It took her leg off, and the pain was literally blinding. It ripped her arm off, and she almost passed out. She could feel cool blood drying all over her.
The creature bit into her chest, and she could feel her heart burst, and more blood exploded out everywhere. One of her breasts came off in its mouth, and she screamed. The sound was as alien in her ears as it was in her throat.
"Abdel!" she screamed, the blood that had filled her throat fountaining out with the name. "I love you … I loved you, Abdel…."
The inhuman, wild eyes that had been burning a solid, hot yellow flickered, and the huge, misshapen head tilted to one side.
"Abdel," Bodhi said, and for the first time in more years than most humans could count, she started to cry.
He started coming back all at once, and watching his transformation actually succeeded in distracting Bodhi from the fact that she'd been ripped to pieces. There were few enough ways to kill a vampire, but that was one of them. Her head was still attached to her shoulders though, and at least some part of her heart still quivered spasmodically in her chest. Bodhi came to the nightmare realization that she could live for hours, no days, years, even centuries just exactly like this—in agony.
"Bodhi," he said, in a voice that almost sounded like Abdel's.
"Abdel, please …" she said.
His hand came back to normal in the time it took for him to reach for, grab hold of, and lift the sharp half of the broken wooden stake. The yellow faded from his eyes.
"Where?" he asked, his all too human face covered, dripping in blood.
She coughed out another gout of cool red blood and said, "My casket… under the soil. In the dirt."
A tear slipped out of one of Abdel's eyes, and Bodhi hoped it would fall on her. It might have, but she couldn't see or feel it.
"Careful," she whispered, shifting her blood-drenched shoulders to turn her open chest to him. The movement sent wave after wave of burning agony through her, but she had to do it. It would be hard enough.
Abdel held the point of the stake over the last remaining fragment of Bodhi's heart.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
She felt the stake go in, heard something that might have been dry leaves blowing over stone, and there was nothing.
Finally.
Jaheira was about to turn and go back to the lean-to when a blast of hot air blew her off her feet.
She slid to a stop through a bed of dried leaves and came to rest pushed up against the sprawled form of Yoshimo.
"By the long departed," the Kozakuran exclaimed, "she exploded!"
Jaheira got to her feet, ignored her shaking knees, and took one step toward the lean-to before looking up. When she did look up, what she saw made her stop in her tracks.
The shelter was gone—apparently consumed by what looked like a whirlpool of gray, black, and silver smoke. The whirlpool was standing on end, perpendicular to the ground. A man stepped out through the whirling winds still pouring out of the gate as if he was strolling into a friendly tavern for a night of play. He saw Jaheira and smiled.
"Irenicus!" Jaheira sneered.
The necromancer didn't answer, just leaned down, his feet still lost in the whirling magical clouds. He rose with something in his hand—an arm, thin and pale. It was Imoen's arm.
A spell came to Jaheira's mind, and she started her prayer, running through the words as quickly as she could, but finding they fell into their own rhythm, refusing to be hurried.
Irenicus spared her an unconcerned glance before scooping the rest of Imoen's limp form into his arms and simply stepping back.
Jaheira's spell drew to a close the exact moment Irenicus and Imoen faded from sight. A bolt of lightning, easily as big around as Jaheira was tall, crashed into the magical gateway, and Jaheira closed her eyes against the blinding flash. Her hair stood on end, and her skin crawled.
Yoshimo said something in a language Jaheira didn't understand, and she opened her eyes.
The whirlpool was gone, and so were Irenicus and Imoen.
"More than one problem solved," Yoshimo mumbled, "I should say."
Jaheira collapsed to the ground and slammed her fist into the uncaring earth.
Abdel fell more than walked down the stairs into the basement. He was covered in freezing gore and nearly blind with a crushing load of guilt and self-loathing. He found a barrel of water and ripped it open with his bare hands. He spilled it over himself and was immediately drenched. He rubbed the blood off his skin as best he could; his need to be cleaned of Bodhi's gore far outweighing his need to retrieve the pieces of the Rynn Lanthorn.
She'd told him where it was, and he'd killed her—mission accomplished. Abdel knew that back in Tethir, if they knew, they'd be cheering, reveling in their chance to defeat Irenicus. Abdel still wanted to care, but at this exact moment and in this exact place, he couldn't. All he wanted to do right now was go back—crawl back if he had to—to Candlekeep and just hide himself away. Here was more blood spilled because he was the son of Bhaal. More blood and more and more. He could just stay in Candlekeep, behind the walls, in the monastery. What better place? Who better than the monks to find some way to rip this curse out of him or kill him trying?
He looked at himself, and there was still so much blood on him. He saw the water from the barrel running to, then through the trapdoor. The casket was there, and the artifact the elves needed so much—that he needed so much—and that Imoen needed so much.
Imoen.
They could go back to Candlekeep together.
Abdel stood and walked purposefully to the trapdoor. He opened it without hesitation. The lanthorn would solve two problems. One more immediate than the other.
He dumped the soil out of Bodhi's casket and heard metal clatter on the wood as the jagged pieces dropped to the dirt floor. Abdel scooped them up in his big, bloodstained hands, and, just as Elhan's mages had promised him they would, the fragments caused a teleport to activate, and the root cellar was gone in a flash of blue light.
Chapter Twenty-Two
"I want to. ." Imoen whispered, her mind a violent haze of fast-approaching hell, "go … home."
She was stretched, magically sedated, across a huge, broken, jagged-edged slab of green-traced marble in the middle of a city elves now long-dead once called Myth Rhynn. All around was the broken remnants of a great elven city, now gone to the wilderness and wandering creatures both benign and hellspawned. The marble slab was tilted on one edge, leaning at a sharp angle. Imoen lay sprawled across it, her tattered clothes gone now, and a hundred twisted sigils traced on her pale, goosefleshed skin.
A ring of elven statues, twice as tall as a real elf, surrounded the slab. The space might once have been a garden or a cemetery. The wind-worn faces of the marble elves looked down at both Imoen and Jon Irenicus with a detached calm no real person of any race could have mustered in that place at that time.
Irenicus himself gagged on his own bile and stepped back. He lost his voice to the shock, revulsion, and twisted, freakish pleasure of the sight of his last desperate hope coming to fruition. He'd chanted himself raw, and his begging with the Weave, with gods whose names no one spoke anymore—to whatever forces would listen—had been answered.
"Yes," he whispered, his voice no more than a painful squeak. "Yes. Change!"
Imoen screamed, and it was the last sound she made as a human. Her face changed first.