I Only Summon Villainesses

The dark didn’t answer my grin. It didn’t need to. It answered with a shape.

It came low and wrong, closer to the ground than I expected, moving in a way that didn’t belong to legs so much as a general suggestion of them, and Death Sense screamed a location half a heartbeat before my eyes caught up. I threw myself sideways, felt something pass through the space where my ribs had been, and hit the ground rolling.

I came up already swinging.

Wren connected with something solid, wet, and utterly unfamiliar, and the impact ran up my arm like I’d hit a wall wrapped in meat. Whatever it was, it didn’t scream. It didn’t make a sound I could name a species to. It just kept coming, and I kept moving, and for a few seconds the only thing keeping me alive was the fact that Death Sense fired faster than I could think.

Left. I moved left before I knew why, and a limb the width of my torso cratered the ground where I’d been standing.

Down. I dropped, and something passed close enough to part my hair.

’Okay. Okay, this is fine. This is completely fine and I am handling it extremely well.’

You’re lying to both of us, Wren said. At least be honest about it.

’I’m handling it extremely poorly. Better?’

Marginally.

I didn’t have time to enjoy the banter. Death Sense spiked again, and I threw myself right this time, dagger coming up on reflex, and I felt it bite into something before a force I couldn’t see swatted me clean off my feet.

I hit the wall. Hard enough that the whole cave rang for a second, hard enough that my vision blurred at the edges and my ears filled with a high, thin whine that had nothing to do with the creature.

’Get up.’

I got up.

The wyvern was still screaming somewhere behind me, thrashing against whatever had taken its leg out from under it, and Light — Light was on the ground where I’d left him, except he wasn’t on the ground anymore. He was standing. Swaying, one hand pressed to the gash the dagger had left on his knee days ago, or hours ago, time had stopped meaning much down here, but standing.

His eyes were still wrong. Still lit with that ghastly crimson that made my skin want to peel itself off and run. But something in the way he held his sword had changed. Less like a puppet holding a prop. More like a man who remembered, somewhere underneath whatever was steering him, what the weapon was for.

”Don’t,” I said, mostly out of habit, because the last three times he’d been upright he’d tried to open my throat.

He didn’t listen. He never did. But this time he wasn’t coming for me.

He turned, sword raised, and swung at the dark.

For one absurd second I just stood there and watched a man I’d been trying to kill twenty minutes ago throw himself at the thing that had actually done this to him, and something twisted hard behind my ribs, sharp enough that my next breath caught before I could put a name to it.

’Fine. Fine, you son of a bitch. We do it together, then.’

I moved.

The creature had a shape now, or something close enough to one that I could hate it properly. Limbs too long for the body they sprouted from, a mass low to the ground that seemed to swallow the green glow instead of reflecting it, and no face I could find no matter how hard I looked, just a wet, shifting darkness where a face should have been. Death Sense read it as wanting something, constantly, endlessly, in a way that made my stomach turn.

It wanted us. All of us. The way I wanted to breathe.

Light came in from the left, sloppy but committed, and the creature turned to meet him. I used the opening.

Death Sense screamed a warning half a second too late, and I understood, with the particular clarity that only comes right before something goes wrong, that it had faked the opening. It hadn’t turned toward Light at all. It had let me think it had.

A limb caught me across the chest and threw me into the wall a second time.

I didn’t get up as fast that time.

’Come on. Come on, get up, get up, get up—’

Blood ran into my eye. My ribs felt like they’d rearranged themselves into a new and worse configuration. Somewhere close, Light was shouting something at the creature that didn’t sound like words, more like the last scraps of a man trying to claw his way to the surface of himself, and the wyvern was still screaming, and I was on the ground in the dark with a monster that had just proven Death Sense could be lied to.

That should have been the part where I stayed down.

Instead I thought about Kassie.

Not anything specific. Not a memory with edges to it. Just the fact of her, the year she’d spent beating discipline into me one bruise at a time, the exact tone of exasperation in her voice when I did something stupid, which was often, which was constantly, which was probably going to be the reason I survived this. I thought about White Feather and Maggie and Celestine, somewhere behind a locked door I couldn’t open, waiting on the other side of a debt I hadn’t finished paying. I thought about Brunhilde getting cheaper by the hour in a place I couldn’t reach, spending her patience on the hope that I wouldn’t spend mine on being a hero.

I didn’t get to see any of them if I died in a cave fighting something that didn’t even have a face.

’Get up.’

I got up.

This time I didn’t wait for Death Sense to tell me where it was. I watched. Really watched, the way Tactical Omniscience wanted me to, cataloguing the drag of its limbs against the stone, the rhythm underneath the chaos, the half-second hitch before it lied.

There. The hitch.

It came for me again. This time the false opening flickered, that same fractional stillness, the tell it hadn’t known it was giving, and I didn’t take the bait. I threw myself into the real strike instead, dagger first, and felt it connect with something that shrieked, high and awful, the first sound the thing had made since it came through the wall.

Light hit it from the other side in the same instant, sword driving in with more strength than a half-conscious, marked, exhausted man should have had left in him, and for one brief, vicious moment the two of us worked like we’d trained together instead of tried to kill each other twice.

The creature reeled. Folded in on itself. Retreated half a step into the dark, wounded, and for the first time since it had come through that wall, I felt it hesitate.

I didn’t let it recover.

I went in with everything the well had left, which wasn’t much, but it didn’t need to be much, it needed to be enough, and I drove Wren in where the shriek had come from and twisted.

It didn’t die. I didn’t think things like this died, not from a sword, not in one night. But it broke away, tearing itself back through the hole in the wall it had made, dragging its ruined shape into the dark it had come from, and the cave went quiet in a way that felt less like victory and more like a held breath.

I stood there, chest heaving, blood in my mouth, dagger still raised at nothing.

Beside me, Light swayed on his feet, the crimson in his eyes flickering, dimming, and for one heartbeat his jaw unclenched and his eyes held mine instead of sliding past me. Something that looked almost like recognition.

Then his knees buckled, and he went down for good this time, and I was too wrecked to do anything but watch him fall.

The wyvern limped over, favoring its ruined leg, and lowered its head until its remaining eye was level with mine. It didn’t growl this time.

It just looked at me like it was reconsidering something.

’Yeah,’ I thought, sliding down the wall until I was sitting in a puddle of my own blood and somebody else’s. ’I earned that look. I think I actually earned that one.’