Except I wasn’t sinking. I stared down at my feet, horrified, stamping them, but nothing. I couldn’t shadowstep anymore. The door wasn’t budging, and I wasn’t going anywhere.
Herald smashed his shoulder into my chest, shoving me clear out of the way. He fell to the ground, slamming his palms into the earth. Streaks of violet energy streamed from his fingers, and a wall of opaque frost sprang from the ground, two feet thick and several times as tall and wide.
The wall shuddered and crunched as the Overthroat’s skull struck it, then rebounded, making a horrible gonging sound. Splinters of dislodged frost rained around me, falling in my hair, melting against my skin, like snow. I kept still on my back, panting. Herald fell against the grass, too, and the both of us stayed that way for a while, staring up into the sky, aching for breath.
“It wouldn’t have killed you to move your feet,” Herald grunted.
“The Dark Room,” I said. “I thought it would open for me. It was instinct, okay? I thought I could escape through there.”
“It’s gone now, Dust. The enchantment worked. You sealed it away, and it’s gone.”
“Gone,” I echoed, my eyes searching the stars for answers, finding nothing. My chest ached as I took huge, deep lungfuls of air. My heart churned with a curious, leaden sense of loss, but somewhere in there I thought I felt the stirrings of hope. “Then who am I now?”
All the many names that the denizens of the arcane underground had used for me ran through my mind, flickering with glimmers of truth, all these facets of my identity. Thief. Sacrifice. Hound. Sweetling. Dog. Fleshling. Shadow beast. Darkling mage. All these names and more.
“You’re Dustin Graves,” Herald said. He reached for my hand and clenched it. “And that’s more than enough for me.”
I squeezed back. Maybe it was enough, after all. Maybe I was enough.
Chapter 34
We found the Overthroat’s skull embedded in the side of a mausoleum, the light of horror faded from its eye sockets and from its mouth. Vanitas was still stuck through its forehead.
It took a little bit of elbow grease and planting my foot squarely in the Overthroat’s dead, stupid face for leverage, but with some effort I managed to wrench Vanitas out of the skull. His garnets flickered back into life as I did. Relief came flooding into my chest.
The first thing I heard in my mind was V gasping for air. I realize that makes no sense – I was pretty sure Vanitas didn’t breathe – but to him it was like breaking the surface of a lake.
“I thought I was dead,” he gasped. “I couldn’t see, I couldn’t feel. Where were you, damn it?” He jerked in my arms, waving about to show his displeasure. I noted that, for once, he didn’t immediately demand that I let him go.
“I was right here, V,” I said. “I told you not to be so damn brash. If you think it’s easy going around to demon princes and begging them for favors to reforge you from leftover pieces, you’re damn wrong.”
I retrieved his scabbard from my backpack, gently sliding both blade and sheath together, then attempted to deposit Vanitas back in his pocket dimension.
“No,” he said, wriggling in my grasp. “Let me breathe. Out here. Just – hold me a little longer, would you?”
Whatever happened to Vanitas when the Overthroat’s influence forced him into dormancy, it couldn’t have been pleasant.
“Sure thing, buddy,” I said, securing him to my hip, leaving my hand on his hilt. “Take as long as you want.”
He settled into position, then said nothing more. I recorded that firmly in my mind. If he gave me shit in the future, I was going to remind him of the time he asked me to hold him.
Odessa showed up to retrieve the Overthroat’s head, accompanied by a number of what I assumed were Hands. Her demeanor towards me was chilly, though after what I’d done to the Heart, I really wouldn’t have expected any friendliness from her end.
“Probably not the best idea to keep that thing at the Lorica,” I said. “I’d suggest smashing it, burning it, then sending the ashes to another dimension.”
“That is not for you to decide, Dustin,” Odessa said curtly.
She waved her hand, and a gleaming bubble of pure force appeared around the skull, securing it and lifting it in the air. She pulled on it with an invisible leash, and the Overthroat, a gargantuan menace to our reality mere minutes ago, was no more threatening than a child’s toy.
“I’m glad you could join us,” I said. I knew that being so snippy wasn’t helping, but I couldn’t stop myself. “I didn’t think the Scions would show up.”
“At least half of us were present at the battle with the Old One,” Odessa said coolly, gesturing at her retinue. I should have known those faces were familiar. She gave me a sidelong glance. “More would have joined us, but there was that small matter of repairing the crystal focus – of keeping the Heart under control and avoiding the arcane equivalent of a nuclear meltdown.”
“We should arrest him,” one of the Scions said. “No one has ever attacked the Heart and endangered the Scions so directly.”
“Honestly, Odessa, the leeway you give this one, and for no real reason,” said another Scion. He grinned. “Smash him, burn him, then send the ashes to another dimension, I say.”
I stiffened, lifting my nose and puffing my chest out, but said nothing. Herald tugged on the sleeve of my jacket, sensing my defiance.