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The man who’d escaped her initial stabbing attempt skulked around, brandishing his knife while calculating her movements to strike.

She sprung to her feet, grabbed his fist so it was tight around his blade’s hilt, and shoved it upwards.

Proving just how much strength and skill she’d acquired in the last few years, she overpowered him and lodged his blade into his own throat.

His entire body stiffened. In a matter of seconds, with blood pooling around the blade and rapidly escaping him, his knees buckled inwards before he dropped to the ground.

Devoid of emotion at the loss of this disgusting human’s life, she didn’t spare him a second glance as she moved her cold gaze elsewhere. She was barely even huffing, as if the exertion from such swift movements was insignificant.

Lindi turned to the final man, and she took in the fear in his eyes.

A light, hot gust of wind blew around her form, lifting her hair and cloak to the left as she took a step closer.

He shook his head, screaming against the tentacle pressing down upon his lips, and wriggled in his confinements – like how she’d wriggled to the edge of the Veil to fall off it. .. willingly.

He was frightened. How dare he be! How many victims had begged and pleaded while they were dragged across the wasteland of the desert? How many women had given him that very wide-eyed, tearful stare as they were pushed off a cliff or gutted to become Demon food – as the occultists called them.

He wanted mercy from her, when he would have never given it.

So Lindi straddled his torso, held his gaze with a determined fierceness, and made another magical blade form.

He managed to get the tentacle off his lips so he could spit just one word: “Witch!”

Lindi stabbed her blade into his ruined heart, halting any other foul word that could come from him.

Then she proceeded to slam it down multiple times until she left a gaping hole in his chest. She twisted it and let a deranged grin lift into her lips, disappointed that he was so dead he could no longer witness its beauty.

Then, once she was done meting out justice, she hopped off him.

Her heart felt both lighter and heavier. The satisfaction of their deaths twirled with the necessity of having to kill them in the first place.

“Their actions caused your demise,” she muttered as a reminder, before she cut his coin purse from his belt. She did the same to the two other dead men nearby.

She didn’t savour their deaths. Instead, she looked around at the empty street. I have to move quickly in case someone comes.

The black mist would only make the area feel haunted, but a drunken fool might wander through it, thinking the booze was playing tricks on his eyes.

Using three thick tentacles, she wrapped them around their legs or arms and took each man to the alley where the first lay dead. She hid their corpses and evaporated the mist except for in the narrow space. Then she used magic she wasn’t particularly fond of.

Making sure there was nothing but stone around them, Lindi set their bodies alight with a black fire. She didn’t need much, just a candlestick’s size flame, but it quickly spread out to devour them. No smoke was produced, as if the very fire ate the air around it, and it left nothing in its wake.

No skin, no bones, and even the stone beneath them began to melt into liquid.

Much like her barriers, she used black sand to snuff out the fire before it could spread across the cobblestones and set the houses next to the alley alight.

If that happened, the fire would spread so quickly that she’d struggle to put it out and it would feed on the entire town.

She’d already witnessed its devastation before and considered it the evilest ability she had in Weldir’s arsenal.

She also refused to do it on a living person, as they could spread it. Lindi feared... she’d be unable to control it before she set fire to the entire world. A wildfire that no water could put out.

I’m thankful he is unable to use such magic on Earth, she thought with an emptiness as she looked at the melted stone – the only evidence that she or the occultists had been there.

Because he lacked a physical form on Earth, Weldir’s magic was incapable of being tangible there. Not even Lindi could wield it in her incorporeal form, and had to be human and solid to do so.

“I’ve told you doing that destroys their souls,” Weldir’s deep and unfairly husky voice whispered in her ear.

No. It wasn’t her ear. It was deeper than that, like it was calling from the centre of her very being, in the recesses of her mind, quiet but strong enough she couldn’t shake it.

She hated the way it caused a pleasurable shiver to run down her spine, and even more so that it was present for her to hear at all. The very decadence, like the smoothest spiced honey, should be a sin. No being, not even a god, should have such an ear-tingling cadence to their voice.

