Page 319 of Seer Prophet

He had access to more light, more tricks, more experience. He’d logged hundreds of more hours on the field. He hadn’t fought other telekinetics, but he’d engaged in more psychic warfare, and most of the same principles applied.

He gasped, slamming out at me harder.

That time, I barely managed to get the shield up in time to deflect the worst of it. Anticipating the shield, he twisted around its edges, hitting at me from the side, and I fought to compensate, blocking his light instinctively.

He was still gaining on me?and now he was learning me, too.

He felt my reluctance to hurt him. He felt those lines I shied away from, those I wouldn’t cross at all, and I saw a smile touch his narrow lips.

I felt the Dreng helping him now, too, yanking parts of me into the construct as I struggled to think, to decide how I could end this without splitting my husband’s skull open.

I shoved him off me again, right before a sideways flick of his light darted out, throwing me so fast I didn’t manage to pull the shield around me in time to lessen the blow. Gasping, I hung in space on the wall by the same cage, staring through the bars, barely seeing the pale faces that stared back at me.

I saw their expressions, though.

Terror filled their eyes as the light from my irises reflected in theirs.

In that split second, I realized he could kill me. I threw up a wall of light, cracking into his, breaking his hold, but it didn’t lesson the terror I felt when I realized he’d had an opportunity to kill me and hadn’t. It hadn’t been mercy that stopped him, or a memory of who I was?a part of him was playing with me. I could even feel the part of him that enjoyed this, that enjoyed a good fight. He didn’t want it to end too soon.

He’d never had anyone to fight like this before.

He’d never had an equal.

I could feel a flicker of the real Revik in that, somewhere under the clouds of Dreng light.

None of it mattered, though. None of this would help.

He was going to kill me. He was going to kill himself.

He was going to kill our daughter.

He tried to throw me sideways again, but I smacked down the snaking tendrils of light, right before he went after my heart, crushing it briefly in my chest before I managed to force him off, hitting out at him with a denser bolt of light.

While he gasped from my hit, laughing by the cage wall, I clutched my chest from what he’d done, fighting to recover even as he went after that part of my light he liked to coil into when we had sex. Panicking when I realized what he was after, I fought to keep him out, but I felt him getting into my light through the threads that connected us, deeper that time?

Too deep. Deeper than I could extricate myself.

My separation pain spiked as my light opened, that part of me that wanted so desperately to coil into him, to rebuild the bond Terian weakened over the past month.

Remembering Lily, I gritted my teeth, sending a hot dart of light at his belly, through the same line of connection. He let out a groan, loosening his hold even as desire slammed back at me. But again, it wasn’t a desire for sex that would actually help me.

I felt desire for fucking, killing, death, fighting tangled up in the same hot flood.

Forcing out a brilliant burst of light, I tried to break his hold altogether.

Feeling his grip on me weaken with that burst, I grabbed the steel bars more tightly in my hands, using them to drag myself to my feet.

Turning, I hit him with a cluster of hits from multiple sides once I was upright, trying to distract him enough to get him off me for real?if only to give myself breathing room.

I felt my light hit him in multiple places, sliding past his shields at the last minute when I traced that pain back to his own half-severed bond. He gasped, then saw what I was doing and tried to block it, but too late. Even so, the blow that finally reached him was definitely weaker than the one before it.

It got him to let go, but for barely a half second.

Then he was after me again.

He wouldn’t stop. Menlim wouldn’t let him stop.

Eventually, he would grow tired of playing. Eventually, he would get in. He’d get in for the same reason I could always get past his defenses, even when he was a servant of the Dreng.

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