The Dark Between Dreams | ✔️

Chapter 49 🔻 Rage

Over and over and over again.

Why did you kill everyone?

Damn it! My spear wasn't sharp enough. Or maybe I just wasn't strong enough. I couldn't break through its skin. I yelled and nearly lost my balance when the behemoth shook itself like an animal trying to rid itself of a pesky little mite. Tentacles unwound and collided with buildings, sending shards of glass and metal shrapnel flying. My skin stung from fresh cuts. Blood trickled from me in rivers. Bruises throbbed. My newly awakened spectral nerve endings screamed.

Why couldn't you have just sucked it up and been happy with what you had? With how things were?

My instincts begged me to run. But I couldn't back down. If I did, everyone would have died in vain. A new eye bubbled from beneath the behemoth's flesh and rolled to glare at me with a red pupil. I didn't recognize the red-eyed woman reflected at me in its wet surface. A waterfall of tears spilled from her eyes. I screamed and plunged my spear into the eye.

You stupid anchored thing!

A tentacle slithered alongside my ankle and wrapped around my leg. I sliced it apart. Two more took its place, so I ran, digging my spear into the creature's body the whole way, spilling a thick coagulated fluid that writhed like it was made of thousands of black maggots and eels. But it wasn't deep enough. The wound healed shut in my wake. My body ached and shook from both shivers and sobs. I panted from exertion. But my breath caught in my throat when I saw the red stone glowing on my scarred wrist. Everything went blurry as my eyes watered even more.

You stupid, stupid girl!

The behemoth shrieked. Nannāru cried out-a warning. I heard the wet fleshy sound of a tentacle cutting through the air before I saw it. Nannāru flew to my side and tugged at a strand of my hair with her beak before disappearing into the black cloud of ash and dust. I jumped blindly from the beast, following the crow a hair's breadth out of reach of the striking tentacle.

The wind was knocked out of me when I landed on a rooftop and rolled to my foot. The behemoth continued to writhe behind the wall of smoke that separated us. Nannāru called again ahead of me, and I followed her, heaving myself over debris and leaping from one building to the next. Blackburne followed, never letting me out of his sight. The behemoth and I kept pace with each other.

I ducked beneath a swiping tentacle and jumped over another, catching the lip of the next roof with my free hand in the nick of time. Nannāru cawed at me frantically while I heaved myself up onto the roof.

I stood before the beast, beneath the sun. I was higher than him now. But a hell of a gap separated us. The creature's body throbbed, just like a giant heart. I wondered if, somewhere in all that flesh, the last shreds of Blackburne's heart still lay.

My fingers drummed my spear. I held one of the spear's winged tips to my face. I hadn't been able to pierce through his hide with this...

I touched my thumb to the red stone on my wrist.

Everyone has a weakness, Vale had told me.

"Find it," I said to myself.

Yet another enormous eye bubbled through the creature's flesh, right in front of me. Two red-eyed creatures glared at each other through churning smoke.

I smiled.

Blackburne's eyes, however, had been easy to cut into.

"Nannāru!" I called out.

My crow landed on my shoulder and shook her feathers, ready for my command.

"I need cover," I told her.