Page 53 of Haunted

Half-emrys move around me, ready to hoist me up and drag me off. I push them away and stagger to my feet on my own.

“Rhianu!” My voice is heavy and cold. The power behind it shocks me. “Rhianu!”

As I say her name again, the empress halts. Her men step back to allow her room as she turns.

Power pulses through my body, fueled by my sorrow, by my anger. My hands brim with a throbbing power that begs me to shatter everything in my path. I lurch forward. “Don’t think that you can be rid of me so easily.”

She smirks. “You amuse me, Caedryn.”

“You didn’t think I was amusing as you gave yourself to me, as you groaned my name.”

“I gave nothing to you!”

I seethe, my power ready to destroy. I can’t hold it back. I unleash it in a blast so powerful the atmosphere ripples with a clash as loud as thunder. The mass of energy surges toward the empress.

She lifts a single hand and immobilizes the forward momentum of the energy. With a turn of her wrist, she twists the energy so it flips and shoots back toward me.

I don’t have time to counter or move. The blast takes me square in the chest and catapults me backward thirty feet.

I slide through splinters of glassy rock, feeling each slice and tear.

I drop my head back, blinking up at the sky. Pain is the only real thing I feel.

Then she’s standing over me. “In what world could you have ever beaten me?”

She shoots the tiniest blast into my face, and my world goes dark.

39

I wake, face down in sand and grit, my mouth full of it. Heat beats down on my back. The sun is high overhead. I hear nothing, not even the call of a bird, but I sense them.

Scavengers. Waiting for my death.

I spit the sand out of my mouth and lift my face. I’m weak. My limbs, shaky, not strong enough to push myself off the ground. I crawl forward an inch and then collapse.

I’m alone. They brought me to the beginning of the Great Divide and left me. I won’t even try to cross it.

I will wait for my death and become food for the scavengers.

40

I’m bumping along. I roll onto my back and feel the prick of my wounds. The sun has set. It’s nightfall, yet I bounce along.

I can’t understand what’s happening, where I am. Then a hand lifts my head and places a cup to my lips.

I drink, greedily.

Memory comes back, a memory that grips me with terror.

She once lifted a cup to my lips.

My eyes fly open.

It’s not the empress.

A man. A human man. His light is barely discernible, but it’s enough to tell me he’s a good man, honorable.

“Who?” I gasp.

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