It incinerated her clothes, her shoes, the scant make-up on her face and the light polish on her nails. And it incinerated the spiders, too – burned them all, outside and in, turned them to ash and turned the ash to vapour. She opened her eyes and her mouth and sucked in air that turned superheated and scorched her throat and lungs. She stood, the ground melting beneath her bare feet. She looked at her arms, looked down at herself. She glowed. Her body was a furnace. She could feel her eyes starting to boil.
Madame Mist was struggling to stand. Dismayed at the loss of so many of her spiders. Clutching her ruined arm. So pale and so frightened. China reached out with both hands, clamping her fingers round Mist’s shoulders. Mist tried to scream, but she was dead before she could make a sound. China let her go and she crumbled, a smoking, charred, blackened thing, not even recognisable as a corpse.
China tightened her grip, but she had no more strength and her knees were about to buckle and she stepped back and then there was something cool pressing against her chest.
“It’s going to be OK,” she heard Darquesse whisper.
The darkness shifted to gloom and then brightness and she had eyes again, and she could see Darquesse standing there, her left hand sucking the heat from China’s body. It filled Darquesse now, making her glow, incinerating her clothes, burning through the gold bands in her hair, turning the arm bracelet to ash. The Necromancer ring burst open as it disintegrated, the shadows curling and twisting madly.
China stepped back, repelled by the heat, but in an instant it was gone, absorbed, and Darquesse stopped glowing.