Demon Beast (Path of the Thunderbird Book 3)

by eden Hudson

  The lavaglass blade’s ragged spurs caught on his muscle, ravaging the flesh as it tore into him. Yoichi stumbled backward, trying to keep his feet. Koida kept pushing until he was pressed to the bookshelf, choking on his own blood.

  “I know you can heal yourself,” she hissed through gritted teeth. “Give Raijin’s Ro back now or I’ll stand over you until you come back to life and kill you a thousand more times in the worst ways possible.”

  Yoichi chuckled, a sound that devolved into choked wheezing. Blood trickled through his grin.

  “You can have it back when you learn to behave yourself,” he said.

  Shaking with rage, Koida twisted the broadsword, leaning her weight into it. Yoichi’s grin froze in a pained rictus, and his hands scrabbled at the bookshelf, knocking books and scrolls to the floor, but he kept laughing.

  “Have you got the time to wait for me to heal, little sister? The fire’s growing fast, and it looks as if Lao has the upper hand with your savage.”

  Koida blinked, realizing she could hear the clash of Ro on lavaglass over the roar of the fire. Red and black flickered through the smoke, throwing Lao’s and Cold Sun’s shadows in a hundred different directions at once. Both men choked and gasped for air as they struck and recoiled from one another. Through the soles of her soft leather boots, the floor felt hot.

  “You’re going to kill all of us,” she said, glaring at Yoichi.

  Her brother’s smile regained its cool superiority. “I’ll call Lao off and get you both to safety if—”

  He jerked suddenly, his purple eyes rolling back in his head as a burled steel dagger planted itself in the side of his skull.

  Koida stared at the blade, dumbfounded.

  Lysander appeared at her side, pulling her away from her white-haired brother. As her moon broadsword tore free of Yoichi’s stomach, his slender frame crumpled to the floor, dead. Again.

  “He stole Raijin’s Ro.”

  “The lower floors are falling apart, Princess,” Lysander said as if that mattered. “This whole tower is half a sneeze away from collapsing.”

  A tornado of twisting flame whirled upward from the public staircase, and fire whooshed through the hidden passageway, the burning wind ripping at her hair and clothing, but she couldn’t see anything beyond Yoichi’s slumped form.

  “Let go of me.” Koida tried to fight free of Lysander’s powerful grip, but the foreigner twisted her blade arm behind her back, shooting pain up into her shoulder and sending her up onto the tips of her toes. He started dragging her toward the balcony.

  Away from her thieving, murdering brother.

  “Let go of me! I have to get it back, let me go!” Her shouting broke off into uncontrollable coughing. It felt as if she were breathing hot coals and her skin was baking.

  “We haven’t got time for this,” Lysander growled. The pain in her shoulder doubled as he twisted her arm higher and pulled her along.

  On the balcony, Hush waved frantically for them to hurry, and Cold Sun sat on the ledge with one leg thrown over the side, an arm out to Lysander.

  “I will carry my sister down!” the Uktena shouted over the thunderous flames. “You take the satchel!”

  They were going to take her away and leave Yoichi there to burn with Raijin’s Ro.

  Koida shook her head. She wasn’t leaving without it. She slammed her right elbow into Lysander’s nose and twisted until the shoulder of her blade arm popped, breaking free.

  She bolted for Yoichi. Lysander didn’t understand. Raijin had given his Ro to her for safekeeping. He had trusted her. She was going to bring it back to him and rescue him from the Sun Palace, where everyone else she loved had died while she watched. He was depending on her to save him.

  Pain exploded through her skull, and she stumbled, feeling draining from her limbs. The floor of the burning library rushed up toward her, but faded to black before she hit.

  Chapter Forty-two

  MORTAL LANDS

  “Are you certain she’s dead?” Raijin’s arms and legs prickled as if they were being stung again by Youn Wha’s burrowing vines. They were heavy and sluggish, but feeling was slowly coming back into them, his body clearing the venom. Using the branching guai-ray electrical organs, he sent Nael the accompanying images and questions as he asked, “She won’t come back again?”

