Page 243 of The Enslaved Duet

Just as the wood swung closed, we heard it, faint as a ghostly moan on the winds of the moors.

Ruthie.

Riddick and I exploded into a sprint simultaneously, guns warm in our ready hands as we took off to the left of the house and plunged into the darkness, predators to the monsters that hunted Cosima through the night.

The cold wind bit at my cheeks, and the rain plastered my black clothes to my body, but I gave them no heed as I entered the narrow mouth of the maze and concentrated on following my memories to its core. I could hear commotion amid the yews, a truncated scream, and a male roar of fury.

I pushed hard, tearing around corners, feet slipping through the mud, catching my hands on branches to leverage myself upright around the tight bends. Riddick called through the radio for backup and we trundled on.

He crashed into my back as I stopped abruptly at the beginning of the last row leading to the center circle because there was a small body at the far end, watching two bodies struggle in the dirt with a gun raised and shaking, waiting to shoot.

“Brother,” I called out, speaking for the first time to a boy I’d never met.

He turned slowly, gun armed and ready but quaking in his hands, and I noticed the gory hole in his abdomen, partially covered by his torn and bloody jumper.

Cosima had got him.

Pride moved through me, eradicating some of the frantic worry in my blood so that I could think more calmly.

“Put down your gun, and I won’t hurt you,” I told him, slowly moving closer with my gun still raised.

Riddick had disappeared like an apparition into thin air.

“Fuck you, slave lover,” he spat. “You and your whore don’t deserve to live.”

I sighed and dropped my gun. “Have it your way, then.”

“You don’t have the stones to kill a boy,” he jeered.

I tipped my head and smiled Noel’s smile at him. “No, but he does.”

Rodger turned his head just as Riddick appeared out of the maze beside him and pressed his gun to his head with a soft, anti-climaticpop.

Noel’s false heir fell to the ground with a wet plop.

I ran and leaped over him the moment he dropped, focusing on the scrambling duo in the middle of the clearing. As I drew closer, I saw the mulch of churned up earth, their feet sank amid the dark soil, shards of white peppered up among them. Noel had his hands around Cosima’s neck, forcing her into the air, her toes dangling.

He couldn’t see her though, his eyes bloody and riddled with long, deep gauges from Cosima’s nails. He blindly squeezed and squeezed, not carrying if he actually saw her die.

I was on him in the next second, hitting him so savagely in a sideswipe tackle that he instantly dropped Cosima and crumpled to the ground. My fists met his face before his head even hit the ground. I beat into him like a hammer to meat, pulverising his face, hating him with every smash, transferring the pain he’d inflicted my entire life through every blow to his despicable head. Somehow, he was able to raise a hand and plunge a small knife from somewhere into my thigh. I grunted and tried to steel myself, but he overpowered me, scrambling to his feet with his back to me, his head cocked over his shoulder to watch me as he started for Cosima again.

I lunged at him, grabbing at his arms and pinning them at his back, opening his chest up. I spun him, thinking to impale his heartless torso on the marble lance of the statue beside me.

Instead, Cosima appeared, dredged in rain and rolled in earth like a goddess newly risen from the bowels of hell. She had something in her hand, long and white, pointed into a danger-like edge.

She planted a palm over the place Noel should have harboured a soul, and then she looked at him with her golden eyes bright even in the dark and she sank that white weapon deep into his side.

He grunted and jerked in my embrace. I cinched my hold and braced my legs, holding Noel up as my wife stabbed him again and again in the side. I held him until his legs gave out. I held him while his breath began to stutter over his grunts and curses. I held him as Cosima killed him, and then when he died, I held him still so that she could look into my eyes as her chest heaved with exertion and her bloody hand shook in the air, the bone still lifted, so that she would know it was done, and I was proud of her for doing it.

She was a vengeful goddess, a righteous warrior, and I never loved her more than I did at that moment as her anger melted into silent tears, and she whispered brokenly, “Please tell me I’ve not gone mad. Please tell me you’re alive.”

I dropped Noel unceremoniously to the ground and caught my wife up in my arms, crushing her to my chest like a human defibrillator, needing the shock of her skin against mine to bring myself back to life after thirteen days of zombified misery.

“I’m here,” I said into her hair as I pushed it back, as I planted a crown of kisses over her forehead and anointed her mouth with my lips. “I’m here, I’m here, and I swear to God and everything holy or unholy, my beauty, we will never be without each other again.”

I chanted the words over and over again, the melody to the harmony of her repeated,Xan, Xan, oh, Xan, until the red and blue lights of police cars cut through the dark of the maze, and it finally occurred to both of us that it was over.

The demons were slain at our feet, and my spring goddess, my dead queen, was in my arms again.