his shoulder.
An electric shiver ran through him as his fingers closed around the smooth hilt of his father's sword. A vision appeared before his eyes: his father's estate as it had been sixteen years ago. The villa in flames. Glowing embers fluttering into the night sky like a cloud of angry fireflies. Levictus standing over his father. Above the wrappings of long black robes, the sorcerer's pallid features shone in the moonlight. The blade pierced his father's chest and Caim cried out, pain bursting from his insides as if the weapon had pierced his flesh instead.
Caim blinked.
He ran through a field of wildflowers in every hue and variety. His parents chased after him, their laughter ringing in the summer air. He glanced over his shoulder, but they had fallen far behind. He could barely see them. Yet their eyes latched onto him from across the distance, watching him, waiting for…
Caim blinked.
He was back on the palace rooftop. The sword shimmered like a shard of black ice in his hand. Water danced along the temper of its razor-keen edges. It felt odd, holding it, and at the same time familiar, like coming home. His father's voice reached across the years.
Justice.
Levictus had stopped half a dozen paces away. The sorcerer stood there with raindrops streaming down the hard planes of his face. Watching. Waiting.
With a grim smile, Caim stepped toward his enemy, and the ache in his chest exploded. Kit appeared as a sensation of weightlessness enveloped him. Joy radiated from her smile like the dawn of the first morning. He had never seen her like this before. Gone was the girlish ingenue. In her place was a woman in full bloom, the woman Caim had always imagined she could be.
She bent down to him, and the darkness flowed along her body like a second skin, but it wasn't entirely black. Murky patterns twisted within the dark. As he reached up, they played along the flesh of his hand and arm like tiny vibrations, and then penetrated his skin, through the muscles and sinews down into his bones. Colors beyond description spun around him, striations of light and shadow cast into physical form.
'Trust yourself,' she whispered.
Caim took a deep breath. He knew what had to be done, but could he do it? Could he release the bands of self-control that had held him together for so long? If he let go, would he lose himself? He took another glance over the side. The darkness parted around him like a veil of sheerest gossamer and he saw Josey, clinging to a stone projection. How she fought for life! She wouldn't give up, not as long as a single breath remained within her. Yes. He could do it, for her.
Caim released the breath, and with it all his reservations. The sorcerer stood like a statue of some forgotten demigod of the night. But Kit had said he could bleed. If he could bleed, he could die.
Caim saluted with the sword. His sword now. Levictus nodded as if they had come to some agreement, and then advanced across the rainsplattered tiles. Again the shadows darted at Caim. He could see them better now, not as amorphous blobs, but as small, sleek creatures with sharp teeth and glittering black eyes. But before they could reach him, a black shape erupted from the darkness. The tiny shadows scurried out of the beast's path. It was huge. Striding on four big paws, it resembled a great sable mastiff.
Caim leveled his sword at the creature. But instead of attacking him, the thing turned to pursue the shadows, scooping them up in its massive jaws and tearing them to bits. Then he realized this was the same shadow creature he had seen before, at the Vine and in the cellar under Josey's manor. It had never threatened him, only his enemies, and by the vibration thrumming in his head as the beast tore through the sorcerer's pets, this thing was somehow bound to him.
A violent hiss was the only warning Caim got. He lifted the sword in time to deflect a black knife aimed at his throat. Phosphoric sparks flew as the weapons connected, recoiled, and clashed again. The shadows had fled into the darkness, and the beast with them. Caim almost felt like his old self. On the next pass, he beat the sorcerer's counterattack by a fraction of a heartbeat. He feinted high and slashed. The sword tore through black fabric and found flesh underneath.
Levictus vanished, leaving behind a few spots of blood. But this time, Caim witnessed something he hadn't before. As the sorcerer disappeared, he stepped into a hole in the air, like a window into nothingness. It slammed shut behind him, but tendrils of dark luminescence remained. Caim turned, following them with his eyes. He was ready when Levictus reappeared on the other side of the roof. He struck. The sorcerer nearly fell on his back evading the lunge. His knives deflected the sword's path enough to avoid being spitted. Then, like a cat he righted himself and kept coming.
Around and around they circled while Kit danced above their heads. Her laughter rivaled the thunder. Caim took a scratch on his left hand, a shallow wound, but Levictus followed up with a series of stabs that put him on the defensive. Yet the sorcerer was slowing with every step, while Caim felt his stamina improving. The sword twitched in his hand like a living thing. He pressed with a riposte, but Levictus parried and leapt at him. Caim tried to reverse his momentum as the tip of a black knife raced toward his unprotected chest. He didn't have time to think as he twisted to avoid the deadly strike. The edge of the roof reared up toward him. Off balance, he would have fallen, should have fallen, except that the darkness billowed around him, cradling him in its grasp. His feet left the tiles, and came down a moment later behind the sorcerer. Somehow, he had been transported a dozen feet through thin air. Levictus turned, his knives moving. Even as his brain boggled at what had just happened, Caim lunged.
Levictus made no sound, but the tendons of his neck stood out like taut cables. His eyes stabbed at Caim with the hatred of the damned for one interminable moment. Then, he slumped to his knees.
Caim shoved the blade deeper and stepped back. The sword's hilt quivered in the sorcerer's chest like the masthead of a floundering ship. In his mind, Caim saw his father, kneeling in the blood-drenched yard of their family estate.
Justice. At last.
Sibilant whispers echoed in the darkness. Caim balled his hands into fists as the shadows returned, but they ignored him. Skittering like tiny spiders, they adhered themselves to the sorcerer's body until they encased it in a black cocoon. The corpse dissolved before Calm's eyes, melted away with the rain and ran down the cracks between the roof tiles. A minute later, nothing was left but his father's sword and an empty, sodden cloak.
Caim watched the black garment flap in the wind. The presence was gone, the beast and the little shadows with it, and something else as well. His fear. A weight had been lifted from his mind. He was different-he accepted that-but he wasn't a monster.
A faint wail rode the storm's howl. Josey!
He limped toward the roof's edge, but froze as a barrage of lightning strokes illuminated the night. Ral blocked his path, face streaked with pink lines of blood, sword drawn back. Caim recoiled, but there was nowhere to go. Even an old woman couldn't miss from so close. Ral grinned through his gory mask as the sword shot forth like a bolt from an arbalest. Caim grabbed at the blade with his naked hands, but it slid between his fingers and plunged into his stomach. Warm blood bubbled over Calm's hands as he braced himself for the disemboweling twist, but the sword dropped from the killer's hand to clatter on the tiles. Ral gaped with a stunned expression as he collapsed at Calm's feet for the second time.
Caim lifted his gaze to the slight figure in drenched rags standing behind the dead assassin, one of his suetes clutched in her shaking, bloodstained hands.
'Jo-' Caim tried to say, but the roof jumped up to smash his face.
Then, he was on his back. Josey and Kit knelt on either side of him. Their hands tugged his jacket in different directions, each trying to pull him upright, but the darkness held him in its embrace. His thoughts were slow to come. Water coursed down Josey's face. Overhead, the heavens roiled in their wrath, but an expanding sense of peace filled the hollow spaces of his soul. She was safe.
'It's all right,' he whispered with a smile that took all of his dwindling strength.
'Don't leave!' Josey and Kit shouted in his ears. 'Stay with me!'
He wanted to stay, but he had to disappoint them both as the night pulled him down into its unfathomable depths.
