Page 27 of The Healer and the Wolf: Part Two

That shimmering rage inside me redoubled. Once again, he’d been hurt after I’d almost gotten him to safety.

The plants sensed that anger, or maybe they fed off it—I couldn’t tell. My brain was so awash with adrenaline, anger, fear,and everything else going on, that it was all a mishmash of input and sensation.

But what I did know was that I was somehow communicating with the foliage—the very much alive foliage. The plants suddenly grew faster, moved faster,werefaster.

The next thing I knew, all those thorny growths from before shot through the air straight at Alric. Magic burst from his hands, knocking away the thorns. He was so concentrated on everything coming at him, he forgot to think about things that could comefrombelow.

One moment he waved his hand and caused a volley of thorns to burst into flame, the next, there was an awful screech as the metal below him split in two, and a giant flower suddenly bloomed below him.

It was magnificent, all resplendent golds and corals with yellow dots, almost like a sunrise breaking through the twilight sky. Then it snapped shut like a Venus flytrap around Alric’s lower half.

He screamed in terror. “What is happening?”

I had no idea what I was doing, yet I unequivocally knew it wasmewho was making everything happen. I felt connected to every single plant around me, not in a solid, definable way like a limb, but that connection was there, nonetheless.

It was almost like a phone call, albeit a phone call with hundreds of different non-sentient entities that didn’t exactly speak English.

Huh, maybe not like a phone call at all.

But I didn’t waste too much more of my mental faculties worrying about the semantics. All the vines in the room surged toward Alric, grabbing his arms and binding them tightly to his side. The vines wrapped around his chest, squeezing so hard I could hear his ribs crack, and then finally, his neck.

His face turned red as he coughed and writhed, but he couldn’t free himself. All the magic stopped, and for a moment, it was calm.

Well, the room was calm. I certainly wasn’t.

There was still the fireworks of something unnamable within me as the vines wound around the rest of Alric’s body, tightening, and tightening, andtightening.

“A drya—” He panted before devolving into a coughing fit, spittle flying from his lips. “You’re not sup?—”

He couldn’t get the words out as new vines, armed with thick, long thorns, joined the fray. Blood seeped out between the verdant green as Alric screamed in agony.

The sound wasawful.Coupled with the sight and smell of blood, it sent ice through my veins. The fire inside me went out, the rage dissipated, and suddenly I was looking at a man being tortured to death.

Fuck.

Nausea swept through me, and it took all my control not to throw up. The thing was, I knew Alric was evil. If he died, we’d be saving an innumerable amount of innocent lives. But there was a difference between dispatching a dangerous foe and outrighttorturingthem. And sure, he had done much worse things to other people and most likely deserved whatever I could do to him, but that was the difference between him and me. He wanted to hurt people.

I wanted to save people.

“Stop! That’s enough!” I called to the plants, and the energy within me completely fizzled. I half-expected them to lose all their vigor with that, no longer fueled by the storm inside of me, but they went on as if I hadn’t said anything at all. Still squeezing. Stillhurting.

“I said that’s enough! Just end him!”

The plants didn’t listen to me, and when I tried to grab hold of that same energy I’d had before, I simply couldn’t find it. It was frustrating. It was horrifying. And I couldn’t help but feel like a giant hypocrite for chewing out Leo for what happened at Chadwicke’s.

What if the plants kept going after destroying Alric? I clearly didn’t have any control over them. What if in my desperate attempt to save my love, I’d created a force that would kill us all?

“I saidstop!Just end it!”

Maybe it was in my own head, but it felt like a ripple of energy went through the plants. A moment later, the vines around Alric’s neck tightened even more, then jerked to the side, and a sickening crack echoed through the room.

It was finally over.

I stood there, trembling, as the reality of everything that had happened rushed through me. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do, could only watch as the plants slowly reverted back to normal and disappeared into the ground. At least my fears about them turning on us turned out to be unfounded.

Still, as I looked around the carnage of the room and at Alric’s mangled, bloody corpse, I couldn’t help but wonder what I had just done.

What the hell was I?

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