Page 59 of Unbroken
“Please, let us help you,” he said. Greenish blood flowed down her face, and she shook her head sharply, as if to clear it. “Listen to me—there are sorcerers who might be able to reverse what was done to you. Even if they can’t, you can still have a life.”
“I have no life!” She tensed her vines, shortening them, and suddenly she was in his face. Her clawed hand lashed out, ripping lines of agony across his cheek and jaw. Red blood spurted, the flesh open to the bone. “I’m going to tear out your throat.”
That would certainly kill him. Blinded by his own blood, he rammed his forehead into her face, felt her nose shatter.
Then they were trading blow after blow—fists, claws, tentacles, anything to hurt the other. He needed to stun her, to stop her. If he could just get her away from him for a moment, long enough to heal a little, but she wasn’t giving him the opportunity.
He let her drive him back, away from the tree. There was a bench behind him somewhere, he just had to find it with a grasping tentacle…
There.
He swung the marble bench around, slamming it into Victoria with all the strength he could muster. Bones snapped, and she cried out. She retracted her own tentacles, trying to pull away from him now, to get some space between them for her to heal.
He refused to let go, jerking her closer. “Victoria,” he said through a mouthful of blood; she’d loosened some of his teeth with a blow. “Stop this. We have the Book now. It’s over. Stop fighting and let us help you!”
A mix of greenish sap and red blood covered her face. She spat weakly, swaying in his grasp. “I’ll never surrender to the likes of you,” she grated out through split and swollen lips.
A thorn shot out of the bark skin of her torso, three feet long and thick as his wrist. It stabbed straight through his gut, just below the rib cage, tearing through muscle and organ to emerge out the other side.
The pain seemed oddly distant. His legs went weak; he was bleeding somewhere inside. His tentacles peeled away from her, and he stumbled back, sliding off the terrible thorn. A river of blood gushed out of the wound, and he fell to his knees.
It was bad, but he could heal. He just needed a moment. But his vision was going fuzzy and his limbs were refusing to work right.
Smoke billowed across the clearing, and sparks drifted on the wind. It had begun to rain at some point, the drops icy cold against his skin. He needed to…he needed to…
As if from the other end of a long tunnel, he saw Victoria stumbling closer to him, dragging the bench he’d hit her with. Heaving it above her head with a pained grunt, she said, “Die, you filthy creature.”
Then the marble came down on his skull, and everything went black.
CHAPTER 27
Sebastian found himself standing on a beach, in front of a man in old-fashioned clothing whose savage grin exposed blood-stained teeth. The sun set behind him, painting the sky in rivers of crimson and scarlet, but night was coming on fast.
“Quincy,” he said, naming the final Hollowell sibling.
If Quincy’s appearance now was true to life, then he’d been a handsome man indeed. But the manic expression on his face bordered on unsettling. “Yes. You’ve met my other siblings, I see.”
Sebastian braced himself. “They’re Bound to me. And I’m going to Bind you as well.”
“Of course you are,” Quincy said simply.
Something was wrong. This wasn’t going the way the other Bindings had. “Aren’t you going to offer me something in return for leaving you unbound?”
“Is there something you want?” Quincy asked, tipping his head to one side.
“Well…no.”
“Then we’re in agreement!” Quincy clapped his hands together. “Bind me and let me rejoin my siblings once again.”
Every instinct told him this was some sort of trap, though he couldn’t imagine what it might be. “You want to be Bound? Why? None of the others did.”
Quincy sighed and folded his hands behind his back. “I love my brother and sisters, but they always had…let’s say, more limited imagination. Not like me. Not like Lydia.”
“Lydia? Gregorio’s wife?”
“Don’t reduce her to my little brother’s appendage,” Quincy snapped, anger flashing over his handsome face. “She surpassed him in every way. The true scholar of our family—I had such hopes for her daughter. But I suppose Phoebe is long dead now.”
“I don’t understand,” Sebastian admitted.
