CHAPTER 49

I felt the ground under me before I understood I was standing on it again.

Something in my chest had changed, expanded, filled with a pressure that had nowhere left to go but out. When I opened my eyes, the world looked different in a way I didn’t have time to examine.

Colours sat sharper than they should have. Sound arrived in layers I could pick apart without trying: Lisa’s ragged breathing, Cú Chulainn’s approaching weight, the settling dust still falling somewhere behind me.

Wings. I felt them unfold before I saw them, black and vast, stretching further than my own arms ever could have reached. Something sharp pressed against my temples that hadn’t been there before, two points of pressure settling into a shape I already understood as mine.

Cú Chulainn’s strike arrived a moment later, and I stopped it with one hand, the impact barely registering as anything more than pressure.

“What!?” Cú Chulainn said, staring, something in his voice caught between fury and genuine alarm.

I said nothing back. I didn’t entirely trust my own voice yet to say anything worth saying. I understood, with total clarity, that whatever this was, it was mine, not borrowed, not Azazel wearing my body the way he had every time before.

Mine.

“Noah?” Lisa’s voice was close, careful, disbelief and hope tangled together in the single word.

“I’m here,” I said, and my own voice sounded strange to me, deeper, carrying an edge I didn’t recognise. “I’m actually here.”

✦ ✦ ✦

Move. There was nothing dry left in his voice at all, nothing careful.

Move now. I have wanted something like him in front of me for longer than you know, and I am not interested in wasting the opportunity.

I moved.

Cú Chulainn had recovered from the stopped strike, staring at the hand that had caught it like the hand itself had personally offended him.

“That’s not possible,” he said. “You were nothing. I made sure you were nothing.”

“You made a mistake,” I said, and my own voice still sounded strange to me, deeper, carrying a weight it hadn’t carried an hour ago. “This is what it costs you.”

“Costs me?” Something flickered across his face, disbelief fighting to close back over whatever had briefly cracked through it. “You’ve no idea what I’ve survived tonight already. A jumped-up hunter growing a few new tricks doesn’t change what I’m.”

“We’ll see.”

He came at me the way he’d come at Nox and Lisa: fast, dismissive, expecting the same overwhelming gap that had defined every previous exchange between us.

I closed the distance before he’d finished the thought.

“Shadow Sword, First Form: Eclipse.”

The crescent went out ahead of the blade and neither of them missed. The line it opened across his shoulder was deep enough to draw blood and stayed open, which was new.

He stared at the wound like it was speaking a language he’d forgotten how to understand.

Again. Something in the word carried an edge sharp enough to cut on its own. Do not let him recover his footing. Do not give him a single second to remember who he thinks he is.

I didn’t.

The fight that followed bore no resemblance to anything Cú Chulainn had shown us before, and none to anything I’d shown him either.

Every strike landed somewhere. Every one of his answers came a moment too slow, a fraction too late, his considerable strength suddenly meaning nothing against a speed he couldn’t match anymore.

“This isn’t right,” he said, backing up a step for the first time since either of us had met him. “You don’t get to be this. Not you. Not after what I decided about you.”

“Not after what you decided wasn’t worth finishing,” I said. “I heard. I’m not particularly interested in your regrets about it.”

Good. Neither am I.

Something had changed in him since the vision, some deep and constant fury sitting just beneath every word.

I understood, fighting alongside it rather than hearing it, that this wasn’t a performance.

He wanted this. He wanted it with a hunger that wasn’t about me at all, and everything to do with something older in him that he had no name for. I had a name for it. I kept it to myself.

Cú Chulainn tried to regain ground with a wide sweep of the spear, the kind of attack that would have ended any of our earlier exchanges outright.

I stepped inside it instead, close enough that the shaft passed harmlessly over my shoulder.

“Second Form: Nightfall.”

It came down where his collarbone met his neck, carrying everything the air above us had to give. He got an arm up. The arm didn’t enjoy the decision.

He staggered, and for the first time all night, real pain showed plainly on his face.

“Stop doing that,” he said, almost sulky, like a child being cheated at a game he’d assumed he’d already won.

