Page 2 of Consume Me
I left them buried. Deep. Far from town. I’d sealed the earth with spell-laced salt courtesy of Natalia’s personal supply, spoken words in a language I didn’t even understand, cut my palm as a blood ward.
They shouldn’t be here.
Yet, here they are.
Taunting me.
I take a step back. Then another. My heel hits the wall. I slide down it until I’m sitting on the cold floor, legs folded, arms wrapped tight around myself like that will stop the shaking.
The daggers don’t move.
But they whisper, same as always, their incessant chatter ringing out inside my head. A private torture known only by me.
“You left us,”they murmur, soft and sweet, like a lover.“You tried to run. To abandon us. But you’re ours, Kendall. Ours forever.”
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until stars explode behind my lids.
“I didn’t ask for this,” I say out loud. Not that I need to. They can read my thoughts just as easily. “I don’t want to belong to you.”
“Want has nothing to do with it, mortal. You wielded us at the moment of transfer, and now your hands are ours to command.”
They sound amused. Darkly, disgustingly amused.
I want to scream. To throw them into the sea, the sun, the void. But tonight proved once and for all that doingany of that won’t matter. They’ll come back. They always come back. Even here, above Spells, with Natalia’s protections woven into every beam and floorboard, they found a way in. And worse, they made it look easy.
No one else has ever breached Natalia’s security.
But the daggers aren’t like anyone or anything I’ve ever known.
The past eighteen months of my life have proven that.
Fighting tears, I jolt a little as my phone dings with a text. I pull it free from where it’s wedged into my pocket and check the screen. Tori. Again. I sigh, my hopelessness digging itself even deeper into my chest. My older sister has always been my lifeline and protector. She would be furious if she knew what had happened to me that day I took those daggers from her hands. The way they bound themselves to me as my master. She’d be even more upset if she knew what they’d made me do. The people I’ve killed. The darkness I’ve courted. The way I’ve all but lost myself to their will.
I told her once that my gift of death sight had only ever shown a long life for myself. A death in old age. But that’s a lie. I’ve seen my own death. It’s a vision that haunts me day and night. The only things standing between me and it are these damned daggers. Even so, sometimes I can’t help but wonder if the ends justify the means.
But Tori… she’s newly mated and married. For the first time since our parents died, she’s happy. I won’t take that happiness from her. Nor will I endanger anyone else I care about by involving them in my fucked-up situation.
Before the last thought is finished, I can feel the familiar buzz between my temples.
“Shit, not now,” I groan.
But there’s no stopping the visions, and within seconds, I’m swept away in a sea of images. Possible futures for all sorts of creatures flash by so quickly that I barely have time to grab hold of one before it has slipped away and I’m on to the next. Their sheer speed is dizzying. Not to mention the horror of having no way to slow or stop them.
My dark fae gift is sight. Specifically, death sight.
But this…
This isn’t me. This is the daggers. They’ve been using me to channel these visions for months now.
It’s getting worse.
By the time the last vision fades, the room tilts as it spins, and I get on all fours, trying to breathe instead of vomit on my rug.
None of the images I saw were of people I know. But that doesn’t make their fates any less horrific. Or less real.
What good is seeing future visions of death with no way to stop it? Or worse, being the cause of it when death finally finds the poor souls I saw?
When I’m fairly sure I won’t be sick, I sit again. Heavily this time.
