Page 155 of Into the Isle

Corpses couldn’t tell secrets.

Unless that corpse is me.

I waited for hours on the fringes of the southwestern longhouse village. It was built in a similar blueprint as the one near Vala Chamber, where Ravinica had been attacked.

Many strong second-years stayed here, like Eirik. I couldn’t play fast and loose like I had with the girl near Nottdeen. I needed to be patient, as painful as it was. I also didn’t know who stayed with Astrid, or if she lived alone.

Dawn was beginning to creep into the sky. It was the gray hours of early morning when I saw the front door of the third longhouse creak open.

Astrid, dressed in an evening gown, was wiping her eyes and yawning. She wasn’t dressed for class, which was still four hours away. She started walking away from the longhouse . . .

My eyes darted from behind the trees where I skulked. I saw where she was headed: a small well that provided water for the six longhouses here, not twenty feet from her front door.

I flared my nostrils and bared my teeth, unreasonable anger flaring inside me. I never felt a damn thing, unless I was with Ravinica, and this was an extension of that.

Seeing Astrid so calmly walk to the well, while my silvermoon nursed her wounds in a hospital bed, drove me to near madness. If I was a berserker, this would have been the time to let it rip.

I reached into my trench coat and grabbed a small knife, holding it by the blade. I stormed out of the trees onto soggy grass, making my way down the gentle slope of the hill toward the well, to cut Astrid off.

“Astrid,” I called out when I was fifteen paces away.

Her head whipped over in surprise—

And I flung the knife at her. It whistled through the air and she lifted her arm with a cry.

My shot wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to knick her in the top of the hand. Which was all I needed.

“What the fuck?!” she cried out, shaking her hand, dripping blood onto the ground at her feet.

I reached out, Shaping runes with my free hand, while my outstretched palm formed a claw in front of me.

Astrid’s breath stopped short. Her squawking ended on an abrupt gasp as she looked down. Her entire body went taut as the flow of blood dripping from the small wound on her hand quickened.

The drip became a leak . . . and then a flood.

Astrid staggered where she stood. Her eyes bulged, watching blood stream out of her, pouring onto the ground at impossible speeds.

I Shaped the direction of the blood and let strands of the sweet redness curve and spin through the air in a double helix, toward me.

At the same time as I drew the woman’s blood from her veins and called it to me, I stepped closer to her.

She looked at her hand, then up at my face. “W-What the hell are you doing to me?”

The energy was leaving her words. She couldn’t shout for help any longer past her desiccated throat—not even the students in the nearby longhouses would hear her cries. No one would.

Her cheeks paled. I approached her. The blood in the air pulsed around me, stopping when I willed it to, like a horrid, nightmare-inducing sphere of gore.

I pulled another knife from my trench coat, slashing into my wrist, and then summoned the blood in the air to me. The strands of it pulsed and throbbed, finding its way into the sliver of flesh I’d cut. It didn’t matter what blood type she was—mine had the ability to adapt and modify life-essence.

Astrid’s blood filled me with power, lust, and greed.

She stared at me in sheer terror, eyes bulging into saucers. So confused, so lost. All the color drained from her skin while I siphoned her blood from her body. Her lively face turned ashy, then bone-white and sickly green from the throbbing, distended veins.

“You don’t deserve a quick death,” I told her, “for what you’ve put my silvermoon through.”

We were mere feet apart now. Her face hollowed, cheeks going concave. Along her arms, the musculature failed, tightening against her bones to make her look like a leathery skeleton.

Astrid’s internal organs failed first, even before her physical body.

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