Page 46 of Wings of Ashes
I amnota cygnus shifter. Even if she did not know what she was, she knew that.
Who cares if I look like a blonde?Who cared if Nix experienced some bullying? She already went through “Ugly Fuckling” bullying.It is nothing compared to what I went through in my cage.
She popped open the top of the elixir vial and lifted it to her lips. She instantly recoiled.
Without thinking, she flung the vial out of her fingers, and it hit the wall, shattering and oozing onto the floor. There, it sizzled over the carpet and perfumed her room with a hauntingly familiar smell.
That scent.
Nix would have never recognized it in her youth. But after years of being injected with high-potency doses of it, in her cage, by her captor…
Poison. A rare kind of poison that weakened the shifter who ingested it.
Nix shivered uncontrollably and clutched herself in fear. Her mind sprang back to the horrific memories. The smell of her blood. Her burning flesh. When her body was unable to move after the large doses her captor gave her.
Why the hell did the illusion potion Elle’s family gave her have that same shifter-weakening poison in it?
It was a very small dose, but Nix would recognize that smell anywhere after everything she had gone through.
Springing to her feet, she ran to her potions textbook and skimmed the table of contents to try to find a specific recipe.
If she had been exposed to the poison all this time… Was this one a bad batch, or had the horrible ingredient always beenin her illusion elixir? Was that the reason she had felt so weak and fatigued in her past years at the academy? She did not know what to trust.
What she did know was that she needed to get any traces of the illusion elixir the hell out of her system.
No wonder I’m weak.
No wonder I can hardly jog without losing my breath and keeling over.
She had been ingesting traces of poison…for years.
Professor Bowen was right. A nefarious ingredient, indeed.
But did Elle’s family know? And if they did, if they had added the poison…
Why? Were they linked to her future captor, who had buckets of the stuff?
If so… If Nix’s adoptive family for the last ten years was involved somehow or linked to Nix’s future capture and torture, then Nix would destroy them.
19
CHAPTER
In complete darkness other than the blanket of moonlight, wandering around the woods at night was maybe not so smart. But that’s why Nix had a flashlight.
Sneaking out of her dorm building, Nix was on a mission. She had found a chapter on reversal potions in her class textbook, and she would not sleep until she found all of the ingredients and made and drank the potion.
After years of being kept weak by that fragrant poison, given to her by her future captor, Nix could not close her eyes and relax until she knew she did everything she could to reverse any of it that was in her system now.
“Weak little birdie, could never break from her cage,” he would sing.
A reversal potion required several herbs found in the woods, on the outskirts of the academy campus.
Agrimonia, pondweed, honey (for taste), rosemary, a tear of a virgin, and a very rare purple flower called hyssop.
Tear of a virgin would be easy—thinking about losing her mate, Persius, or how her adoptive family had been secretlypoisoning her for so many years would trigger her never-had-sex tear ducts. Finding honey would also be easy; she kept some in her room for hot tea.
So: agrimonia, pondweed, rosemary, and hyssop. Due to her previous potions class, she knew where she could find plenty of agrimonia and rosemary. Pondweed, she hoped, would be close to a pond that was about one mile into the dark forest. But hyssop…
