Page 173 of Visions of Darkness

He tried to shove her off with his shoulder without letting go of my throat.

“Wait your turn, bitch. I’m going to take care of you next.”

Sickness churned, and that urge that had first found me in that facility roiled, building from deep within, beyond the tide of succumbing. It was a wave that gathered strength and rose to take power.

The impulse to touch him overwhelming.

Somehow, I managed to find the strength to jerk my arms free from where he had them trapped beneath his legs, the man too lost to the need for my execution to notice the shift.

He kept squeezing my throat as I reached up and gripped his face with my hands.

The same familiar cold streaked through my failing veins, my hands afire, an inferno burning me alive.

But I could see.

I could see the Ghorl.

“End her now. Don’t let go. It’s her fault. She’s the one who destroyed this family, not you. She’s poison.”

Tightening my hold, I tried to wrap my mind around it, to contain it, to push out the light from within andbindit.

I fought with all of me to separate the black spirit from his.

But it was so powerful. So strong. Still, I projected the light. The Ghorl wailed when a tendril whipped out and struck it in the side.

My father’s hands loosened for the bare flash of a second, and I inhaled a shattered breath, sucking oxygen into my aching lungs.

I hung on with everything I had.

Something different passed through his eyes as my mother continued to beg him to stop, confusion glittering through his gaze.

“Cal, why are you doing this? Please, stop. Listen to me. Oh God, please stop.”

The Ghorl regrouped, massive and enraged.

“Kill her now. Do it. It’s already too late. There’s no turning back.”

My father’s hold tightened again, and I fought harder, with all the strength I possessed, pulling from the deepest place inside me.

In a place that shouldn’t exist.

The Ghorl shrieked as a glance of energy hit it against its middle, and a piece of it fell away, burned to ash.

For one second, it lurched back, but then it was right back on me, the venom in its voice filling the room.

“I will destroy you. I will destroy you all. None of you will survive.”

I nearly lost hold with the force of it, with the horror that it was speaking directly to me.

I fought just as desperately as it did, my father’s hands its weapons as he squeezed so tight that I thought he was going to crush my throat.

And the lights began to flicker again, the oxygen growing too thin, my body succumbing to my human limitations. My heels dug into the carpet as I tried to buck up to knock him off.

Blackness gathered at the edges of my sight, and still I tried.

The Ghorl suddenly roared, rearing back as streaks of light hit it from all sides.

Shock rounded my father’s eyes, confusion bounding, his mind stuck in two places.

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