  The young ray responded with certainty: the image of her black heart smashed between his flat jaw palates and the feeling of a full belly and heartcenter.

  The crackling sound of burnt flesh moving made them both tense up, but rather than coming back to life a third time, the guai-ray senses told Raijin that the flower monster was crumbling. Nael sent him the image, allowing Raijin to watch the meaty plant dissipate and blow away until all that remained was Youn Wha’s torn face and the split-open body of the old woman.

  Raijin slumped back against the stone wall of the demolished tower. Youn Wha was dead. Truly dead. But he felt no sudden swell of happiness or justification. In truth, he felt little different than when he was searching for her. Just older and tired. He tried to call up the memory of everyone the grandmaster’s evil had destroyed, to remind himself that this had all been for a purpose, but time had blurred the faces of Master Chugi and Yong Lei. He could still hear their voices, but only just.

  Perhaps they were among the dead the Grandfather Spirit was supposed to send on to eternity, or perhaps they would return in the next cycle to live a new life. Raijin hoped Master Chugi was reborn in a place where he could read to his heart’s content and that Yong Lei would find someone who could appreciate his shameless jokes and complaints.

  They were gone. Youn Wha’s death was nothing to them, meaningless in the face of their memories. Raijin had stopped the Water Lily grandmaster, not for them, but for the ones who were still alive. The ones who could be saved.

  “She said that soon the third Path of Peace would be strangled,” he told Nael, though he was really just thinking aloud. “As if one of her plots was already in motion. Either Endless Day or Falling Leaf.”

  Would he have time to find Koida, Lysander, and Hush, or should he and Nael fly straight for the Dead Waters Kingdom and warn Imir?

  “And the Grandfather Spirit said Misuru would send every weapon she had against Koida, trying to turn her into the Dark Dragon,” Raijin said.

  In response, Nael nudged him in the side of the head for more attention.

  Raijin scrubbed the young guai-ray absently between its eye bumps while he considered his next actions. It felt as if his heartcenter were being pulled in two directions. Imir had sacrificed so much for their tribe and her kingdom. If the Path of Endless Day was wiped out, she would be killed with it. But if he failed Koida, he wouldn’t have another cycle to save her. She would be Unmade, gone forever from the fabric of the universe. As hard as it would be to lose one of his friends, he couldn’t let the Dragon end the world and herself.

  “Do you know where Lysander or Hush are, Nael?” Raijin asked, sending the ray questions and the memory of his friends’ electrical signatures. “What about Koida, the rider of the demon horse?”

  Nael responded with a desert landscape, an oasis city, and a looming tower. The young ray showed Raijin an image of Koida and Lysander as they rode her hot-tempered black destrier into a rocky streambed surrounded by miles of orange sand.

  Raijin felt his heart sink. He had been so certain Hush would stay to teach Koida.

  “Hush isn’t with them?” Lysander’s fears that the silent physician would return to her life of killing until she finally took her own life echoed in his mind. “Where did she go?”

  Nael dipped and fluttered his wings, sending an image not only of Hush, but of Cold Sun, the two of them riding an enormous Uktena war ram alongside Koida and Lysander.

  Raijin relaxed a bit, smiling. “You frightened me, Nael. For a moment, I thought I wasn’t as clever as I believed.”

  And that I had lost another of my friends to the darkness.

  The only des
ert he knew of was far to the north end of the continent. He had read about its blistering sands, but had never traveled there in all his time with Lysander and Hush. If he remembered right, it was several weeks’ journey from the Horned Serpent Valley. The Dead Waters Kingdom lay almost a month to the west. By the time he found Koida and his friends and they made it back to the Dead Waters, Imir’s Path of Endless Day could be long destroyed.

  Raijin shifted his arm into the lavaglass butterfly sword and hacked off a lock of his blood- and ichor-soaked black hair.

  “Take this to Imir,” he told Nael, sending the ray the white-haired young woman’s electrical signature along with images of the Dead Waters Kingdom. “She probably won’t leave her citizens, but she’ll know I sent you. Protect her like you would me until I can join you.”

  Nael sent sadness and frustration. He had just found Raijin. He didn’t want to leave him again so soon.

