“He’ll melt the palace into slag at this rate!” Eli shouted over the spirit’s wail.
“We have to do something!” Miranda cried.
“You tell me!” Eli cowered as more acid spattered around them. “I’m out of good ideas!”
“I’d take a bad one, at this point!”
Still screaming madly, the mound of sludge shivered from base to tip. Suddenly, with a sickening, liquid snap,
a torrent of black water began to pour out of its base. It was as if a dam inside the sludge had burst, sending a river of foamy, black liquid roaring across the floor straight toward them. It happened so quickly, Miranda couldn’t do anything except watch in horror as the wave rushed at her. Only when the black tide washed over the piles of discarded treasure, dissolving the carved mahogany and precious metals in the time it took to catch her breath, did Miranda’s instincts gain the upper hand on her fear. She spun around and dashed for the far wall, her feet skidding across the marble. As soon as she was close enough, she launched herself at the wall, and her grasping fingers caught the edge of a decorative niche. She hauled herself up, tossing over the stone bust of some Mellinorian king or other to make room, and pressed her body as far back into the crevice as she would fit. Eli followed her lead, climbing into the alcove next to hers.
“Nico,” he shouted, “there’s a shelf a bit higher up you could jump to.”
But Nico didn’t answer. Miranda peered over the lip of his hiding place. Several feet below, the girl was standing at the base of the wall, stoically watching the black tide as it rushed toward her.
“Nico,” Eli said more urgently, leaning out of his crevice and thrusting out his arm. “Take my hand!”
“Josef told me to protect you,” Nico said, not even looking at him.
“Don’t be an—” He gasped and ducked as a black wave crashed against the wall, sending burning spray up the walls around them. Miranda turned away in horror as the black surge covered Nico’s lower body, and waited for the scream.
But there was no scream, not even a pained gasp. Miranda turned back. Nico was standing in inky liquid up to her knees. Smoke rose in white plumes where the acid touched her, yet her posture was as calm as ever. She might have been wading in a warm river for all the attention she paid the black water eating at her legs.
At the center of the room, the black blob quivered, and the tide of black sludge receded with a sucking hiss. Miranda watched in spellbound horror as the girl’s legs came back into view, bracing for the worst. However, while Nico’s trousers, boots, and the hem of her coat were completely dissolved where the acid had submerged them, her pale skin was untouched, as were the heavy silver manacles she wore on her ankles.
Gregorn screamed in angry confusion as Nico took a step forward, her bare, uninjured feet moving through the sludge of the dissolved treasure in quick, light steps. As she walked, a soft, dry sound cut through the spirit’s wailing. It sounded like dust blowing through grass, and it took Miranda a few seconds to realize that Nico was laughing. The girl hopped clear of the treasure detritus and stood before the screaming sludge spirit, tilting her head back so she could see all of him at once. When she spoke, her voice was full of that horrible, dry dust laughter.
“You think you can beat us with that?”
The black sludge froze in midshriek and hung there, quivering. Nico watched for a moment, and then she raised one bony hand to her throat, and the temperature in the room plummetted.
In one smooth motion, Nico tossed her coat to the ground. Without its bulk to hide her, she was skeletally
thin. Her threadbare shirt was sleeveless, and her bony arms hung like cracked branches from a crooked trunk. Her silver manacles glowed with their own light, casting weird shadows across the acid-etched floor as she reached up to take off her hat.
“Nico …” Eli’s voice held a warning, but if the girl heard him, she ignored it. “That stupid girl,” he whispered.
Miranda didn’t have to ask what he meant. Without the coat to hide her, the girl’s aura was inescapable. Predatory menace rolled off her in waves, stirring Miranda’s deepest instincts to run, to get out. But she could not move. Deep, irrational, primordial fear had turned the air to glue, snaring her soul like a rabbit under a wolf’s paw. She could do nothing except cower in her alcove and watch, gasping in the acidic air and waiting for the threat to kill her or pass by. For the first time, she understood why all spirits fear a demonseed, and why Gin had been so adamant about killing the girl, no matter how small or controlled she seemed.
