A woodland shifter.
The guards’ grips on their weapons tightened, frantically looking between each other as vines sprouted out from the ground and began to snake up their ankles and legs, rooting them in place.
But then a gunshot cracked through the air.
BANG.
Esmyra’s eyes flared, her breath catching in her throat as she found one of the soldiers aiming a gun, smoke rising from the end of its barrel. When she turned to the shifter, a bullet wound marked his temple—centered directly between his eyes.
But that wasn’t all.
Branching out from the wound, onyx, spider-like veins quickly spread. Within seconds, they covered his face, spreading down his neck, torso, and arms. And then, as the infection spread to the tips of every limb, his body began to crumble, caving in on itself. It didn’t stop until the man was nothing but a shriveled, vein-covered husk on the ground.
Esmyra stood there, frozen in horror as she watched.
He wasn’t just shot—he was murdered with a velsinyte bullet. She had never seen its effects on anyone other than herself before. Syrena and Azarian were right. Once in the bloodstream, velsinyte devoured anyone who wasn’t a god in seconds.
Bile climbed her throat. What if one of those bullets hit Draevyn? Or Jak?
Absolutely fucking not.
Fury, dark and relentless, swirled in her chest, and Kaelypso answered her call. Talons extended, and the midnight hair sprawled over her shoulder lengthened to even longer, silver locks. Her pirate guise shimmered and was replaced by billowing, royal robes. Her fingers sprawled out, and a trident formed entirely of water rested in her hand.
Her bare feet settled into the dirt road, and her storm was summoned.
Water surged up from the earth, curling around her arms as lightning skittered within the liquid. Her hair lifted on a sudden windless charge, and the silver-blue tattoos glowing on her skin pulsated with her power, humming with her wrath.
Two soldiers turned at the sound, their eyes widening in the silver light cast from her own.
“This is the part where you run,” she warned.
They moved to scatter, but even with her warning, she never gave them a chance.
She aimed the points of her trident at them, and lightning erupted forward. It violently slammed into them with a blinding flash. They were hurled backward, their flesh melting from their bones as they landed in smoking heaps.
Esmyra cracked her neck to the side as she stepped over the piles of pulp they had turned into.
A whip of water lashed from her palm at a third soldier, yanking him off his feet and slamming him into the wall of a tavern. Another raised his musket behind her, and she spun, eyes glowing; a bolt of lightning leapt from her fingertip and shot out straight into his chest. The godly powers humming through her felt the moment his heart stopped.
Let them call me a monster. If she was a monster for protecting her own, then so be it.
The onlookers who were once afraid of the soldiers now looked at her with something resembling both awe and fear. One of them let out a scream, and they all followed suit, running away from her in a frantic mess of shoves and curses as they scattered.
She didn’t care; she just wanted them to be safe. Because the rowdy mess of misfits who called this port their home were hers.
Esmyra took off in a sprint, her feet slamming against the cobblestone as she searched for Draevyn. She had to find him and her crew before any of them were hit with one of those bullets.
Every instinct screamed at her to disappear, to slip beneath the tide and vanish, but she ignored them. She knew it was more Kaelypso’s fear of velsinyte than her own, because what Esmyra feared was losing what few things she had left.
“We now know for sure they have the velsinyte in their guns. We need to leave,” Kaelypso hissed.
“No.”
“Or in the least, listen to Irah’s heir and hide!”
“Stop being a pussy!” Esmyra yelled out loud.
“Says the woman who hasn’t been killed by it before!”