  Raijin rested his face against Nael’s rounded nose and let him feel the same reluctance to be parted in his heart, but followed this with urgency and danger.

  “Swim fast, Nael,” he said. “Please.”

  Finally, the young guai-ray relented and took the lock of hair between his jaw palates. With a final bump against Raijin’s ear, Nael darted out of the hole he had made in the tower.

  Raijin struggled to his feet, grabbing the leg of an overturned table for support. Stinging needles crawled through his muscles, but compared to being eaten by akane or burrowed into by spiraling vines, the sensation of the venom was hardly noticeable.

  He had to find Koida—though he no longer had any idea what he should do when he found her. He had tried and failed to follow the variation he’d seen in the Dead Waters Kingdom, but perhaps if he just told her about their immortal past...

  Misuru’s duplicitous smile appeared in his mind. If she remembered herself, then you would be enemies.

  If Koida remembered who she was, would she turn against him?

  Raijin had watched it happen thousands of times in the waters of the Passage to Eternity, the world dead by Ha-Koi’s poisoned hands. In thousands of lives he had tried to stop her, and in many of them she had killed him. The cycles continued, destroying her immortal energy a little more every time. Unmaking the Dragon, driving her toward oblivion.

  There had been variations where he killed her before she could destroy the world, but he never saw what happened to her afterward. She must have been reborn in a new body, as the cycles and their endless dance continued. If she was reborn without suffering through a cataclysmic destruction of the world, then her immortal energy wouldn’t be further damaged, would it? Was that why he had chosen to kill her in those variations?

  The rubble near the far wall of the tower room shifted.

  Instinctively, Raijin fell into the stance of the demon beast. Jade Ro crackled to the surface of Raijin’s skin, rolling and arcing like electricity and filling the air with the smell of ozone.

  His motions dragged on at less than half-speed as his body struggled to rid itself of Youn Wha’s venom, but the guai-ray thundered in his chest, glorying in the prospect of another battle. It was just as the Grandfather Spirit had said—the demon beast cared nothing for his life or death, it only wanted more bloodshed, more victory.

  Raijin pulled back his demonic Ro and forced himself to straighten into the Uktena’s war art fighting stance, relaxed but alert, blade arm forward. He sent the living lavaglass that was stabilizing his broken ribs to his left arm, shifting his flesh and blood into the deadly butterfly sword.

  Across the tower, a man grunted with strain. Stone and wood tumbled aside as the trapdoor to the room was heaved open. Boots pounded the floor and electrical signatures flooded the tower.

  Humans. Not Water Lilies.

  They gagged at the stench of burnt flesh. One man turned and vomited onto the floor.

  “Blade and death, it’s true,” a stunned voice said. “The Ji Yu was an assassin all along! The second princess was conspiring against the empire with Water Lilies!”

  Around the room, Ro weapons manifested, lighting up the guai-ray senses with threat.

  But not killing intent. They were prepared to do whatever they had to do, but they had not come to murder him.

  “Unmanifest your poisoned blade, Water Lily scum,” a harsh voice growled.

  If not for the demon beast snarling in his chest, Raijin would have laughed. They didn’t realize his blade was lavaglass. They thought it was manifested from the toxic black Ro of a Water Lily master.

  “You’re outnumbered, murderer,” the harsh voice warned him. “We won’t die easily like that old alchemist. Unmanifest your blade or be executed on the spot.”

  Kill them! the guai-ray roared.

  They’re human, and they have no idea what they’re doing, Raijin thought. They were just guards apprehending a man that they thought had murdered a harmless old woman.

  They beg for death! Kill them and emerge the victor!

  Master Chugi’s kindly old face appeared in his mind with perfect clarity then, every wrinkle and age spot, telling a much younger Raijin, “Imagine that you gave in to your pride and avoided humiliation and defeat at the hands of one weaker than yourself, but in doing so, you harmed or even killed the weaker party. A superficial victory, but in truth, a moral failure.”

  I’m supposed to defend the weak, not attack them. Raijin retrieved the lavaglass, shifting his left arm back to flesh and blood.