“Can’t you stop her?” Miranda whispered through gritted teeth.
“Only Josef can stop her when she gets like this.” Eli was pressed so far back in his alcove Miranda couldn’t see him anymore. “You might want to get down,” he whispered.
Nico stretched her arms out, flexing her shoulders. One by one, the thick manacles at her wrists, ankles, and neck popped open with a hard, metallic snap. Each time, the silver clung to her for a moment, screaming angrily, but even fully awakened metal can’t fight gravity. The manacles hit the floor with a crash, cursing Nico all the way down. As soon as she was free of their touch, the small girl’s posture changed completely.
The Nico who stood at the center of the circle of cast off clothes and silver restraints was an entirely different creature than the Nico who had entered the throne room with them. Her thinness was no longer awkward, but deadly and cutting, like garrote wire. Her movements were languid as she dropped lazily into a stance, her newly freed hands flourished in front of her.
With a thin smile Nico stared up at the enormous sludge. Then the dim moonlight seemed to bend around her, and she vanished.
The sludge roared as shadows, blacker than any simple darkness, streaked across its surface, appearing and vanishing in an instant, like black heat lightning. It was nauseating to watch, but Miranda could no more look away than she could sprout wings and escape. Everywhere the shadow touched, a large section of acidic sludge vanished. It wasn’t that it got knocked away, or that the creature was pulling it back. Where the darkness landed, that piece of the blob was simply gone. Within a few seconds, the acid spirit looked like a mouse-nibbled biscuit, and the fear in the room was suffocating. The stones were screaming, the unlit lamps were screaming, the gold-plated decorations, the remaining contents of the treasury, the glass windows, the air itself,
everything
in the throne room was screaming nonsense in a state of full panic. The voices stabbed Miranda’s ears, filling them to bursting, but all she could do was press herself tighter against the screeching wall and watch wide-eyed as Nico winked into view, landing neatly at the center of the throne room.
Gregorn’s sludge was about half the size it had been. It lay at the far end of the room, whimpering pathetically,
but still protecting the dais as it had been commanded to do. Nico, on the other hand, looked healthier than Miranda had ever seen her. Her pale skin was flushed and glowing. Her body was no longer skeletal, but strong and supple. Her legs were longer and her torso more filled out. She also looked taller, a suspicion confirmed by the new gap between the hem of her shirt and the waist of her trousers. It was as if she’d aged ten happy, healthy years, and yet the freezing, predatory menace rolling off her was stronger than ever. She glided across the corroded stone, and the acidic sludge shrank back, but it would not give up its position in front of the dais, not even when Nico stopped a foot away from its trembling base.
“Nico!” Eli’s voice was thin and strained, but the fact that he could speak at all was a miracle. “Don’t do it, Nico!”
The girl ignored him. With a triumphant cry, Nico plunged her bare hand deep into the acid’s center. If Miranda had named the spirit’s scream a wail before, the cry it gave now reduced its earlier sounds to whimpers. Gregorn’s spirit thrashed on the end of Nico’s arm like a speared fish, slinging acid in huge arcs. But, despite its struggles, the spirit was shrinking. It was now not more than double the height of the dais. Then it was no taller than Gin, and still it was shrinking, its cries growing smaller and smaller. When the sludge was no larger than Nico herself, a new shape began to emerge. The black tar narrowed and separated, revealing long appendages. Ribs appeared at its center, and its peaked top became a rounded head. Two legs, barely more than tar over bone, appeared at the base, and shoulders like knives led to twiglike arms. Finally, the last of the sludge disappeared
altogether, and Nico stood over the kneeling, black form of an old, skeletal man.
Wisps of hair still sprouted from his head, plastered down by black tar, and his face, his face was still human. Sunken eyes grayed over with cataracts looked pleadingly up at his conqueror. His cracked, black lips moved pathetically, but no sound came out. Black tears pooled in the hollows of the ancient enslaver king’s cheeks as he looked up at her, his ruined hands rising slowly to grasp Nico’s wrist where her hand was buried deep in his hollow chest.
