Rips out hearts

Ryn dropped down to finish him. He lay blackened with his throat split open and vertebrae exposed, but he’d half regenerated from the wounds already. He screamed and cried and cursed from his many mouths, but all of them a chorus of pleas for death.
Obliging, she ripped the first of his sinful hearts from the screaming corpus and wolfed it down. The meat slid into the center of her, a place not her stomach but nearer to her wrath. That dark furnace was buried deep, folded parallel to normal space so that it was tucked away from the world—necessary because its heat was like a star’s. It was called gehenna, and the moment wet flesh touched that pocket of space within her, the organs burned to black ash. A scream vibrated through her, her inner fire so hot it ate his soul next, burning until that too was obliterated.
Digging for the other hearts, she sent speckles of blood to the alley wall, dissecting the monstrosity Saxby had stitched together. The second heart she slurped down in four snaps of her bright teeth, that one’s soul stickier, the vagaries of their individual evil modifying the flavor. Coming to the final heart, she tightened her fist around it, stared down into the mangled face of her quarry and asked one more time: “Before I release you, you will tell me: where is the other shooter?”
“Kill me,” rasped the bloody head. He was little more than severed spine, a cobweb of blood vessels, heart, and brain, but the unholy work done to his biology kept his soul rooted, and might for days yet. In a way, the eternal end of gehenna was a mercy, and the only one she knew. “Please… kill me.”
“The ice-rink shooter,” she insisted. When she spoke, glowing cinders from annihilated souls floated from her mouth.
“…Casper wouldn’t come. Casper said it wasn’t the mission. He went to finish it.”
Tearing his heart out, she sprinted for the train at full speed and ate him as she went, ripping into hard muscle a bite at a time until his screaming soul joined his friends, first shrill, then silent forever.


Chapter 14, Page 212