He threw his palms up, and released a blast of power to take control of the Earth and keep the sand away. He wouldnotbe buried again.
Blinking against the particles caking his eyes, his vision finally cleared enough to reveal a ceiling of sand cascading over his head. In the unrelenting sun, the different grains and rocks sparkled and shone with a rainbow of colors. Cole sneered at those colors.
The creature tore a hunk of sinew from his shoulder as the wave ended. As the sun beat down on him once more, Cole expected another wave to follow, but it didn’t.
Twisting to the side, he managed to tear himself free of the creature’s hold. He rolled away from it as more skeletal hands erupted from the sand. They pawed at the air and patted the now calm earth as they searched for him.
Pushing himself to his feet, Cole staggered and nearly went down before catching himself. More sand spilled from his mouth, but he still couldn’t breathe. His vision blurred and went out again as lack of oxygen caused him to sway.
However, he couldn’t stop moving. Stopping meant death; it meant losing, and hewouldclaim the dark fae throne.
He tried to cough the sand out of his lungs, but there was no air in him to do so. As he staggered forward, he clawed at his mouth and pulled handfuls of sand from it. He dug deeper until his fingers were pulling sand out of his throat.
When he couldn’t get any deeper, he clasped his hands together and placed them against his belly. He shoved upward to push more of the sand out of him. Eventually, he loosened enough earth from inside him to work some air into his lungs.
Once those first breaths entered him, a bone-wracking wave of coughing swept his frame. Bending over, he rested his hands on his knees as he hacked up clumps of bloody sand. The intensity of the coughing cracked a couple more ribs and caused a fiery, stabbing pain in his side and back.
It took some time, but he finally wheezed in air. His lungs felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to them, but they were functioning again.
With trembling fingers deprived of their skin, he wiped away the sand sticking to his eyes and blinked against the fiery sun. In the distance, skeletal creatures dragged themselves across the sand toward him. They were so far away he didn’t pay them any attention.
The barren wasteland spread out before him once more, but this time, a hundred feet away, the desert ended in a wall of dark. He couldn’t see what lay within that dark and didn’t care.
If it meant escaping this place, that shadowed land could lead straight to Hell, and he would be happy about it. Rising, he staggered into the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The blessed coldair of the darkness enveloped him as he lurched forward like a zombie in pursuit of brains—and those creatures were ruthless when tracking a meal.
Except, he didn’t smell brains or food as he stumbled forward. Instead, the crisp scent of water filled his nostrils. If he’d possessed an ounce of moisture in his body, saliva would have flooded his mouth, but though he felt like drooling, he couldn’t.
His stressed heart beat so rapidly it pulsed in his eardrums as he tracked the scent. He became so focused on the smell of water and the prospect of drinkingall of itthat his vision tunneled.
He didn’t see the world around him and had no idea if an enemy loomed nearby as he searched for water. The cool rocks beneath his bare, skeletal feet were a welcome respite as he shuffled around a set of boulders that blocked his view of whatever lay beyond.
And then, he saw the water.
An unrecognizable sound issued from him, and his legs became so weak that he nearly went down. Somehow, he managed to stay on his feet as he staggered toward the pristine lake. Not a single ripple disturbed its glassy surface.
He was almost to the shore and could already taste the cool liquid slipping down his throat to eradicate what remained of the sand coating the insides of his cheeks and tongue when warning bells went off in his head.
He planned to trudge straight into the water and consume as much of it as he could while washing away the sand sticking to his muscles, but something inside his head screamed at him to stop when he arrived at the water’s edge.
Falling to his knees, he stared at the water. It was so crystal clear he could see every one of the stones making up its bed. Hovering over the water, he shook as he restrained himself from gulping water from the lake.
These were the trials. And so far, he’d endured a trial by air, another by earth, and now he was staring at water.
The trials are the elements.
The knowledge was sluggish in coming as most of his brain continued to scream at him todrink, drink, drink!
But he couldn’t drink. He’d defeated air and earth, so that only left water and fire. It couldn’t be a coincidence that after leaving that wasteland behind, he was now facing this lake with all its delicious, life-giving water.
His entire body quaked as the aroma of the water intensified. Like a siren beckoning to the sailors, he couldn’t resist its temptation as he leaned over the water. He hadn’t realized he’d cupped his hands until he spotted himself hovering over the water with them.
The vision of himself—or at least he believed it was him, as he was barely recognizable—staring into that water shocked some reality back into him. He had no skin left on his face, and little remained on his body. It had been stripped away and replaced by the sand sticking to his bloody tendons.
One of his eyes protruded oddly. It took him a second to realize that was because part of his eyelid was missing. He’d lost his boots; skeletons and the sand had torn away his shirt and shredded most of his pants.
