A Kiss Of Shadows   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

"Sholto asked that you grant Nerys death. Do it, so we can get out of here." I sounded disinterested, even bored. I thought if I had to stand there and hear that thing screaming for much longer, I'd join it.

Still on his knees, Doyle held the sword up to me, hilt first, the blade lying on his hands. "It is your magic—let it be your kill."

I stared at the bone hilt, the three ravens and their jeweled eyes. I didn't want to do it. I stared at the blade for a minute more, trying to think how to get out of this without appearing weak. Nothing came to mind. If I got squeamish now, then Nerys's torment was for nothing. I would have gained a new title but not the reputation that went with it.

I took the sword, and hated Doyle for offering it to me. It should have been easily done. Her heart was trapped and pulsing on the side of the ball. I thrust the blade into it. Blood poured black, and the heart stopped beating, but that thin screaming didn't stop.

I glanced at the two men. "Why isn't she dead?"

"The sluagh are harder to kill than the sidhe," Sholto said.

"How much harder?"

He shrugged. "It's your kill."

In that instant I hated them both, because I realized finally that it was a test. It might be that if I refused the kill they'd leave her alive. That was not acceptable. I couldn't leave her like this, knowing that she'd never age, or heal, or die. She'd just continue. Death was mercy; anything else was madness, hers and mine.

I stabbed the sword into every vital organ I could find. They bled, shriveled, ceased to function, and still the screaming went on. I finally raised the sword in a two-handed motion above my head and just started stabbing. At first I paused between stabs, or slices, but every time the screams just went on and on, trapped inside that ball of meat. Somewhere around the tenth blow, or the fifteenth blow, I stopped pausing, stopped listening, and just kept stabbing.

I had to make the screaming stop. I had to make her die. The world narrowed down to the pounding of the blade into the thick meat. My arms raised and lowered, raised and lowered. The blade bit into the flesh. Blood sprayed across my face, my shirt. I ended on my knees beside something that was no longer round, no longer whole. I'd hacked the thing into pieces, unrecognizable pieces. The screaming had stopped.

My hands were soaked with blood, crimson to the elbows. The sword blade was scarlet, the bone hilt was solid blood, and still the hilt fit my hand well, not slippery at all. The green silk shirt I'd put back on was black with soaked blood.