I Only Summon Villainesses

The survivor didn’t have much left in him after that. His shoulders had stopped fighting the wall behind them, like something in him had finally agreed to lose, and the green glow along the rock made his face look already halfway to a corpse. I asked more questions anyway, because that’s what you do when a dying man hands you half an answer and then looks like he’s about to stop breathing before you get the rest.

”How many,” I said. ”How many has it marked.”

His eyes had gone glassy, drifting somewhere past my shoulder, fixed on nothing I could see. ”Lost count,” he managed. ”Wasn’t just me who came in here looking for it. Wasn’t just him.” A tilt of his chin toward Light, weak, barely more than a twitch of the jaw. ”There’s more of us. Scattered. Some still walking around thinking they’re fine.”

’Some still walking around thinking they’re fine.’

That landed somewhere behind my ribs and sat there.

”Where,” I said. ”Where does it keep them?”

He didn’t answer that one. His breathing had gone shallow, thin little pulls of air that didn’t seem to be going anywhere useful, and his hand, the one that had been pointing at Light, dropped back into his lap like the string holding it up had been cut. I checked his pulse out of habit more than hope. It was there. Thin, but there, ticking under my fingers like it might quit on me at any second. His skin had gone the color of old wax.

I couldn’t carry him. I could barely manage the wyvern situation I already had, and the wyvern situation was not, by any measure, going well.

’Leaving him here feels like a bad decision.’

Everything about this feels like a bad decision, Wren said. You’re currently mounted on an angry lizard, hauling a cursed man, in a cave that’s apparently digesting people. Pick your battles.

I didn’t have a good answer for that, so I settled the survivor as best I could against the wall, propped at an angle that wouldn’t choke him, one hand resting slack against the stone like he might still need it later. I told him, mostly for my own benefit, that I’d send help if I found any worth sending. He didn’t respond. I hadn’t expected him to.

The wyvern watched the whole thing with its one good eye, unblinking, patient in the way animals get when they’ve already decided a thing is out of their hands. Its bad leg trembled under it, a slow tremor that never quite stopped, and when I climbed back onto its back it didn’t fight me on the direction. Toward the veins. Toward the smell.

We hadn’t gone another hundred feet before Light’s twitching got worse.

It wasn’t subtle anymore. His whole hand was shaking now, fingers curling and uncurling around a hilt that wasn’t there, over and over, like his body remembered a weapon his mind couldn’t. Sweat had come up cold along his hairline despite the chill of the cave.

The dark lines at his collar had crept another inch up his throat since I’d last looked, thin as veins under the skin, branching the way frost branches across glass. His breathing had a rasp in it I didn’t like, wet and effortful, like something was sitting on his chest from the inside and had no intention of getting up.

I stopped the wyvern and got down to check on him properly, one hand on his shoulder, the other tilting his chin so I could see how far the lines had actually gotten, which in hindsight was probably the reason I didn’t see it coming.

The wall gave way.

Not with a bang. With a wet, tearing sound, like fabric ripping under water, and something came through it low and fast, aimed at the wyvern’s bad leg. The wyvern screamed, an actual scream, higher and worse than anything I’d heard it make, and reared, and I threw myself sideways to keep from getting crushed under it.

I hit the ground hard enough to lose my breath, rolled, and came up with Wren already in my hand, dagger out in the other, boots skidding on loose stone before they found purchase. Death Sense screamed at a pitch I hadn’t felt from it before, a pressure behind my eyes that had no shape and no distance and no mercy about giving me either.

Whatever had come through the wall wasn’t standing where I could see it. It wasn’t standing anywhere I could see. The wyvern was still fighting somewhere off to my left, wings beating uselessly against stone it couldn’t get past, its scream trailing into something lower and more animal.

But the smell had gone from bad to unbearable, thick enough that my eyes watered and my throat closed against it, and somewhere in the dark past its heaving shape I heard something drag itself across stone.

Unhurried, like it already knew it had all the time it wanted, and mine besides.

”Show yourself,” I said, which was possibly the single most useless thing I had ever said out loud, in a life that had included quite a lot of useless things said out loud.

Nothing answered. Nothing ever answered.

But the dragging sound stopped, right at the edge of where the green glow gave up and the real dark started, and I had the distinct sense, spine-deep and immediate, that it was looking at me.

Not through eyes. I didn’t think it had those, not in any way that mattered. It was looking at me the way the survivor had described it, the way you’d size up something before deciding what shelf it goes on. The way it had looked at Light before it left its mark on him.

Like it was deciding whether I was worth collecting.

’Oh, you have got to be kidding me.’

I planted my feet, dagger in one hand, Wren steady in the other, knees bent and weight low, blade held the way you hold something you might need in the next half second, and did the only thing that made sense with a monster sizing you up in the dark.

I grinned at it.

”Come on then,” I said. ”Let’s see if I’m your type.”