Nayden ran blindly. His lungs burned with liquid fire, and every breath tasted of blood and ash. He turned sharply left, looking for a gap between buildings. Anything. Just to get further away from the man in black linen and the monsters in the square. His boots slipped on the mud. He fell into the shadows. And slammed his shoulder into a wall.

  A high warehouse wall. No doors. No windows. Just wet, mossy brick that smelled of mustiness. Nayden hit it with his fist. Once, twice. “Damn...” he rasped, resting his forehead against the cold stone. “Goddamn it!”

  He turned slowly. The mouth of the alley was blocked by two shadows. Lesser Zmeys, lured by the scent of his wounds, crawled into the alley. They hissed quietly, like escaping steam.

  Nayden raised his sword. The steel now weighed as much as an anvil. His hands were trembling. Broken ribs protested with every movement, sending pulses of pain straight to his skull. Without armor on his chest, he felt naked. Inside his head, like a persistent fly, the stranger’s voice rang: “That’s a dead end, you idiot.” “You were right, you bastard,” he growled under his breath.

  “Come on,” he shouted louder at the beasts, though his voice cracked. “Come on, scum. I don’t have all day.”

  The beasts split up. Professionally. One went left, climbing a pile of crates. The other slid down the middle, dragging its belly through the mud. Nayden slashed blindly. He hit air. The Zmey was faster. It jumped back, snapping its jaws centimeters from his thigh. Nayden staggered. He was exhausted. The adrenaline that had kept him on his feet after Lovro’s death had just evaporated, leaving only cold, leaden fatigue. He backed away, scraping his back against the wall. There was nowhere to run.

  Then they attacked both at once. Nayden parried the first blow of the upper monster, but the force of the impact sent him to his knees. The second one, the one from below, seized the moment. Jaws clamped on the guard’s calf. Snap. Nayden screamed as fangs pierced the metal greave and went deep into the flesh. The jerk was brutal. He fell onto his back in the mud. The sword slipped from his hand and rolled into the darkness.

  He tried to kick with his free leg, but the beast pinned him to the ground with the weight of its own body. The Zmey crawled onto him. Claws plowed his tunic, seeking the soft underbelly. Foul steam from its snout wrapped around his face, choking him with the stench of rot. Sharp, yellow fangs gleamed right above his throat. Slime dripped onto his cheeks. Hot and sticky.

  Nayden closed his eyes. The end. “At least I’ll meet Lovro,” he thought, waiting for the crunch of his own larynx.

  Suddenly he heard a hiss. As if someone had violently opened a high-pressure steam valve. And then a short, dry sound. The weight on his chest went limp instantly. The Zmey didn’t bite. The beast slumped helplessly, crushing Nayden with its dead, flaccid body. Silence. Only rain and panting.

  “Idiot,” a cold voice rang out.

  From the shadows at the mouth of the alley emerged the man. He walked calmly, avoiding mud puddles as if he were on a stroll in the park, not in a slaughterhouse. The second lesser Zmey already lay against the wall. It had no head.

  The man approached the collapsed Nayden. He kicked the beast’s carcass, knocking it off the guard with such ease as if brushing a branch out of the way. He bent down. Grabbed Nayden by the lapels of his dirty, scorched tunic. He yanked him up, setting him on his feet and pressing him against the wall so hard Nayden lost his breath.

  The white eyes above the edge of the black mask were not empty. They burned with fury. “You!” he snarled, his voice trembling with suppressed anger. “No dying. You do not have my permission to decease, do you understand?!” He shook Nayden. The guard’s teeth clacked. “You are going to tell me what this is about! What am I doing here?!”

  Nayden grabbed his wrists, trying to catch his breath. “None of your... business!” he spat in his face, struggling helplessly.

  “None of my business?!” The man laughed shortly. The sound was dry and unpleasant. “I just wasted on you...” He didn’t finish because a deafening roar interrupted him, shaking the bricks in the wall. Dust rained on their heads. The man let go of Nayden and turned sharply toward the mouth of the alley.

  Above the roofs, clinging to the cornices, hung the Beast. Its gullet pulsed with bright, poisonous bile, as if it had swallowed the sun. The snow around its snout melted in mid-air, turning into hot rain.

  The man staggered as if hit by an invisible fist. He grabbed his temple. His face twisted in furious, boundless frustration. “You have got to be kidding me...” he hissed through his teeth. “He really wants to do it.”

