Page 45 of A Dusk Of Stars

Once I’m done, he just keeps looking at me in wonder. My chest heaving with anger, I let out a scoff and move to push past him and back into the Junkyard.

“Get back here,” he orders in a low, pissed-off voice as I feel his fingers try to wrap around the wrist of my right hand.

The touch sends sparks flying through my skin, but I just tear my hand away and keep marching back into the Junkyard, where I find Alaric and Raven still sitting on the bench, staring at me as I approach.

I come to stand in front of them, but I can barely see them, that’s how out of it I am. My barriers are down and I can’t seem to get them up.

Gods, this… It’s not good.

“Anna,” I hear Alaric start hesitantly.

I force myself to truly look at him, only to find such surprise in his eyes. “Yeah?” I ask, all breathless.

It’s just as he opens his mouth to say something that it hits me. I grit my teeth. “Did you just use your hearing to eavesdrop on my conversation?”

He clamps his mouth shut.

For a second, I just look at him, feeling this violent anger rise to the surface. “I thought you were a powerless vampire,” I demand with cold suspicion in my voice.

He hesitates. “I’m not powerless,” he says, still reluctant, “I just choose not to use my powers.”

I have to close my eyes and take a deep breath so as not to lose my shit. Here I am, at my wit’s end because there seems to be nothing I can do to even get close to using my powers, whilehe…

“Are you alright, Anna?” I hear Raven ask.

I only manage to shake my head before Alaric cuts in. “The world is cruel enough,” I hear him explain, this unusual defensiveness in his voice. “It doesn’t need Originals making it even worse.”

I take another deep breath, but my chest is still heaving. I open my eyes. “Right,” I say mockingly. “That sure as hell isn’t the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

There’s a moment of silence before both him and Raven shoot me these looks filled with pity.

“What?” I grit out, having to fight not to raise my voice as my breathing turns even heavier. “Why the hell do you two think you have the right to look at me like that?”

Alaric just looks at me with unblinking eyes. After a moment of hesitation, I watch Raven get up and move towards me, making my eyebrows pull down. Before I can slink away, she’s already placed a delicate palm on my upper arm, as if to comfort me.

It’s with horror in my eyes that I look at her. She freezes as soon as she touches me, as soon as she feels it, too.

Something’s about to happen and I’m already failing to stop it.

I watch her eyes round, her body still frozen in place, as my mind starts flashing with a series of violent, murky images from her life seen through her own eyes.

There’s the cold, piercing stare of the old fae who came to my dying father’s court, charming him as she cursed his sons to forever remain in their shifted forms.

Then there’s the thickest fog of the oldest forest I’m running through, searching for what was taken from me — my brothers, my family, my everything.

Then there’s the pain searing into me when I finally find them and take their curse upon myself, only for them to leave me there for days that turn into years and years that turn into decades, as I lose every sense of what’s real, every sense of myself, every sense of love the way I used to know it.

When it stops, I’m breathless and her hand is still on my upper arm, but now her eyes are glassy and I can feel her body taking from mine — cleansing itself of coldness, discomfort and pain while poisoning mine with all of that and worse.

Just like they always do — take, take and take, until I’m just an empty shell of a person, sitting on the floor of that goddamn room with my legs pulled to my chest and my unseeing eyes fixed ahead.

The fear is not sudden, but it’s blinding.

As if in slow motion, I tear my arm away from her, needing to get the hell out of here as soon as possible.

It makes my eyes round, when I stumble back and see the burst of light shoot out of my body, her eyes clearing and rounding once again as the impact sends her frail body flying back and hitting the tree trunk behind.

There’s a moment of silence during which I just stand there in shock, watching her eyelids drop and her body slide down the trunk as Alaric rushes over to her with such panic in his movements. Throwing himself onto the ground, he slaps her into opening her eyes.

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