Page 73 of Veiled Fate
The power isn’t in my hand.
What the hell was that supposed to mean? She had just said I controlled her power before and that I had to do so again. So, if it’s not in my hand, then whose hand is it in?
I looked down at the hand gripping the sword, trying to understand the cryptic message. Why couldn’t she have just said it plainly? Why did it have to be so difficult? Did she notwantme to do it? She couldn’t possibly want Lycaonus to win and take her power for himself, could she?
“Damn it, what am I supposed to do!” I howled, the fingers of my left hand struggling to stay tight around the sword, courtesy of the gaping hole in the forearm.
Staring at the hole made by a dagger held by another Alpha, I watched the emerald lightning sparking inside it. The power wasright there. My veins glowed with it, my skin stretching and trying to split apart as it sought to get out of my body.
No, not my body. I stiffened in sudden realization.
The power wasn’t in my hand. It was in myblood!
Taking the blade in my good hand, I shook my head. I had to be crazy. If thisdidn’t work …
Kiel shouted in pain as Lycaonus took advantage of his weakened state from the fight with the Nehringi and struck him hard.
Without a second thought, I plunged the blade through the hole in my stomach, reopening the wounds and coating the steel in blood.
Myblood.
I screamed in agony at the sensation of being impaled again, but through the haze of red and pain, I focused on the sword, now linked to me through my blood. That indescribable feeling of having a foreign objectinsideme was all I needed.
If you want it. Make it so.
Gathering up all of Fate’s power, I shoved it into the sword, stripping it from every corner of my body and forcing it into that other object that was, temporarily at least, a part of me.
Along the way, my skin calmed, and my veins ceased glowing. My vision lost its haze of jade. Even the room darkened as I robbed it of the only source of light.
With the power beginning to be under control, I willed shut my wounds. My neck stitched itself up, and my forearm became whole once again. Reaching up to grab the handle of the short blade once more, an awkward task that crunched my abs against the edges of the sword, I pulled it free slowly, ordering the last vestiges of Fate’s power to heal that wound, too.
As the tip pulled free of my stomach, the room went completely and totally pitch black.
“What’s going on?” Lycaonus snarled into the silence that followed. “Light, now!”
“You know,” I said casually from where I now stood on the altar, balanced easily on the balls of my feet. “You should probably be more careful what you wish for.”
With an order to the sword, its tip pointed down to the ground, a line of light ran along the flat edges of the blade, outlining it in a deadly emerald hue.
The Alpha, standing perhaps ten feet away from me, reacted with immediate suspicion and a hint of shock.
“What have you done?” he hissed.
“What I had to do to stop you,” I growled, stepping off the altar and advancing on the weaponless Alpha.
He barked a laugh. “You can’t kill me. You must know that by now.”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” I agreed. “But taking your head and burying it separately from your body ought to leave you less than capable, don’t you think?”
“No sword can do—”
I lifted my Fate-infused blade, and Lycaonus fell silent, his eyes focused on the glowing tip of my sword.
“You were saying?”
“I was saying that you will die now!” Lycaonus howled as a shadow rushed me from the side.
The sword and I spun as one, moving before we truly registered what we saw. I parried the Nehringi’s longer blade. Green sparks flashed where steel met steel. I saw the surprise that registered in the assassin a moment before my blade pared a sliver of steel from his.
