I could taste iron.
Could hear it in my lungs too, wet and wrong.
Every breath dragged across something torn.
I lifted my head.
The lion stepped through the settling dust like it belonged there.
Its outline filled the ruined opening where the wall had been. Three heads. Huge shoulders. Claws scraping through stone fragments like they were pebbles.
The left head pushed through first, nostrils flaring.
The middle head followed, gaze fixed on me.
The right one looked past me toward Nate's body, then back, as if confirming its kills.
I spat blood onto the rubble and tried to stand again.
My left arm gave out halfway.
I nearly collapsed face-first, caught myself, pushed harder, and forced my legs under me. The world pitched violently. I grabbed the broken edge of a beam for balance and felt my own blood slick beneath my fingers.
The lion entered fully.
It took up almost the whole room.
This had been someone's front room once. A table might have stood here. A lamp. A rug. Maybe a family sat in this place last night and thought they were safe.
Now it held me and a monster.
The middle head tilted slightly.
Its mouth opened.
I saw the glow before I understood it.
Orange-red, deep in the back of its throat.
Heat washed over me.
I moved without thinking.
I threw myself sideways just as fire ripped past where I had been standing.
It wasn't a stream. Not clean. It came out in a violent, roaring burst, a wave of blistering heat and orange-white flame that swallowed the beam I'd been leaning on and turned it instantly into blackened cinders. The wall behind it burst apart, burning wood and molten plaster spraying into the street beyond.
I hit the ground hard, rolled through dust and burning splinters, and screamed as one ember bit into my forearm.
The lion strode through the flames it had made.
Its mane smoked at the edges, but it didn't seem to care.
I scrambled backward on one hand and both heels, dragging my injured side, leaving a thick red smear behind me.
"No," I whispered, though I wasn't speaking to it. "No."
I reached blindly and found a chunk of fallen masonry. Not enough. Nothing was enough.
The left head lunged.
I rammed the stone into its snout with everything I had left.
It shattered in my hand.
The lion barely flinched.
Then its paw came down.
I twisted at the last second.
The claws missed my throat.
Instead they drove through my side.
I felt them enter.
There was no mistaking it. No clean line of pain, no simple tearing. Just an impossible, hideous pressure forcing through flesh and muscle and everything inside me, followed by a heat so intense it didn't register as pain for half a second.
Then the pain arrived.
It tore a sound out of me that didn't sound human.
The lion lifted.
Its claws ripped back out of my body in a spray of blood and something darker, and I knew instantly, absolutely knew... that this was it. This was the wound. This was the one that mattered. My body folded around it on instinct, but there was nothing to hold in. My side burned and pulsed and poured.
I hit the ground.
The ceiling spun.
The three heads hovered above me for a moment, huge and blurred through tears and blood and dust.
Then the middle head huffed once through its nose.
A dismissive sound.
The paw withdrew.
The lion turned away.
For a second I didn't understand. My mind lagged behind everything now. Thought came in broken pieces, too slow to connect.
It was leaving.
It had finished.
I wasn't worth finishing properly.
The beast stepped back through the broken wall and into the street, its heavy paws fading one by one into the wider sounds of the city. The left head cast one last glance back at me, eyes bright with something like contempt.
Then it was gone.
Only the fire remained.
And the blood.
Mine.
So much of it.
I tried to move and nearly blacked out from the effort.
A wet cough spilled out of me. More blood splashed onto the broken floor beneath my face. My hand pressed against my side automatically, and my fingers slipped into warmth too deep and too thick to be a surface wound.
I could feel the torn edges of myself under my palm.
I pulled my hand back with a gasp.
Red.
Almost black in the low light.
Shaking.
I stared at it for a long moment without understanding why it mattered so much, then my gaze drifted past it and found the opening in the wall.
Beyond it, Nate still lay where the lion had thrown him.
He hadn't moved.
He wasn't going to.
Something in me tried to rise at that, grief, horror, denial, but it was all too far away now, like I was sinking under deep water and those emotions were happening up on the surface where I couldn't reach them anymore.
I dragged myself forward an inch.
Another.
The floor beneath me was rough stone and burning splinters and powdered plaster. Each pull left more of me behind. Blood smeared under my elbows. My breath came in shallow, wet jerks. Every inhale felt like a knife opening me wider.
The room darkened for a second, then cleared.
Darkened again.
I stopped moving.
I couldn't reach him.
I couldn't even reach the wall.
My body knew before I did.
This was death.
Not fear of it. Not the idea of it.
It had arrived.
I lay there, half on my side, half twisted onto my stomach, and listened to the city through the ringing in my ears.
Far-off screams.
A collapsing roof.
Something roaring in triumph.
Crackling flames.
All of it fading.
Mom.
The thought came suddenly and with such force it made my chest seize.
For an instant I was back in the kitchen that morning. Light through the window. The smell of eggs and butter. My father's coffee. My mother pretending not to watch me too closely while I tried to act like I wasn't nervous.
Then that broke apart and became the bedroom again. Blood on the floor. Her torn body. My father split open. Nate in the street. The claw through his chest.
Everyone.
Gone.
Because I was weak.
Because I couldn't protect anyone.
Because I had nothing.
I laughed.
Or tried to.
It came out as a wet choking sound and another cough of blood.
My fingers dug into the floor so hard the nails bent.
"I'll kill them," I whispered.
The words barely existed.
My throat burned. My mouth filled with blood every time I breathed. I could feel myself fading at the edges, vision tunnelling, limbs going colder, thoughts slowing into thick, useless sludge.
But the hatred stayed clear.
Hot.
Sharp.
Brighter than pain.
"I'll kill them all."
The room dimmed again.
I thought of Nate asking if I was okay.
Of him telling me not to do anything crazy.
Of him following me anyway.
Of him hitting me because he didn't want me to die.
Of him telling me to run with a claw through his chest.
Something in my face twisted. Maybe I was crying again. I couldn't tell.
"All of them," I whispered. "Every… last… one…"
It wasn't enough.
It wasn't enough to think it.
I wanted to carve it into the world.
I wanted to drag every monster in existence into the dirt and rip the life out of them with my bare hands. I wanted their screams. Their blood. Their extinction. I wanted a world with none of them left in it.
Hatred swallowed everything else.
My family.
Nate.
The city.
The pain.
All of it condensed into one unbearable point.
I will kill them.
I will kill them all.
And from somewhere very close, in the darkness just behind my failing senses, a voice answered.
"Would you?"
I froze.
Not my body. My body was barely mine anymore.
But something inside me stilled.
The voice was calm.
Not loud. Not distant. Not like a shout from the street or a sound from the flames.
It was right there.
Inside the room.
Inside me.
I tried to lift my head.
Failed.
"Who…" The word tore apart in my throat.
A pause followed.
Long enough that I thought maybe I had imagined it.
Then:
"I will grant that wish."
The darkness around the edges of my vision deepened.
For a moment I thought I saw stars where the broken ceiling should have been. Not real stars. Wrong ones. Too bright. Too many. Hanging in a black that did not belong to the world I knew.
My heart stumbled once in my chest.
Or maybe it was the world stumbling around me.
Blood spread beneath me in steady warmth.
The voice came again.
"But this power will come with a cost."
Then everything went black.