“Kill me!” Deirdre cried. “His control over me lessens.” Her arms had gone slack. She looked at Nicodemus with wide, pleading eyes.

“Deirdre, I c-can’t possibly-”

“The blade,” she said nodding to the greatsword she had dropped. “Pick it up.”

The cavern blazed brighter with Typhon’s white light. Garkex bellowed as Typhon crushed the troll’s chest with a blazing fist. The other night terrors were deconstructing as the light frayed their exterior sentences.

Nicodemus picked up the sword and stepped toward the brawl; he would rather die with a weapon in hand than hide in a corner.

“For pity’s sake!” Deirdre pleaded. “Typhon corrupted my goddess. He led me to endanger Kyran. Don’t let me live to serve the demon.” Tears filled her eyes. “He will twist my will. He will make me one of them!”

Nicodemus could not move.

Before him Typhon leaped to his feet with a deafening roar. The demon tore apart Fael, the night terror lycanthrope. Oily blood now seeped from small wounds across the demon’s head and chest. Only Tamelkan, the eyeless dragon, remained.

“Now!” Deirdre pleaded. “Nicodemus, before it is too late!”

Typhon lunged forward and caught the small dragon’s head. With a quick twist of the torso the demon snapped the wyrm’s neck and threw it aside.

Nicodemus raised his sword.

Typhon turned to him. “Nicodemus, stop. You will only harm yourself.”

“Nicodemus!” Deirdre cried. “I beg you!”

Typhon shook his head. “I have chosen the two of you to beget a new race after the War of Disjunction. You are to know unparalleled happiness. You must survive together!”

“Please,” Deirdre whispered. Her tear-bright face shone with torment and longing. Her trembling hand drew back her cloak to reveal the dirty white cloth above her left breast. “Save me if you bear me any love.”

“No!” Typhon bellowed as Nicodemus thrust the rusted blade through Deirdre’s heart.

DEIRDRE CONVULSED. HER hands came up to grasp the sword.

Typhon howled, a torrent of crimson blood spewing from his left breast. The demon fell to his knees, wings flapping wildly, arms trembling.

Deirdre collapsed into Nicodemus’s arms. They sank slowly to the floor. She looked up at him, struggling for breath. He could barely see through his own tears.

Without warning, a massive obsidian arm pulled them apart and tossed Nicodemus to the ground. Typhon lifted Deirdre up and pulled the sword from her chest. He hugged her close. “No!” she gasped. “No! Nicodemus, help! He’s healing-”

The demon had dissolved into a dark cloud that was imbuing itself into Deirdre’s body.

Confused relief flooded through Nicodemus. Deirdre wouldn’t die after all. The demon’s red and black wings now grew from her back. She held the greatsword in one hand.

Nicodemus struggled to his feet and grabbed her arm. Touching her sent a shock through his body and filled his mind with a vision of Deirdre as a girl running through a field of heather. He saw her holding a child. Then he was back in the present. She was holding him. Her once green eyes were now black as onyx.

She began to whisper, not with her own voice, but with Typhon’s rumbling one. “Lord Severn, April, James Berr,” she whispered. “You’ve always been mine. The next dragon will make you mine again.”

Nicodemus opened his mouth but could not speak.

“Kill the beast!” a woman’s voice bellowed as a Magnus wartext shot over Deirdre’s head. Suddenly Magistra Okeke and two sentinels rushed into the cavern casting violent language at Deirdre.

The sentinels must have magically spanned the distance from the fractured Spindle Tunnel to the cavern.

With a shove, Deirdre sent Nicodemus flying to slam against the cavern wall. Everything disappeared for a moment. Then he was slouched on the floor.

Deirdre leveled her greatsword at the sentinels. With blinding speed, she dodged around the spells to charge the black-robes. The first she slashed across the chest, the second across the throat. But when she lunged for Magistra Okeke, the woman leaped back in time to avoid the blade.

Another silver spell flashed through the cavern and knocked the sword from Deirdre’s hands. One of the sentinels remaining in the Spindle had renewed the attack.

With a cry, Deirdre ran for the cavern’s entrance. Nicodemus struggled to his feet in time to see her leap out into the tunnel.

He ran forward and saw her drop out of the tunnel’s decimated floor and spread her wings.

She was too heavy to fly, but by flapping hard she turned south and began a slow descent to the forest. Occasionally her arms swung out with the effort. Once, before she had fallen too far, Nicodemus glimpsed in her hand the small, glinting emerald.

CHAPTER Forty-five

Nicodemus watched until Deirdre disappeared into the forest far below. The wind set his long black hair fluttering. The cold autumn night smelled of coming rain.

“She will survive the demon,” a soft voice said behind him.

Nicodemus turned to see a short, transparent figure that at first seemed to be a ghost. She stared at him with lapis eyes and pressed her wide lips into a solemn line. Her hair was not hair at all but a slow, white torrent: a miniature white river that tumbled down her back to splash against her ankles. Thick green robes floated all about her as if underwater.

“Boann,” Nicodemus said with a nod and a backward step.

“What is left of her,” the figure said, returning the nod. “I have escaped the prison Typhon made for me in my own ark, but I am now too weak to manifest myself physically.”

“Can you save Deirdre?” Nicodemus asked, taking another step away.

The goddess looked past him to the forest in which Deirdre had vanished.

“No.” She studied Nicodemus. “But one day you might. I have watched you, Nicodemus Weal. And when Deirdre touched the ark, I learned all that she knew. I would swear on the Creator’s name to protect and help you in your struggle against the demons. Do you know what that means? For a deity to swear on the Creator’s name?”

Nicodemus had been backing away. Now he stopped. “It means you would be bound to your oath, that you could never break it.”

The young goddess nodded and held out her transparent hand. “Will you exchange oaths? I will pledge myself to you if you pledge yourself to freeing Deirdre.”

Nicodemus studied the goddess. Deities sometimes swore fealty to each other, but never to mortals. “Why would you offer such a thing? Being human, I could break my vow; you could not.”

Boann’s hand did not waver. “I am little more than a wraith now, unable to affect the physical world. I will remain so until reunited with Deirdre. Unless you take me under your protection, Typhon’s followers will find me and tear me apart.”

Her voice grew urgent. “If you refuse, Deirdre will languish under the demon’s control. It is only through you that I might regain her.”

“Then I accept,” Nicodemus said firmly. Together they kneeled and swore on the Creator’s name-he to rescue Deirdre, she to protect and serve him.

Slowly they stood. She nodded and sent her waterfall-hair cascading over her shoulders. “The human deities resisting Typhon call themselves The Alliance of Divine Heretics. My mother, the rain goddess Sian, is a Heretic. Long ago I sought to join the Alliance, but they declined. They felt my political involvement in the Highlands made me too visible to the demon-worshipers.”

The goddess sighed. “And it seems they were right. My scheming somehow alerted Typhon of my connection to the Alliance. He sought to infect me in hopes of gaining a spy among his enemies. But Fellwroth attacked him during the infection, and so the demon won control of my ark but never of me. In time, he learned to manipulate Deirdre, though she fought him with all her will.”