Page 45 of A Kingdom of Monsters

I’d been spending increasingly more time sleeping or in my other form, trying to conserve what little energy I had, and using magic of this magnitude would undo any progress I’d made.

The answer was: I couldn’t explain that. Possibly ever, but certainly not now.

Bracing myself, I gripped Lonnie’s fingers tighter, and raised my free hand toward the crowd.

A different sort of tremor traveled through me, pulling power from the depths of my center. I gritted my teeth, and the closest row of angry courtiers fell. Those who had been pushing hardest against Scion’s smoke screen, simply crumbled. They disintegrated on the spot, so far gone that even immortality couldn’t protect them.

Lonnie gasped in horror, her hand flying to her mouth. “Stop!” she demanded.

I didn’t stop.

As I knew and feared would happen, the moment I started I was unable to pull myself back from the edge of reason. Unable to fight the monster in the back of my mind who wanted to tear into the crowd, leaving no survivors behind.

“There are hundreds of them,” Lonnie screamed. “You can’t just?—”

I growled, cutting her off. I didn’t want to be told that I couldn’t kill them all. I could—I wanted to, even. The mob continued to surge and I destroyed the next row of courtiers. The irony wasn’tlost on me that this darkness, this love of violence, was exactly what I’d just been accused of.

“Stop!” Ambrose barked, echoing Lonnie but with a much more commanding tone.” If you kill them all it only proves that fucking bastard correct.”

I came back into myself long enough to glare at him.

Ambrose had no right to comment on the morality of killing hundreds of people. None of us did. That was the one thing that Idris had gotten right—we were all murderers, but I didn’t truly care anymore. They were threatening Lonnie, and for her I’d flatten the entire city if I had to.

“We have to go, now,” Ambrose ordered.

“I’m not going fucking anywhere,” Scion spat. “I’m going to tear that fucker limb from limb with my bare hands.”

I growled in agreement. There were clearly two opposing opinions within our small group, both grappling for dominance. Scion and I would gladly kill first, and ask questions never, whereas Lonnie had found an ally in Ambrose, both of them fighting for nuance.

“No. We have to find the healer,” Ambrose yelled nonsensically.

“What fucking healer?” Scion roared over the noise of the swarming mob. “I’m not going to?—”

He didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. In that second, Ambrose clearly decided he’d had enough.

He dropped his sword, evidently realizing he needed his hands free, and instead grabbed Lonnie’s arm with one hand and Scion’s shoulder with the other. As I was still clinging to Lonnie,I felt my stomach lurch forward, and then we were falling through compressed darkness.

In seconds, my knees crashed into hard stone. I tipped forward, entirely disoriented. My palms fell flat against the ground, and I panted, a wave of nausea washed over me and I choked, trying not to vomit.

It had been years since I’d been sick from shadow walking. The nausea and confusion lessened the more accustomed one was to traveling that way, and I’d been flitting in and out of the darkness longer than I could remember.

Squeezing my eyes shut for a moment to ward off the nausea, I sat up and looked around.

Where the fuck were we?

As I’d already known it would be, the clearing in the forest had disappeared. We’d left the mob and the remnants of the destroyed tents behind, and were now crouching in the middle of what looked to be a deserted road.

I looked around anxiously for Lonnie, and found her kneeling several feet to my left, her head in her hands. I couldn’t tell if she was ill from the sudden travel, or holding back tears.

Likely both, I supposed.

Clearly thinking along the same lines as I was, Scion’s angry shout echoed my thoughts. “What the fuck! Where did you take us?”

He’d gotten to his feet—evidently not as affected as I felt—and was marching toward Ambrose. Ambrose also stood, looking slightly pained. As I watched, he wiped a bead of sweat fromhis hairline with the back of his hand, before he schooled his expression to one of blank indifference.

“I would have thought you’d recognize shadow walking,” he snapped at Scion.

“Don’t give me that shit,” Scion growled. “How did you do that? I’ve never heard of anyone bringing three others with them through the shadows at once.”

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