The Nightborn by Isabel Cooper (howl and other poems TXT) 📗

long branches near each other, letting her weight help her break them off on the way down.

“Here.” She handed one branch to Zelen, took hold of the other, and started running again, making for the nearest of the demons. “Life disrupts them. Range might save you.”

* * *

A man lay screaming on the grass, and above him the world was torn open.

The demon was tall and thin and…flat? It floated in the air like paper laid on a table, and Zelen couldn’t work out how—not just how it was doing so, but how that could even be. He had the impression of a manlike shape, with a rudimentary, elongated face and not so much arms as a set of jagged edges at its side. Around it the night puckered inward, like skin around a fresh cut.

To view it was to feel the world tilt beneath his feet, not out of terror—though he felt plenty of that—but out of his mind’s effort to reconcile what he was seeing with any part of the world he’d been born into and understood.

If not for its victim, Zelen might have frozen there, or fled. The years of his training and those at the clinic took over, though, and said: There’s a wounded man here. That was familiar. That was knowable. And if Zelen needed to treat a wounded man, he’d need time and space to do so. The nature of the obstacles to those didn’t need to matter.

He forced himself to look long enough to aim, raised the dagger Branwyn had given him, and threw as hard as he could.

He’d never know whether he hit squarely, whatever that might mean for such things, or whether he’d only nicked it and the knife was simply that magical. There was a flash of blue light, a sound like papers sliding together but far louder, and the demon was gone.

Its victim, Zelen found as he dropped to his knees by the man, was missing chunks of flesh from half a dozen places. The shoulder was the worst, with almost nothing left but bone. There was very little blood, though, and it wasn’t flowing nearly as quickly as it should have been. “Do you think you can stand?” Zelen asked.

“Wha… Verengir?”

Zelen vaguely recognized his patient. They’d joked together at dances, gambled and hunted in the same parties. He had no time to recall names any more than he did for gentleness. “You need to run, if you can. Back to the palace. There are more of those things. Can you stand?” he repeated.

“I think so.”

The wounded man managed with help from Zelen, if a sort of braced shove upward could be called helping, and then stared at Branwyn. She was standing, facing the darkness with knife in one hand and branch in the other, her hair falling tangled down her back. She didn’t look as though she even noticed the existence of the men behind her, and yet Zelen knew that she was alert for the slightest hint of matters going wrong.

“Gape later,” he suggested. “Move now, or are you that tired of life?”

That suggestion got through. The man started moving, limping in a way that made Zelen want to turn and assist—but he wasn’t the only one out there. Branwyn was already moving, tracking the next set of screams, the next writhing human form.

“Not nearly enough blood,” said Zelen, catching up to her. “Do they drink it?”

“No, but they’re very cold. That’s why they’re here, I wouldn’t wonder. The heat of living things draws them. Many people in one place, particularly people exerting themselves, would have been a beacon as soon as they broke through.”

Her grip on the branch was different than the one she used on her sword, and the contrast made Zelen think of the blade. His mind, clarified by nearness to death, seized on the great jewel in the sword’s hilt and snapped it into place. It was the missing detail, the feature that made a portrait recognizable as a person.

The sword.

Branwyn’s strength and speed, more than any human could have possessed.

Her knowledge of demons and how casual she was about it.

The blow, fighting assassins, that should have left her dead and yet she’d shaken off easily.

Her comment afterward: she hadn’t killed people before.

No detail alone would have been enough to draw conclusions, but now Zelen saw the whole portrait before him. “You’re a Sentinel,” he said.

Branwyn didn’t even turn. If she blinked, Zelen missed it. “Yes.”

* * *

She didn’t have the time or energy to make up a good denial. Honestly, Zelen would more than likely see through any lie she did put together, even a painstakingly crafted one. The man was perceptive.

He said nothing in response to her answer, but that might have been simply a lack of opportunity. The demons, aware of their fellow creature’s forcible return to the outer darkness or attracted by motion and greater heat, were moving toward Zelen and Branwyn. That gave some of their victims a chance to escape, but it also required a certain amount of focus.

The first to approach caught Branwyn’s branch hard on the side of what passed for its head. Yellow-green light flickered through its pallid form, webbing out from the point of contact, and it reeled. Branwyn ducked low, past its guard, and plunged her knife into its chest. As the demon dissipated, the magic buzzed through her fingers and up her arm.

To her side, Zelen fended off two others, wielding the branch he carried like a quarterstaff. She noticed flashes of motion as he blocked and dodged, then a more vivid burst of yellow-green as he caught one of the demons with a fatal blow.

They kept moving, killing when they could but mostly trying to keep clear of lashing claws, heading toward any human bodies they could see or screams they could hear. To Branwyn’s mild surprise and distinct gratitude, they met with others on the same errand: one of the palace guards wielding a gold-hilted sword and an older