  “I surrender,” he said, pushing back his sleeves and holding out his hands so they could see he was weaponless. “I did kill the alchemist, honored guards, but not because I am an assassin. She was the grandmaster of the Water Lilies, a woman named Youn Wha. Six years ago, she ordered the destruction of my Path and—”

  “Lies!” the harsh voice barked. “Typical Water Lily tactic, deflecting the suspicion onto their victims.”

  “Apologies, but—”

  “He’s trying to confuse us with a mystifying curse,” one of the guards shouted. “Cut out his tongue!”

  “He’ll poison you if you touch him.”

  “Not if you take his head with it,” the man worried about curses argued.

  “But what if he’s telling the truth?” an older voice spoke up. “What if he truly isn’t the Water Lily and the alchemist was?”

  “Len’s been cursed!”

  “No, I haven’t. I’m only saying I don’t want to be part of murdering a man who wasn’t doing nothing wrong. Water Lilies love poisons and potions, don’t they? So it’s not beyond possibility that one might be an alchemist by trade, is it?”

  “Cursed,” muttered the worried man.

  “Anyway,” Len continued, “isn’t it the emperor’s job to cast judgment before blood’s spilled in the palace?”

  Armor clinked and leather creaked as feet shifted.

  The guai-ray senses felt one of the men approach and press a Ro-blade to Raijin’s throat. His own jade Ro fought to lash out in a bolt of electricity, but Raijin wrestled it back, caging it in his heartcenter before it could attack the guard.

  “You’ll stand trial before the Rising Phoenix Emperor when he returns, murderer,” the harsh-voiced guard growled. “For now, if you say another word, we’ll have no choice but to cut your head off to stop your lies. Nod if you understand.”

  Very carefully so as not to cut his own throat with the man’s blade, Raijin nodded. If the throne had gone to whom he suspected it had, then he could guess what the new emperor’s judgment would be.

  “Same goes for if you even look like you’re about to manifest something,” the guard said. “Don’t make a twitch while we lock on the shackles, or there won’t be enough of you left to stand trial.”

  The guai-ray thrashed and roared in defiance as they bound him with more chains and irons than even a demon beast could break free of, but Raijin forced himself to remain obediently still.

  Though Raijin didn’t say another word, and he had never heard of a Water Lily putting a curse
on someone by speaking, the guards deemed it necessary to gag him before they led him away.

  Chapter Forty-three

  MORTAL LANDS

  Koida fought her way up from the depths of sleep as if she were trying to kick to the surface of sinking sand. She didn’t want to wake—she could feel the urge to stay comfortably lost in slumber trying to overwhelm her, almost like a giant hand pushing her back down into the sand. The contradictory emotions were somehow familiar.

  As if someone was interfering with her thoughts.

  She shoved off Lysander’s influence and opened her eyes to find moonlit dunes racing past on either side. Pernicious’s broad back lay beneath her. Lysander sat behind her, keeping her from falling off the galloping half-demon.

  “Even asleep you’re as disagreeable as your houndmeat demon,” Lysander muttered.

  She scowled. “It’s you meddling with my heartcenter, isn’t it?”

  “For your own good. If I hadn’t done anything, that pouting face would be candle wax right now, Princess.”

  The bottom dropped out of Koida’s stomach as she remembered the flames licking up the stairways. Raijin’s Ro stolen. Yoichi impaled on her broadsword. Lysander dragging her away from the only person who could give her betrothed’s Ro back.

  Without thinking, Koida twisted in her seat and jumped on the foreigner like a rabid mountain lion. Pernicious reared and bolted, sending them tumbling from the destrier’s back and into the sand.

  “You drunken idiot!” she screamed, raining fists on his face, chest, and arms. “I could have gotten it back if you hadn’t interfered! Now there’s nothing! I don’t have anything! He trusted me!”

  Responding to her fury, her left arm shifted to the moon broadsword. Lysander jerked his head away, the lavaglass blade hissing into the sand where his ear had been a thin moment before. Then huge hands were pulling Koida off the foreigner and restraining her arms.