Page 81 of Her Psycho Beasts

The fact that he’s holed up in bed with her confirms that.

“He confuses fascination with infatuation!” Xander exclaims. “She is powerful, yes, but she’s also…”

“What?” Savage asks, frowning.

“Dangerous. Unstable. Have you forgotten what she did to Minnie and Titus?”

“That’s why she has us,” I say, carefully. Xander is also unstable right now. He hangs on a precipice himself, fighting his desire for her with his hatred. Savage and I exchange a knowing look. We also need to be observant of our dragon, whose power is so vast that even his father is wary of him. His temper had the potential to be the ruin of us all.

“And this rescue mission!” Xander exclaims, sitting forward in his seat, eyes blazing. “It’s insane that we’re even contemplating it. Marduk himself said it’s almost impossible and we’re risking our own necks for a woman who’s basically dead already?—”

Savage lets out a snarl and lunges for Xander. I barely repress the urge myself, but watching Savage lay a solid punch to Xander’s jaw and the subsequent crunch we all hear is satisfying.

Xander groans, “Fuck!” through his broken jaw, before setting a hand to it and letting his power flow.

Savage huffs irritably and shakes his head in dismay as he leaps off his dragon-brother. “You’re really an asshole sometimes, Xan.”

“Fuck you and your regin— Argh!”

He doesn’t get to finish his sentence because my animus has had enough and flips his armchair backwards, sending him crashing, upside down, into the wall.

“Really, Lyle?”

“Really,” I growl from my chest.

“Enough,”Scythe rasps.“That’s fucking enough.”

Xander mutters something foul under his breath before collecting the cloth sack with his kangaroo joey from the wall and storming out.

Chapter 39

Scythe

Ten years ago

Smoke and flames rise like demons from hell around me. My power burns like cold fire to keep my lungs breathing and my eyes seeing my parents tied to our plastic dining chairs in front of me. I’d kept my wolf mum unconscious out of respect for Savage. She was his mum, even if she was evil. But Dad doesn’t deserve a quiet death. He deserves to feel every last flame from where he’s tied up to the metal chair in front of me.

Something rises out of the black smoke. Something leathery and hunched. I stare at it in horror.

“No!” I cry before inhaling a lungful of ash.

Dad looks over his shoulder, cranes his neck to see where I’m looking. He coughs, and then I realise it’s not a cough, but laughter.

“It’s started, hasn’t it?” he wheezes. “Your land psychosis has finally started. It’s all downhill from here, son. All fucking downhill.”

“You’re wrong.” I’m not looking at my dad but the gruesome thing bear-crawling the perimeter of the room, malicious black eyes fixed on me like a hunting predator. I stand my ground and meet it eye to eye.

“I might be the one to die today,” my dad rasps, “but the road you’re taking now is just a longer, more painful version. A slow death.” Dad coughs and laughs again. “It’ll be slow, and it ends with you, and a rope around your throat.”

“No.” But his words are coals inside the base of me. Coals that smoulder and burn like this house.

“I’m going to watch you die,” I say firmly despite the pain lashing down my throat, burning my eyes, my skin. It turns my velvet voice into something harsher. Scarier. “And I’m going to enjoy it.”

The house groans, a dying man’s final protest to the darkness. Something collapses in my room, probably my bookshelf.

He would never hurt my mother or Savage again. He would never hurtmeagain.

I wait until my father’s screams begin and the flames light up his body like a dying star. This is fate, not dealt by the Wild Goddess, but byme. I turn my back on his burning corpse and make my way out of the house, towards my baby brother. Towards our future.

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