Page 121 of All the Devils are Here

It was unthinkable.

Still, the pain grew. I couldn’t move at all. Paralyzed by the magic inside me now. It ached and burned and amplified everything else so I was nothing but a throbbing bruise that life refused to stop pressing on.

“It’s going to take her,” Trin said.

“He’ll make it,” Ariel said. “He will.”

“He’s going to die,” I whispered, breath hiccuping.

Ariel pulled me up and turned me to look into my eyes. I still had no control. “You’re going to be all right, Meg. I promise. You will survive this.”

The world blurred. “I don’t think so.”

“You will.” He kissed me quickly. “You will. Whatever you feel right now, it ismorethan you, understand? The grief is yours, but the pain is not. Laurent went to make it go away.”

Pain?

I was in pain.

Everything was pain, and my heart hurt as much as my body. It was so much I was used to it now.

So much pain.

But if Laurent was gone, there would always be some pain. I needed to learn to live with it.

“It should have lasted longer,” Trin said. “Should haveslowed. It’s like our bond made it surge.”

Ban pulled me into his lap and cradled me. A slow, rolling purr that made my body relax against my will. “For me too,” he said. “It surged after we came back. I saw it recede, but it returned faster than it fell.”

I felt it with a single piece of detached clarity. My mind had separated from myself and my grief in order to survive. And it was in that mind that I had the thought.

Sex. Orgasms drove back the magic’s power. But mating didn’t. Mating made it grow. Like the connection between me and my mates opened my soul to more of the magic, and now it was too late to stop it.

The magic in me convulsed painfully. Something was different. The light I saw behind my eyes was only one bright spot shining directly into my eyes. There was aknowingthere. A grief that matched my own, and a yearning I couldn’t explain through the agony.

“Fuck,” Ariel cursed and whispered. “Come on, Khalas.”

“Meg,” Trin turned my face to his, panicked. “You have to stay with us all right? You have to stay right here.”

“I want to. I don’t know how.”

Ban shifted to pin me down with his feline form, but I was already being pulled away. Not transformed and not killed. Just taken once more, away from the monsters who loved me and who I loved.

I felt it when it happened.

The power simmering under my skin entered my heart, and I was fully a being of power and magic.

I expected it to hurt.

But it didn’t.

Instead, the pain in my body faded though I felt theirs through our bonds. Ban growled in my ear, and I felt the desperation. Trin was kissing the back of my hand, and Ariel…

Ariel’s dark eyes were as desolate as I felt.

My mind was fractured, part here and part gone. And in the part that was still here, I heard them begging me to stay the same way I begged Laurent to stay. And I wanted to.

I did.

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