  The Zmey roared. The sound was so powerful Nayden felt it in his stomach. The monster’s gullet pulsed with bright bile. Like a dam that had burst. A river of pressurized acid crashed down, straight into the bottleneck of the alley. Nayden curled up, instinctively shielding his head with his arms. Wall behind his back, monster in front of his face. He already felt the heat of the incoming wave on his skin. He closed his eyes.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Someone yanked him by the arm, throwing him behind them. Nayden fell to his knees in the mud, opening his eyes. He saw the stranger’s back. The beige coat flapped. The man pulled off his black gloves in one furious motion and hurled them under his feet. His hands were bare, pale, marked with a web of tiny scars. He clenched his teeth so hard Nayden felt he heard the crack of breaking enamel.

  The air in the alley howled. As if someone had driven a steel wedge into space. Nayden felt a violent pressure change that popped his ears.

  The stream of acid hit. It didn’t hit them. A meter in front of the man’s face, the yellow, boiling river shattered against an invisible blade. It split into two streams, flowing around them on both sides with a deafening hiss.

  Nayden watched in horror as the acid hit the walls of the tenements on both sides of the alley. Brick and mortar melted before his eyes, flowing onto the pavement like hot wax. Acrid, yellow smoke burst upward, choking the breath. They were in a bubble. In the eye of the cyclone. The only safe place was the shadow cast by this man.

  The man grunted. The sound was muffled by the fabric but still audible. His boots ground on the stones, carving deep trenches in the mud. The pressure of a ton of fluid tried to crush him.

  The white eyes flooded with red in a split second. Vessels couldn’t withstand the pressure inside the skull. They burst. Thin, dark trickles flowed from the corners of his eyes, running down his pale skin. The fabric of the mask on his nose and mouth soaked like a sponge. It dripped from the bottom. Thick, fast. The man choked, swallowing his own blood, but he didn’t lower his hands.

  When the acid passed them, the man dropped his arms. He fell heavily onto one knee. He yanked violently at the black fabric, pulling the mask down to his neck.

  Nayden recoiled. Almost nothing was left of the wall behind his back. He had already seen the "bill" for using magic. He had seen Lovro’s burned hand. He knew the law of exchange. But this... this was something else.

  “Gods...” he whispered, pointing a trembling hand at his savior’s face. “Your face...”

  The right half of the man’s face was purple. It wasn’t a burn. It was a hemorrhage. A massive, subcutaneous hematoma covering his cheek, temple, and eye socket. The skin was stretched to the limit, shiny, as if about to burst and release the fluid accumulated beneath. Blood gushed from his nose in a thick, dark stream, flooding his mouth and chin.

  “That’s not payment...” Nayden choked out. “Vessels are bursting in your head. You’re dying.”

  The man didn’t answer immediately. He gasped for air, wheezing wetly. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing blood across his cheek. “Don’t be dramatic,” he groaned. “It’s just pressure. I poured an ocean into a pipe the diameter of a finger. It had to blow.”

  He doubled over. Coughed deeply, tearing something from his lungs. Spat. A thick, almost black clot the size of a walnut fell onto the snow.

  The puddle under the man’s feet literally bubbled. Billows of white steam burst upward, hitting their faces with a wave of heat. The snow around the clot melted in the blink of an eye, revealing bare earth.

  Nayden jumped back, shielding his face with his sleeve. “It’s steaming!” he screamed, staring in disbelief at the blood boiling in the frost. “Your blood is boiling!”

  “System overheating...” The man wiped his chin. His skin was red, radiating heat like an open furnace. “I’ll regenerate quickly, but the cooling... the cooling is shot.”

  With trembling fingers, he pulled the blood-soaked mask back over his nose. The earth trembled. A shadow fell over them again. The great Zmey landed right in front of the alley’s mouth, cutting off escape. The beast lowered its head. Nostrils flared, drawing in air. It smelled blood. But not the kind it knew. This wasn’t the sweet scent of iron. It was the smell of boiling water and storm.

  Burst vessels had flooded his eyes, turning them a solid, sick crimson. Yet, in the center of that bloody haze, a faint blue light smoldered. Flickering. Unsettling. Like a will-o'-the-wisp in a graveyard.

  “Begone,” he ground out through the fabric, his voice distorted, vibrating like a cracked bell. “Or I will pop and take you to Nawia with me.”

  The Zmey lowered its head. Opened its maw centimeters from the man’s face, ready to clamp its fangs. And suddenly it froze. It recoiled violently, shaking its head as if it had stuck its snout into embers. It hissed, narrowing its great, yellow eyes. The monster snapped its jaws at empty air but didn’t try to bite again.

  The Zmey snorted, expelling a puff of smoke, and spread its wings. The blast of wind drove Nayden into the mud. Heavy paws lifted off the ground. The beast soared into the night, leaving them in the smoking alley.