Page 8 of Cursed Evermore
My Bloodsworn gasped. It took a lot for such a thing to happen—cry silver tears. The only equivalent I’d heard of were instances in the mortal realm where a human’s hair turned white after experiencing intense shock or fear.
I wriggled my fingers once more, and the dark threads of my magic curled around the rebel’s body in wisps of blackened mist, thick and shifting, like a storm without wind.
In the next heartbeat, the skin ripped off his body piece by piece as if I were tearing it off with my hands.
The scream that poured from his throat was unlike any other we’d heard tonight. It was raw and animalistic. Heartbreaking and distressing. Pitiful and deplorable.
Seconds later, every inch of his skin was gone, leaving muscles and sinew and organs exposed. But he wasn’t dead yet.
To fuck with him, I was purposely keeping him alive for a little longer. Just a little longer to stretch out that arduous pain so it would feel like he’d endured it for an eternity.
The air pulsed with death. The dungeon walls groaned and strained.
A final cry tore from his throat. Then the screaming stopped, and the darkness swallowed him whole, a twisting, volatile force that consumed flesh, bone, and soul in a single moment.
Then he was nothing.
Gone.
Erased.
Unmade.
No corpse. No mess.
The empty chains where his wrist had been bound clanked against the stone, and the air reeked with the rebel’s essence.
It was over, but the darkness continued swirling around my body, draining and stealing my sense as a familiar voice, gravelly as crushed bone, called to me.
“Join me. Become me. Be one with me,”it whispered.
“Join me. Become me. Be one with me.”
It would be so easy to let go. To stop fighting. To lose myself.
After five years of failing to find my father’s murderer and the ring to break the curse, what hope did I have left?
I’d been around for three centuries. Perhaps it was time to become something else and embrace my new calling as Death. Perhaps it was…
A hand rested on my shoulder, warm and firm and powerful like an anchor, grounding me. Through the grip, a flow of energy seeped beneath my skin and breathed into my soul, pulling me back to this world.
Bastian.
Only he would brave touching me when I was like this.
He had the power to manipulate emotion and energy, so as he took the edge off my fury and dimmed the wrath that fueled the darkness, my mind returned to me.
The darkness subsided, crawling back from whence it came, and the voice faded to a static hum.
I breathed out a haggard breath and looked at Bastian. His hand was still on my shoulder, bare of his gauntlet and blistered from the impact of my magic.
Slowly, my Fae looks returned, everything down to the long raven hair on my head and the deep scar that ran across my cheek. Sometimes, this look felt like a glamor, an illusion of what I wasn’t anymore. More and more, even when I didn’t use my death magic, I felt like I’d already become one with the dark.
With a hard stare, Bastian released me and straightened, clenching his jaw. He knew what I was thinking. They all knew. “Wolfe?—”
“Don’t.” My voice echoed around us, fierce as lightning crackling over the Pangthorne Mountains. I didn’t want the reminder of the dangers of using my powers, especially during aPhantom Moon. “That bastard more than deserved it. Don’t you dare disagree.”
Bastian stared at me for a long moment before he nodded and his shoulders sagged with the burden of grief and defeat. He’d known the handmaidens for as long as I had. They both helped raise us. Their deaths would hit harder than the others, so there was no way he could utter a word against my decision to obliterate the rebel.