“Doing what?”

“Being better than the story already decided you were allowed to be.”

He is rattled. Something almost pleased threaded through the fury now. Keep him rattled. A frightened opponent makes more mistakes than an angry one, and he is currently managing both at once.

I pressed the advantage, forcing him back another two steps, each exchange costing him more than the last. He tried three separate openings, each one slower than the last to arrive, and I closed each one before it had finished forming.

“Third Form: Severing Dusk.”

He went to walk into it the way he had in the Chilterns, straight down the throat of the wide one. I had spent three months waiting for him to try that again.

I shortened it. The sweep stopped at two feet instead of running out to five, and he arrived inside an arc that was already where he was going to be.

He staggered back further than any hit had managed yet, pain no longer bothering to hide itself behind anything.

“Enough,” he said. “Enough. I need a moment.”

“You don’t get moments. You didn’t give us any.”

He came at me anyway, desperate now rather than confident, and the desperation cost him whatever precision he had left. I read the strike a full second before it arrived and answered it with everything I had.

His strike never finished. I closed again, faster than his body could adjust for. I put everything into a strike that ended with an audible crack, ribs giving way under an impact he had no answer left to offer.

He went down hard, one leg folding beneath him at an angle legs weren’t built to survive.

“Stay down,” I said.

He didn’t. Of course he didn’t.

“You don’t understand,” he said, dragging himself half upright on arms that shook with the effort. “I can’t go back to him like this. I can’t go back to him at all if this is how it ends.”

“Then don’t go back. Stop.”

“I can’t stop either.”

Something in his voice had gone strange, cracked, terror and fury sharing the same small space.

“I’d rather become something I don’t recognise than go back to him as nothing,” he said. “You wouldn’t understand that. You’ve never had to.”

“Cú Chulainn.”

“Inverse,” he said, forcing the word out like it cost him something. “Ríastrad.”

The word landed wrong, too heavy for four letters, and something answered it immediately.

A dark mark bloomed across his chest like ink dropped into water, slow at first and then faster, crawling up his throat and across his face in branching lines that pulsed with the same wrongness I remembered from the Chilterns.

“What’s that?” Lisa breathed, somewhere behind me.

Nothing good. For the first time all night, something in his fury gave way to something closer to genuine alarm.

The mark finished its crawl. Cú Chulainn’s whole body convulsed, bones resetting audibly, the broken leg straightening with a sound none of us should have had to hear.

His scream, when it came, didn’t sound entirely like him either, something underneath it that hadn’t been there a moment before, layered and wrong enough to make my own teeth ache just from hearing it.

When he rose again, he rose wrong. Taller. The spear was no longer a spear, crimson light bleeding down its length and gathering into two thin rings near the head.

His eyes, when they finally found mine again, held nothing recognizable left in them at all.

This is not him anymore. Whatever answered that word, treat it as an entirely new opponent. Do not assume anything you learned fighting him still applies.

“You broke something you shouldn’t have,” he said, and his voice came out layered now, doubled, something underneath the words that wasn’t entirely his own. “Let me show you exactly what that costs.”

He moved before any of us had finished processing that he’d spoken.

Nox took the spear’s point through one shoulder before he’d registered the shape blurring toward him. A short strangled sound was the only warning the rest of us got.

Lisa caught a strike a moment later that lifted her clean off her feet and threw her a dozen feet into a parked car’s windscreen, glass coming down around her before she’d landed.

I felt the kick arrive somewhere in my ribs a moment after that. The impact carried me through the air with a force that made the earlier lunge feel like a breeze. The world spun once. Then the ground came up to meet me.

All three of us hit the ground within the same second. Cú Chulainn stood over the wreckage of what had, until a few seconds ago, been a fight we were decisively winning.

He looked down at us. At Nox’s shoulder already darkening with blood, and Lisa struggling upright out of a bed of shattered glass. At me, trying and failing to get my knees back under me.

“There,” he said, and his doubled voice carried something that might have been satisfaction, if satisfaction could sound that hollow. “That’s better. That’s considerably more familiar.”