Page 147 of Her Psycho Beasts

By the time I step off the black stone staircase, she’s splashed into the glowing blue water, leaving only her clothes in a messy pile by the old dinghy.

Frowning, I crouch by the dinghy, scanning the water, straining my ears. Her energy is not fiery and furious like it was that day we rescued Athena Boneweaver. It’s the opposite.

She’s dropped in temperature, her breathing stopped completely. Eerily, it reminds me of the way Scythe goes cold when he drops into his Great White.

Suddenly, there’s a strange sound and a massive grey fin pierces the water, headed down the canal away from me. For the first time in what feels like eons, my interest is piqued.

No wonder Scythe is besotted. She’s seduced him with a Great White shark form.

The fact that he still wants to have her is madness. Probably a bad use of the word, but I’d always wondered if his land psychosis had ever involved more than the auditory and visual hallucinations. Sometimes the psychosis involved delusions as well. Both things are the hallmarks of psychosis. But Scythe had never believed in anything that wasn’t real. He was only as paranoid as any underworld don should be. Delusions had never been his thing. Savage put that advantage down to their shared wolf father stabilising him.

But ever since we’d come across Spawn, the psychosis has gotten worse.

Everything has been made worse.

She is a curse upon us all and none of the others realise it. Perhapsthatisthe delusion after all. Perhaps they are all just unwell.

“Does your dad hate you as much as mine hates me?” Her raspy voice echoing around us shakes me out of my reverie.My eyes focus to see her human head and neck bobbing in the water, dark hair streaming about her shoulders and pooling around her, blue eyes blinking wide at me like a mermaid from a fairytale.

“Darkness comes naturally to serpents,” I snap. “Our kind are nothing alike.”

“I wasn’t talking about our orders,” she says softly, her lips parted as she sucks in a breath. A bead of water trickles over her top lip. “I was talking about our fathers.”

Gods, I hate her more and more as each day passes.

“My father doesn’t hate me,” I say. “You’re alone on that one.”

She wades closer, never taking her wretched, gem-like eyes from me. Her skin is devoid of any jewellery, making her look incomplete. Savage had given her some. I don’t know why she didn’t respect it and?—

“I saw the way he looked at you,” she continues. “At the gates when they all came for Lyle. He’s a real piece of work.”

She’s prying for information, using the worst technique in the book. Trying to make us lookalike. Trying to make me feel understood. But she doesn’t deserve to know what happened to me. She would never earn that right. “Mind your own business,” I say. “You need to worry about your own slithering worm.”

“Scythe says we don’t react, we respond,” she says. After what her father told her, I don’t know how she’s so calm. Probably has the same sociopathic gene as her father. “I…” She hesitates, dipping her mouth below the water as if she’s not sure if she wants to reveal this. It leaves her big saucer-like eyes peering at me in the most vile way. “Never mind.”

Now I have to deal with this awful image being stuck in my mind for the rest of the day. “I don’t have time for this. I only came here to make sure you weren’t going to smash any morewindows and got subjected to an interrogation instead.” I rise and turn, striding back to the stairs.

I’m halfway up the staircase when she says, “No windows will be smashed, but I think my heart will be.”

My dragon threatens to set fire to the stone around us and turn it into an obsidian slide.“I hope it is,”I say to him.“For what she’s done to us, I hope her heart is smashed to a pulp.”

Chapter 76

Lyle

Mace Naga’s unprecedented entry and exit from Animus Academy sends everyone into a spiral. Savage and I bolt across the academy grounds when Xander tells us what happened.

Damien had shielded Mace from us. From even Scythe. And it had meant that he’d had unrestricted access to Aurelia for ten whole minutes. We find her floating on her back in the watery canal, her eyes closed and serene, as if meditating.

I know she is anything but serene. She may have blocked us from feeling her emotions for the moment, but I know her well enough now. Know that my angel is shaken. That trauma from the past few weeks would have risen up, fresh and bleeding.

Savage immediately shifts and belly flops noisily into the water, doggy paddling until he reaches her floating form, nuzzling at her cheek, then licking it.

I crouch down at the water’s edge, monitoring them.

“Did he hurt you, regina?”Savage asks.“Did he touch you?”

“No,” Aurelia replies flatly, without opening her eyes. “I wish to be left alone.”

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