ocean with her and controlled its currents, it didn’t hear her.

It’d helped her against Asmodeus, of its own choice? But it, or she, must have heard Asmodeus’s music, right? He played so much louder than Mia.

But she didn’t need loud right now, not that loud, anyway. She told the ground to push out small walls of stone underneath her to make an opening in the muck for them, a dry spot. It did. She told the ground to open up, and it did. A gentle crater at first, wide enough for them all, barely, and it sank half a dozen meters into the ground. Minimal rumbling, minimal quaking, she drew on the rock and told it to act like liquid. Encase them whole, hide them, and leave a chimney hidden in the muck so they could breathe.

The rock encased them all, slower than she wanted, but making it move at all was difficult, and sweat beaded down her forehead. A few tiny amber veins lined the rock walls, and the stone curved as it covered them in a grown ceiling.

“In the Lord’s name.” Azreal sucked in a breath and stared up at the rock ceiling that slowly encased them. “I ... I wasn’t there to see what happened, unmarked, when you ... at the battle of Death’s Grip. But to see this with my own eyes...”

Mia closed the ceiling overhead, officially trapping them all inside a small cave. Very small. The demons had to move in closer to fit, and it couldn’t be done without sharing space. Vin sat against the wall, and Julisa was more than happy to crouch between his legs. The incubi stood shoulder to shoulder, while Kas and Adron sat around Mia.

Everyone gave the two angels a little more room.

“Azreal,” Mia said. “Is Noah okay?”

“He’ll live. He’s drained. He—” Azreal fell. No one caught him. Mia glared hard at the incubi, earning some winces from the very bad boys, and they helped Noah and Azreal sit back against the wall. Neither angel was in the condition to shove them off, but from the way Azreal set his purple eyes on them, he wanted to.

“Okay,” Mia said, and she gestured to a hole in the ceiling, a pipe of rock that only stuck up high enough to barely pierce through the layer of muck above; she couldn’t see it, but her sixth sense told her the chimney idea was a success. “We won’t suffocate, and we should be fine if we whisper, I think.”

Azreal nodded. “Agreed.”

“Good. Asmodeus is still trying to play notes and pull me back down, but he’s failing. I think he really drained himself doing that tidal wave. So, I’m going to ... lie down ... and cry.” She set her head down, let the pain wash over her for half a second, and looked at Adron. “My—”

He set her egg beside her.

“Right here. It’s fine.”

She scooped the egg in to her side with her good arm, and let out a low whine. Tears filled her eyes, and she forced down the urge to legit cry. Too much noise.

Kas put a hand over her mouth, gave her arm a small yank, and before she could even realize what the flying fuck he was doing, he did it to her leg, too. She screamed into his hand and tears washed her vision. The only thing stopping her from giving away their position was the asshole suffocating her.

He tilted his head and slowly removed his hand.

“S ... Sorry,” he whispered.

Mia stared at him, panting, and glanced down at her limbs. As long as she stayed lying down, both limbs were now straight. The pain was less, too.

For all Hell’s tortures, it wasn’t too concerned with the minor details of healing wounds. Bone slightly out of place? Not an issue. As long as she got food and rest, she’d heal just fine, hopefully.

“Kas, I—”

He shook his head and adopted his usual half squat, half crouch position beside her, like he’d done when he’d been her bodyguard. If only she could hug him. How did he know how to set a broken bone?

Thoughts no longer drowning in pain, she looked around.

“Vin?” she asked. “You ... You got crushed. You going to be alright?”

Vin snarled, but even that was enough to force a hiss from him.

Julisa mirrored the snarl and aimed it at Mia. “An Old One squeezed him hard enough to kill a lesser demon. His insides are destroyed. And he used hellfire. He needs food.”

Don’t we all.

“Azreal,” Mia said, head lying back and eyes aimed at the low ceiling. “You were both really beat up, when Asmodeus showed me your bodies. How’d you manage to fight?”

The angel sighed. From the sound, he’d probably turned his head and looked down.

“We ... We were ... still absorbing...”

“Right. We found the bodies of some of your comrades. You ate their hearts?” No response, and Mia couldn’t lift her head to see the misery in his eyes. But she heard it. Not exactly tactful, Mia. “Asmodeus said you fought the invaders. The monsters. Is that what killed them?”

“Yes.”

“I’m ... sorry. The monsters are probably trying to kill me. I don’t know why.”

“Everyone wants to kill you,” Azreal said. “And no one knows why.”

“She is insufferable,” Julisa said. “But I doubt that is why.”

“Kas,” Mia said. “Can you ... sit me up a bit? Slowly.”

Her shark dinosaur nodded and did as asked. Far more slowly and gently than someone his size looked like he could manage, he slid her along the stone and helped her sit up. A very shallow sit, mostly just her head, so her broken arm and leg were free to lie limp on the ground. Good arm holding her egg, she looked at the two angels and winced. Their wings were torn up, ruined, and pretty much ripped in half.

“Asmodeus hurt you, to learn about me?”

Azreal shrugged, regretted it, and let his arms go limp too. “We told him little.”

“Thank you. That must have been hard.”

The angel raised a brow. “You’re welcome.”

“Did you know he was alive?”

“No. There is always talk of cultists scurrying in the underbelly of Hell, worshiping Cain or the Old Ones or Lucifer, but the targets of their reverence have not been seen in ages.”