It always sounded a little distant when he spoke to her like this, whereas in his realm it was crystal clear.

With a sigh, she lifted her gaze to the side to look at the alleyway’s exit. Damnit. He’s awake. Her right hand curled into a tight fist as she bit the sides of her tongue in annoyance. Why? I thought I’d been using enough to keep him in a slumber.

Then she smoothed her features and wore a mask of indifference.

Although deaths from being consumed by Demons resulted in Ghosts and normal human deaths didn’t, the only other way to create them was by her very hands. If his magic touched them, she could obtain their deceased souls.

“I like that I’m able to completely get rid of them, body and spirit,” she admitted, lifting her hood over her head to shroud her in mystery once more. “They don’t deserve an afterlife, not even in your world.”

“But it would empower me.” He said it without emotion, yet she knew he was annoyed.

More power, that’s all he wanted. It’s all he ever wanted. Power, power, power. That’s all they ever spoke about.

And she didn’t want to give it.

She still didn’t know if Weldir was a malevolent entity or not. She didn’t know if he was good or evil, and she worried that aiding him meant she was endangering humankind. If he ever obtained a physical form... What stopped him from destroying this world on a childish whim?

Old gods were known to be fickle and immature beings. She feared she was aiding one and just didn’t know it yet.

Then again, he shared nothing about himself, which gave her no chance to truly trust him. For once she wished he’d elucidate on anything to do with him – alas, apparently that was too much to ask for.

He also obviously cared very, very little for Lindi.

Not once had he checked to see how she fared, offered a warm greeting, or even a soothing word when she regrettably shed a tear for her past. With the prolonged silence and the nothingness from him, even when he was awake, he only shared his annoyance that she didn’t collect the souls resulting from her kills.

“I’m trying to collect souls, as you have asked of me,” she lied coldly, heading towards the alleyway’s exit. “I have six already.”

She ducked her head out, her curls waving around her chin and neck, and made sure it was clear of people before she walked into the main street. There were no people, and the mix of cold and warm lights from the slice of moon and the widely spaced streetlamps lit the area dimly like before.

It was safe.

The moment Lindi stepped out of the shadows and into the light of a nearby street lantern, her foot sunk. The ground opened up like a yawning mouth and swallowed her whole. Biting back a scream, she fell into pitch-black darkness and floated in its weightlessness freely.

Her hair lifted to flutter around her head, and her cloak wrapped around her body before whisking away. The racing of her heart quickly settled.

“I hate it when you do that,” Lindi said as she folded her arms across her chest – although it was only the second time he’d done so.

“And it costs me mana to bring you here, and yet I feel I must do so in order to collect the souls you have on your person,” Weldir stated, his voice stronger and no longer a whisper.

He stood vertically while she lay horizontally, and she cut him a slit-eyed scowl. Her arms tightened, since she couldn’t argue with him on that front. She also refused to admit the truth that she’d been avoiding him.

No, she’d rather lie.

“Once I’d collected enough, I planned to return to your mist and gift them to you,” she said plainly, looking up to avoid peering at him. “I don’t want to make that long journey needlessly.”

“It is not a gift when it is your task and merely the cost that is due,” he answered, and his mist spread out from him until she could see it.

Then six white souls slipped out from the confines of her satchel, despite its solidness, and into his cloud, disappearing completely for him to do whatever the hell it was he would do with them later.

“You know I prefer it if you shift forms when you arrive here.”

Her upper lip twitched, but she managed to stem the desire to sneer. Lindi turned incorporeal, which, unfortunately, made her tangible to him. If she remained in her physical form, even in his realm, Weldir was unable to touch her – and she liked that he couldn’t force the shift on her.

It was entirely her choice, and she preferred being out of his reach when in his presence.

However, she also didn’t wish to anger him, as he could remove her abilities from her – which he had once threatened when she’d gone out of her way to not collect souls.

She’d thought she’d done a good job of pretending she hadn’t seen a lonely soul in the middle of a village, but he’d been watching her and had grown annoyed that she wasn’t doing her task.