chapterfourteen
Sacrifices
Dylan’s voice echoed through the rafters above. “For the crime of…”
Deetra snatched the dagger from Butch’s wound and turned in time to see Max barrelling at her. Deetra brought the dagger down as he collided with her midsection. The dagger glanced off his shoulder blade.
They hit the ground, Max on top, between her legs. He grabbed her wrist and smacked her knuckles against the floor to make her let go of the knife.
“… the Evil One, Ayla of …”
Deetra grit her teeth and held onto the dagger. She punched him in the cheek, left handed. A sick grin on his face, he ignored it and ground her knuckles into the wood. Her tunic had hiked to her waist.
He was enjoying this. She could feel his stiffness between her legs. The acrid smell of smoke hung in the air. Deetra punched again, but his other arm blocked.
“… to burn at the stake.”
Max leaned his weight onto the hand with the dagger and smashed his fist down on her fingers. Her middle and ring digits broke and the dagger slipped. Max snatched the blade.
Deetra grabbed his wrist with both hands. He twisted her broken digits until she screamed. The dagger came down.
Deetra weaved her head and turned it to the side. The blade cut her chin and stabbed the floor. She reached under his tunic, and grabbed him by his testicles.
Max’s whole body flinched and tensed. He punched, but Deetra got her other arm up in time. She head butted him in the face. His nose cracked and spewed blood on her face.
Max’s head whipped back and Deetra rolled him onto his back, hand still gripping between his legs. The dagger clattered over the wood. Max punched again and hit her in the nose. The world flashed and pressure built instantly in her sinuses.
She squeezed harder and Max howled the guileless scream of true torment as one crushed in her palm. She leaned over his face, blood dripping from her nose.
“Do you know what I did at Hillside?”
She twisted and pulled. Something inside his scrotum ripped.
Max opened his mouth to scream again, when Butch’s boot came down and crushed his temple with a sickening crunch. Deetra recoiled and looked up.
Butch lifted his foot with a sneer, hands over his belly wound. “She picked grapes.”
A heart-wrenching wail echoed through the rafters.
Deetra scrambled to her feet. Smoke billowed under the heavy steel-banded wooden door of the temple. The scream paused, then returned; a broken, raw sound that turned Deetra’s insides to jelly.
Butch ran with a limp to the door. He grabbed the handle and jerked his hand away with a grunt. He winced, jumping up and down, grunting, fighting the pain. Bits of flesh stuck to the handle.
They were too late. Ayla would die just beyond the temple door, while Deetra stood on the other side, helpless.
Ayla’s wail continued, longer than she thought possible, before it faded again. Her eyes settled on the overturned Altar. This was a temple, and she, a Priestess. She tried to recall the prayer, but couldn't pull a single word from her racing mind.
Deetra turned her face to the rafters and yelled for the Goddess. “Help me! Ayla needs you!”
Nothing. Ayla wailed again outside, weaker, dying. Deetra turned, searching the stone covered windows, the walls, and rafters above for an answer. Smoke rolled up the inside of the door in a creeping black cloud.
She balled her one working fist and screamed at the temple.
“WHERE ARE YOU?”
The stone covering the two windows shattered like glass. The bricks fell into shards and crumbled to the floor in a wave, billowing dust. Colored light tinted the debris-filled air in hues of red and blue. The stained glass that once decorated the window stood miraculously intact. Images of fire, minotaurs, and blood stood over Deetra on either side like painted sentinels.
Ayla cried out once more.
The image on the window before her depicted a woman at the stake, wreathed in flames. The other showed a woman with short brown hair on her knees, looking up at the sky with tears streaming down her face.
Deetra’s insides went cold.
She picked up a stone from the ground and hurled it through the image of the woman burning, smashing a fist sized hole. She turned to get another stone.
Butch picked up one of the half-broken crates and hurled it at the window. That did it. Glass rained down as he ran back to her. He held out his hands, fingers laced, palms up. Deetra propped her foot on it. He lifted and she crawled over the jagged ledge.
Deetra dropped to the narrow alley between the temple and the building next to it. She climbed over the refuse in the smoke clouded alley. Ayla had gone quiet. The flagstone flickered orange in time with the roar of the flames and popping wood. Deetra’s heart beat a broken, panicked rhythm as she climbed out of the alley.
The Furless stood in a line, nine of them, watching Ayla burn. Her body was a charred husk within a cocoon of twisting flames. Nothing recognizable as her friend remained. She had the crazy hope, for an instant, that the body did not belong to Ayla - but Deetra knew.
They had formed a semicircle on the other side of the pyre with Dylan on one end.
She had no weapon. Her good hand could not grip one if she wanted it to, but the wrenching pain in her heart could not accept doing nothing.
Ayla would not hesitate and never owned a weapon. A Priestess needed only her Goddess. Deetra was not a Priestess and didn't want the title. She was Ayla’s protector, her knight, and she had failed. If the rest killed her, she could die knowing she had taken Dylan with her.
Butch hit the ground behind her with a grunt in the piled refuse. Good. He could cover her while she throttled the traitor. She bolted out of the alley and headed straight for Dylan. Two on the closest end pointed at her through the haze. They shouted orders, drowned out by the din of the twin fires.
She cut between the inferno of the temple doors and the one engulfing her friend - her love. The medallion beneath her tunic bounced on her breastbone. Scooping up a burning, two-foot section of kindling from the pyre with her off hand, she shrieked a battle cry. Dylan, sword already drawn, ran to meet her between the two conflagrations.