Mia nodded. “I ... I’m surprised you came down here to talk to me.”

The rapholem kept his beautiful eyes pointed down. “I heard about what happened, what Moriah did to Galon, and what Azoryev did to Yosepha. Something ... is amiss. I can’t live with myself knowing something is wrong, and simply let it be. Not after you stopped him from eating us.” He gestured to Vin with a tiny nod.

Vin snarled, but just like Mia, relaxed back against the wall and let his body go limp. Too injured to even throw an insult.

“Yosepha’s still alive,” she said, “with the Damall. Now that we’re back topside, maybe we can find them.”

Julisa snorted. “If we survive. Finding food in this swamp will not be easy.”

“Right,” Adron said. “The demons who live here know how to hunt this area, but the food I’d found here before was more luck than anything.”

“Food.” Mia frowned down at her arm and leg. If she didn’t move, the pain was only extremely uncomfortable instead of blinding, but her inner fingers could still move. They ached, but despite literally crafting a tiny cave to hide in purely under her own power, they only hurt. She gently touched the strings, waited for the inevitable pain, and smiled. It hurt, but not nearly as much as it had before.

She was adapting.

Her weird music powers had one giant flaw: they could only manipulate Hell. She couldn’t create something from nothing. She couldn’t breathe hellfire or shoot angel beams. But in the Black Valley, they were surrounded by Hell, by millions of remnants getting churned by the bone machines it grew to grind through the damned, and they were surrounded by the essence and resonance that they leaked into the black.

She lifted her good hand, aimed it at the empty ground in the center of their tiny cave, lifted her palm, and curled her fingers toward herself. This didn’t require some explosive strike of the strings. What she wanted to do was gentle, and a gentle song was all it took, a cute, cheerful tune, bright, and perhaps played on a flute.

It was a shame the others couldn’t hear the beauty of the music.

A tiny tree sprouted from the stone. It may have looked dead, with dark brown bark, nigh black, but it was alive. It was alive the same way Hell herself was alive. And with a little coaxing and honeyed notes, Hell siphoned the endless nutrition of the swamp into the spot Mia focused on. The tree grew slowly, but slow was still ridiculously fast when watching a literal plant grow in front of you.

It stopped a few feet up, and tiny buds grew on its branches, little red acorns that grew into flesh-colored fruit, shaped like human hearts.

“What is this madness?” Julisa asked, glaring at the tree, at Mia, and back again. “We had been starving for days, and now you can create food for us?”

“I didn’t know!” Shit. Whisper, damn it. “I didn’t know I could do this. I probably couldn’t have. It’s getting easier to play the music, okay? And to feel stuff. I can ... I can feel all the energy the Black Valley is churning through, how it created those forbidden trees we found, and...” She gestured at her little tree. “I just told it to do it here, instead of down in the cavern below us. I bet there’s trees all over the Black Valley hidden in the muck we’d never be able to find, where there’s no cavern to grow them in. They’d have to grow on the surface, instead. Maybe ... Maybe that’s how the demons who live here survive?”

“Maybe,” Adron said. “But those are—” The tree grew, and the fruit grew with it. Everyone stared. It took only a few minutes for the fruit to finish growing, and for the tree to stop at three meters high, almost touching the ceiling of their little cave. “Wow. That is ... a ridiculously amazing talent, Mia.”

She smiled. Okay, that was a delightful ego stroke, and she relished in it, complete with a half grin and scrunching of the nose up at Julisa.

“Here.” The vratorin plucked a fruit and handed it to her. “I mean, I assume it’s good to eat?”

“I think so.” She used her good arm, took a bite, and smiled. No nasty memories, just delicious goodness. “They are.”

The incubi each made a silent cheer, rubbed their hands, and reached for the tree.

“Vin first,” Mia said. “And Azreal and Noah.”

Azreal again raised a brow. Did he know just how ecstatic Mia was? If it wasn’t for the broken limbs, she’d have been hugging him and thanking him for finally talking to her, for giving peace a chance, for doing all the things she’d wished the angels she’d killed would have done.

Faust handed Vin two fruits. Gallius handed Azreal two, as well. Vin looked at the small fruits of flesh, set his dragon gaze on Mia, and for just a fleeting second, it almost looked like he wasn’t so frustrated and angry anymore. If anything, he looked ... tired? He swallowed them down, closed his eyes, and rested.

Azreal bit off a piece and pushed it into Noah’s mouth. The angel stirred, eyes opening, and he sat up straight with a jolt. Azreal pushed him back.

“Eat,” he said, and handed Noah the fruit heart.

Noah stared down at it, at the tree growing in front of him, at the cave that surrounded them, and at Vin and Mia. A triple take at that. Mia would have grinned, but Noah would have probably thought she was insulting him. He seemed like the kinda guy to get angry easily.

“We’re alive,” he said. “Where are we?”

“Hiding from our brethren,” Azreal said. “The unmarked created this ... little cave for us.”

“Oh.” He blinked down at his beaten, clawed, bleeding body, and at the partially eaten fruit in his hand. “This ... isn’t how things were supposed to go. Naumova, and Jordan, and Vaneva, and—”

Azreal shook his head and set a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“Their hearts are the only reason we’re still alive, Noah.”