Page 10 of An Empress of Air & Chaos

“If only I was permitted to drink every drop.” The creature toyed with the idea. His black hair sprayed across his face was the only sign of the struggle she had put up.

Evil oozed from his solid core; she could feel it festering in the air. His eyes changed and in that moment, she knew he wasn’t going to stop. She knew she was going to die. There would be no stopping him.

He attacked, driven wild by the taste of her blood. She pushed and punched at him, but it wasn’t enough. She wasn’t strong enough. So, she screamed and prayed that it would be quick. She also prayed it would be quick for Cally, when her time came—if it hadn’t already.

Muffled voices broke through her prayers and a bright gleam of light swung past her face.

Was it the blade that the creature had stabbed into her grandmother’s neck not long before? Would she get the same death?

She closed her eyes, clenched her jaw tight and let death sweep her to the other side.

She would be reunited with loved ones who had passed. She would finally be reunited with her parents.

She heard cutting sounds like steel slicing through bone and flesh, but didn’t feel any pain. The Gods that her grandmother so often made her pray to as a child had clearly spared her from any more pain until it was over.

Her only miracle in this nightmare.

A man’s voice broke her thoughts, but it was not the creature’s...

Were there more like him?

She sprung her eyes open to see another man standing over the body of the creature that had attacked her—its head now detached from its body.

She let out a scream and pressed herself harder into the wall. She flinched as she felt the cold plaster touch base with her spine.

Another man appeared at the doorway. “Dead?”

“The one in here is,” the closest one to her replied.

She couldn’t concentrate on any faces or take in if they had the same eyes as the other man because she couldn’t stop staring at the head of the creature—looking up at her, still promising her death.

Bile rose in her throat and she hurled herself over, spewing the contents of her stomach. The man who had taken the creature’s head off, the one with the sword, walked over to Cally.

“Don’t you dare touch her,” she managed to warn, struggling to breathe through the burn in her throat. “Kill me instead.” Her voice was stern and authoritative, a trait she had picked up from her grandmother. “Leave her!”

“She’s feisty, I like that!” the man said casually to the other, turning his attention back to Cally. “Relax, she’s alive,” he said in a nonchalant way, like he saw this sort of thing happen all year round. “For now. We need to move out.”

He wasn’t like the creature; he didn’t have dead, crimson eyes. They were ocean blue.

Maybe they were part of the elite’s guards. Maybe they had heard the screams?

Before she could decipher anything, she felt an unusual cold consume her body.

“Gideon, she’s going into shock,” the blue-eyed man said.

Emara brushed her hands over her upper arms to protect herself from the freezing stiffness and a searing pain jolted down her left arm. The agony surged through her body and she fell to her knees. She hadn’t realised just how open the wound was when the adrenaline of the last few moments had taken over her, but when she looked at it now…

She glanced around the room, her head now spinning and throbbing. When she closed her eyes to compose herself, all she saw was her grandmother’s face, splattered with blood.

It’s too much.

This was all too much.

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t feel her body. She was…

She plunged into darkness, like she had fallen into the sea in the dead of night. She could hear voices around her, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to listen anymore. Someone hollered for help.

Help?

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