“Handle the orc. I got this one,” he shouted to his men.
Thunder rolled in the distance as Dylan slowed to a trot and then stopped. He gripped the chains of a medallion in one hand and held the sword out to one side. Deetra ran at him full speed and took an awkward swing with the stick.
He lifted the sword, parried, and stepped to the side. Deetra stumbled to a stop a few feet past him. She turned around in time to see him lunge with his sword. He thought he had her and overcommitted.
Deetra weaved and he missed. She held the unburned end of the stick with both hands. Rage muted the pain of her broken fingers. It came down in an arc, striking his sword wrist. The sword clattered to the ground. She took a swing at his face.
Dylan ducked and kneed her in the stomach. Deetra doubled over. The section of wood dropped to the ground. His boot collided with her mouth.
The world flashed. She chased her balance back a few steps and landed on her rear. The flames of Ayla’s sacrifice heated her back and roared in her ears. Her vision doubled like she couldn’t uncross her eyes.
The medallion wrapped around Dylan’s fist glinted in the firelight as he picked up his sword. Deetra retrieved the steel oroboros from inside her collar as the other hand grabbed a new stick from the pile behind her. She forced her injured hand to grip the burning pitch.
Her hand cried out but Deetra used the flash of agony to focus her eyes. She held the burning stick behind her back as she stood, wincing. She turned her shoulder, feigning injury to her arm.
Dylan advanced on her, a slow and menacing walk under the gloomy sky of the morning. Swords clanked and men screamed from the other side of the blaze. Drops of rain pattered on Deetra’s head and hissed in the fires.
Dylan grinned as he advanced on her.
“Your Goddess is late.”
Deetra tossed the holy symbol to him. Dylan jumped away, legs together, as if she tossed him a handful of spiders. Deetra threw the stick, end over end. It hit him square in the forehead, splashing burning pitch across his face. He screamed and dropped the sword.
Deetra rushed to his weapon as he shrieked and rubbed his eyes. He dropped to his knees in the rain. He tried to splash water on his face but no puddles had formed yet. His fingers rubbed across damp cobblestone, frantic.
“My eyes! God of Light, my eyes!”
She stepped behind him.
“Traitor,” she said, and shoved the blade into his spine. Her injured hands didn't have the strength for a killing thrust. The blade sank in an inch next to his backbone, slipped out of Deetra’s hands and clanked on the road.
Dylan’s back arched and he fell over to the side, writhing.
“You kissfish bitch!”
Deetra picked up the blade with her left hand. He rolled onto his side and held up a bracer to block. She swung the blade down. The cut slid down the bracer to his wrist.
His hand twisted to an unnatural angle and he hollered again. Deetra brought the sword down again with her left hand at his neck. It chopped into his collar, blade wedging into bone.
Dylan went rigid, blood pouring into the street from his collar. Deetra pried the blade loose and hacked with another awkward swing. The blade hit higher, under the ear. The Furless leader’s body went slack.
The rain picked up and thunder rumbled a low warning of impending downpour. Deetra squinted through the flames and smoke, trying not to look at Ayla’s remains. The time for mourning would come.
Butch cried out. Sliding and snapping wood sounded from the other side, under the crackling of the diminishing flames. Butch’s form appeared as a shadow in the wreath of flames around Ayla. He rammed the stake with his shoulder.
It tipped and fell to its side, crushing one of Ayla’s seared arms. He rolled down the side of the pile, hissing, and grunting in pain. The post only burned in a few places, and the fall had extinguished most of what surrounded Ayla’s body.
Deetra ran over with the sword, climbing through the remaining flames. The fire scorched her calves and thighs. She chopped at the ropes that held Ayla. Almost burned through, they came away with a few quick hacks. Butch had used three dead bodies to create a path up the bonfire. No other Furless lingered. Cowards. She dragged Ayla’s body out of the knee high flames, hands blackening, and collapsed in the wet street with her.
Thunder rolled through the sky and the rain beat down in heavy drops. Deetra grabbed her under the shoulders to pull Ayla’s body into her lap. Despite the cooling precipitation, Ayla remained too hot to touch.
Deetra flinched as every part of her body singed already ragged skin. Rain drops hissed as they landed on red embers of Ayla’s smoldering flesh. Ayla’s head lolled to the side. Half of her face bore blisters and black scorches, but otherwise remained unblemished.
Deetra wanted nothing more than to hold her, but the Goddess denied even that. She cried out with every touch as she laid Ayla on her back in the street. Deetra used two fingers to pick up Ayla’s wrists, one at a time, and folded them over her chest.
The rain beat down harder and the door of the temple fell from its hinges, black and thin. Deetra ran her fingertips along Ayla’s cheek, and planted a kiss on the corner of her mouth. She whispered, her throat tight and voice husky.
“I'm sorry.” She curled her lips in and bit them. She swallowed but her heart stayed lodged in her throat. “I tried.”
A shadow cast over her, blocking the rain. Deetra looked back. Butch stood over her, unsteady on his feet, bleeding from half a dozen serious wounds on his chest, arms and face. Their eyes met.
He put a hand on Deetra’s shoulder. “We have to go.”
Deetra shook her head and a sob escaped. She covered her face with trembling, broken, and now scorched hands.
Butch took her under the arm. “She’s dead, Deetra.”