Page 128 of Death is My BFF
“Oh, how I’ve been waiting for this moment,” Malphas said with a fiendish, evil smirk. “I knew it would only be a matter of time before you screwed up. Honestly, all your power, and agirlis your undoing? It’s quite pathetic, son. Dare I say, cliché.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Death said, and I could hear the tremor in his deep voice. “Killing her won’t change what I did.”
“Do not lecture me about morality when you stand in the gray.
Fortwo thousand years, my soul was imprisoned in the Underworld.
You could not fathom the pain and suffering I endured. All while you paraded around with Lucifer, all while you were treated likecelebrityamongst the mortals!”
Our surroundings pulsed with electric currents as Malphas’s anger amplified to a wrathful roar. His ravens soared high above us, circling the floodlights like vultures.
“The long wait was worth it, though,” he continued, calming himself with graceful precision. “It seems I couldn’t have arrived at a better time to stir up the balance between good and evil.”
His ominous words rattled me to the bone.
“I was achild!” Death thundered. “I was a child and a slave to those Roman games you put me through. Ahrimad took advantage of my innocence—”
“You made your choice,” Malphas said coldly. “Yourwords, not mine.”
“I have no remorse for you,” Death snarled, each word like poison in his mouth. “You took . . . everything I loved and destroyed it.
You should have stayed dead.”
Malphas’s face tightened with rage. He began uttering a chant, the words amplifying as he lifted his arms toward the night. The sigil pulsed to a violent rhythm with scarlet flames. Death stiffened, the shadows lingering around his frame pressing against their unyielding confinements.
“You’ll find I am not the only one who won’t stay dead,” Malphas said. “There is another who hungers to be freed. To free him, I will need to borrow your scythe. Hope you don’t mind.”
With a menacing roar unlike any animal I’d ever heard, Death thrashed in the circle, hurling himself into an invisible barrier. He dropped forcefully to one knee, then the other.
Anxiety squeezed at my heart. Death would die because of me, because I called on Malphas. I had to do something. Ihadto intervene.
“Stop!” I exclaimed. “Please, stop! I didn’t want this! I didn’t want you to hurt him!”
Malphas wouldn’t listen.
“Come on, comeon!” I shook out my fingers and flexed them as if it would charge the mysterious power within me.“Do something!”
With no luck, I barreled into the sigil, and I heard Malphas’s shout from the outside. Pain crippled me instantly, coiled and twisted as if I was being torn apart from the inside. Deeper into the lines of magic, pressure crushed against my skull, but my will was stronger. I reached a shuddering hand toward Death, just beyond the barrier of magic containing him at the center.
“Take my hand!” Tears surged down my face as my fingertips flickered to life with light, slowly burning an opening into the center sigil. “You’re not dying on me. Not tonight!”
Death’s gloves tore and talons slid out. With one last heave of strength, he slashed at the barriers remaining between us. The inner sigil exploded, and I was flung out of the lines with a blast of painful jolts up my legs and spine. I knew Death had saved my life again as the whole sigil spewed out ferocious red flames.
Death’s shoulders slumped; his movements turned lethargic. The beast beneath the cloak stirred, growling and hissing.
Death weakly lifted his head, hands gripping the earth. Our eyes connected through the darkness concealing his features, and in that painful moment, I knew this was good-bye.
A strangled cry ripped free from Death’s throat, as an orb of light ripped out from his body. The glow hovered in the air as bright as a blue flare, and then flung itself into the night. The shadow of Death’s face waned away as he collapsed forward, hitting the ground at a dead weight.
“DEATH!” I lurched to my feet to run into the sigil again and was jolted once more. Malphas’s once onyx-black eyes blazed the same shade of scarlet as the sigil’s lines. When I tried to escape the clearing, he pointed at me with a casual outstretched hand and suddenly I was consumed by a crushing, clawing pain from inside my skull. I screamed as it only amplified, my vision strobing in and out, before the sensations expired, and I hit the ground in utter exhaustion.
A grin spread over Malphas’s mouth. A tormentor proud of the pain he’d inflicted. “Not so fast, girl,” he tsked. “You and I are not done here.” Wind swept over the clearing and smothered the red flames to smoke, as Malphas strolled into the sigil and squatted down, reaching toward Death’s head.
“No!” I cried out at the top of my lungs. My limbs were like dead weights as I tried to get off the ground. Tears rushed from my eyes.
“Please, don’t, Malphas! Don’t hurt him anymore! He’s your son!”
The Raven God seemed to pause.