Poison resistance

“Again,” she said.
His dark coils spilled like ribbons through the hole in the wall and he sneered with dagger teeth. In a flick of motion, his venomous tail opened three red gashes across her chest.
Yet the red-hot glow of pain didn’t exorcise her demons.
Beneath the bleeding cuts, she felt the wyrm’s searing venom thread into her veins, weakening her. Her body fought the poison, but it wasn’t the thing slowing her down; it wasn’t the thing dragging twisted desires from her soul—she’d ingested the psilocybin willingly, and whatever a deva consumed by her own will, whether alcohol or drug, affected her fully. She could see an asura, true, but now when the serpent licked her blood from his spiny tail and grinned, she could think only: To her, that is what I am. Bloody-mouthed, grinning.
He struck with the twin spears of his horns.
Ryn caught the glinting point of one horn and stopped it an inch from her throat. The force bowed the cinder blocks she was pressed into and the crumbling wall swallowed her, spat her out the other side where she tumbled through wind and snow. Hitting the top of a cargo container, she skidded across slick steel and jumped to her feet.
On great and ragged wings Saxby descended, displaced air scouring whorls of snow from the broken ground where he alighted, just forward of the container. He rose, towering high.
Ryn spread her hands to either side, cool air tickling between her fingers, the ache of poison and fractures not enough to slake her thirst. She met the wyrm’s unfeeling gaze, finding nothing in his soul but hatred and arrogance; nothing that wasn’t also in hers. “More.”
He sneezed globs of ooze that smacked both her hands, viscous so that when she clenched her fists they wouldn’t reopen. She could wriggle individual fingers, but her deadly nails were each secured to the only thing they couldn’t cut: her palms. No more claws.
Saxby pounced, snatched her in his hind feet, and on wings as wide as city buses, carried her up, up, to the top of Primrose, where he broke her spine against steel girders. Feeling winked from her limbs. She slid off the girders, dropping to a worker’s platform, helpless.
Saxby brought his spiny tail overhead for the killing blow.
But she still had cards to play. Threads from her kanaf pierced the back of her neck, shooting through her vertebrae and fusing a connection. Sensation woke throughout her—agony like black lightning—and she caught the tail’s downswing. Spines ripped through her forearm and broke off in the wound, the impact shattering her platform and dropping her through space.
She caught an I-beam in the crook of her elbow, dangling over the building’s metal skeleton while the broken-off spines pumped her other arm full of venom—worse venom than before, blowing through her veins like wildfire.
It was melting her arm.
Before, the poison had slowed her. This one bubbled her flesh inward in bloody honeycomb clusters. Cinching a razor-thin thread from her kanaf just below the shoulder, she bit and pulled the line taut with her teeth, slicing off the offending limb. It thumped onto the platform below and she stitched the stump closed.
Saxby thudded onto a steel strut below, slurping her arm into the back of his throat, gulping it down. “Lovely how my poison brings out your flavor,” he purred. “When I tasted your blood before, it helped me tailor this venom just for you. This sampling will evolve it even further, sharpen it so that my next sting will end you—from now until the End of Days, every little piece of you I take makes me better at killing you. I have your scent, monster, and now it is I who will follow you through the ages, killing your every incarnation.”


Chapter 17, Page 266-268