With a final, cruel smile, Nico yanked her hand free, and what was left of Gregorn toppled to the ground. He made no sound as he fell, the last of his human features crumbling to dust even before they struck the pitted stone. Nico shook the dust off her fingers, and Miranda knew as surely as if she’d been standing over him herself that Gregorn’s spirit was dead.
“Nico.” Eli’s soft voice made Miranda jump. She hadn’t seen him leap down from his alcove, but the thief was standing a dozen feet behind the demonseed. Cautiously, he held out his hand, the largest of Nico’s manacles, her neck piece, dangling from his fingers. “You did well,” he said. “You did as Josef asked. Now it’s time to come back to us.”
The girl turned slowly, regarding him through slitted eyes that flashed in the darkness with their own flickering light. The room was deafeningly silent. Everything seemed to be holding its breath as Nico considered him.
“Come back?”
Her voice was different. The dry dust scrape that had been just a whisper before now completely overwhelmed her natural sound. It was so alien, so strange, that if
Miranda had not seen Nico’s lips moving, she would not have been able to name the speaker as human. Nico took a step forward, moving with unnatural grace toward the thief until she was only a few inches from Eli’s outstretched hand. Then, with casual cruelty, she reeled back and punched him.
Eli didn’t try to dodge. He took the blow full in the chest, and it sent him flying backward. He landed with a bone-snapping crunch on the scarred marble, the silver manacle clattering off into the dark. The second he hit the floor, Nico was on top of him again with another of her gut-wrenching, light-bending jumps. She kicked the manacle out of his hand and grabbed the thief around the neck, lifting him off the floor. “Come back?” she hissed, glaring at him with eyes that opened wider than human eyes should. “To what? I see how you treat the girl. A weapon, a
servant
. Our kind do not serve, thief!”
“I’m talking to Nico, not you,” Eli said coldly. “You’re just an interloper, a deadbeat tenant. We treat Nico as a partner, which is far more than I can say for you, bug.”
She roared at that, drawing her fist to hit him again, but before she could strike, there was a silver flash in the thin space between them. Nico screamed and flailed backward, dropping Eli on the ground. Breathing hard, the girl reached down and wrenched something out of her chest. She tossed it to the ground where it landed with a clatter, and Miranda recognized one of Josef’s knives. Eli grunted and rolled over, another knife ready in his hands.
But Nico’s white skin was knitting itself back together as Miranda watched, and she crept toward Eli like a hunting spider. “You treacherous thief,” she hissed. “How dare you take his blades!”
“Ah-ha,” Eli said, coughing as he sat up slowly. “So there is some Nico left in there.” He tucked the second knife back into his sleeve. “Listen to me, Nico. This isn’t the real you. You’re human, Nico. Still human, even now. Josef didn’t nearly die five times over rescuing you just to have it end like this, in this nowhere kingdom.” He held out his hand, his face kind and pleading. “Come back to us.”
Nico paused and stared at his hand, and for a moment, the inhuman light in her eyes flickered out. Then it was back brighter than before. She lifted her clenched fist, ready to bring it down on the thief’s unguarded head, but before she could swing, a tremendous crash stopped everything. Glass exploded above them, and Nico looked up just in time to see the swirling mass of gray fur and knife-sharp claws crash through the high window right before it landed on top of her.
Miranda pressed her hands to her mouth. The relief mixed with fear was almost more than she could bear. “Gin!”
Gin had Nico in his mouth. He shook her fiercely before flinging her as hard as he could against the stone wall. Her impact cracked the marble, and she slumped to the floor, her limbs bent under her at unnatural angles. Gin bounded to one side, putting himself between the crumpled girl and Miranda.
“I came as soon as I felt her,” he growled, never taking his eyes off Nico’s motionless body. “I told you, didn’t I? Demons can’t be trusted.”
Miranda jumped down from her alcove and ran to him, flinging herself face down into his swirling fur.
“The king?”
“Still hiding and safe enough,” he said quietly. “Not that any of us are ‘safe’ at this point.” He voice thickened to a snarl as Nico stirred. “Get the thief.”
Miranda nodded and looked around for Eli. The thief was still on his back where he had fallen, coughing painfully.