Page 63 of Jacinth

As Orion whispered “One”, we lunged.

At first, everything went to plan. I caught Alisdair by the elbows, wrenching them back as far as I could. Orion stepped out in front of him, right arm extended, palm glowing with his power.

I pulled back further, exposing his chest and the amulet. Alisdair twisted, lunging and bucking like a wild animal and for a time, I felt unstoppable.

Until I wasn’t.

As Orion reared back and cast the Hail Mary, onetime-offer, don’t-fuck-this-up spell forward; Alisdair dropped like a bag of grain. As though in slow motion, his arm dislocated under my hand. I bent to adjust my grip, and our only hope hit the boundary fence and imploded on impact, leaving a gaping hole in the barrier and taking any chance of redemption with it.

Alisdair wrestled his way free of my suddenly lax hands and bolted through the newly formed exit.

My knees went next.

Slowly, each part shut down.

Except my mind.

In there, I didn’t stop screaming.

Funny how all this time they had thought me broken.

Now, they may have been right.

CHAPTER 43

Niko

Wasted.

Look how far I’ve come,I thought to myself as I screwed the top off a fresh bottle of vodka. I was fairly sure about 85% of my body mass was now spirits.

Fuck. Spirits.

What was I saying? Oh! My brain wouldn’t shut up. Just kept on spitting out the greatest hits of the last twenty-four hours.

The fact I couldn’t even kill myself to save my girlfriend?

Yup, that was front and center. Fucking Harley.

Not that she had stuck around for the party.

Pity party, that is.

As soon as I had heard Skyler’s report, that all our work was for nothing and our girl was gone? I had bailed. I couldn’t handle any more of this, and I knew one sure-fire way of making it go away... at least, I thought I had. Turns out my brain wasn’t on board for the whole shut out the world thing.

I remembered how insane her ramblings were when we shared a body. How enthusiastically she explored. Her grin when we had agreed to be in this together. I took a large gulp of ‘please for the love of god let me forget’. No dice.

A slicing light burned my eyes as someone opened a door from outside.

Orion.

Sky was nowhere to be seen.

“He’s in the middle of a nervous breakdown in the cemetery. Thought it would be rude to interrupt. Gimme that.” He swiped my bottle, and I found my limbs were a kind of unresponsive that meant I couldn’t stop him.

“How the fuck did it come to this?”

It seemed in the absence of a reply, Orion was going to carry a conversation with himself. Then again, if I thought back to that time pre-Jacinth—god, had that only been a week ago?—he would have been used to me being paralytic and Sky so stuck in his head he was completely unresponsive. Poor bastard was probably well versed in self conversing.

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