And it was tightening, tightening, tightening. It made her think of medieval torture devices, of being trapped while someone turned a handle—and of course, she knew who was doing the turning. It was him; he was doing this. She had let her guard drop enough, and now he was seizing his chance to torture her to death.
And it was her fury at that injustice that made her act.
She couldn’t move her hand, but she could move the knife within it. She could tilt it up, until it touched velvet. Then it was just a matter of forcing, of pushing, and making that fucking material rip.
It shocked her when it did, though.
She felt it give and almost sobbed with relief. Because the moment she managed that, the rest of it seemed to retreat. It melted away from her, as fast as it had come, while she continued to tearand stab and wrench her way back out. She burst free, like something being born.
And there he stood, laughing at her.Laughing.
She’d almost suffocated, and he thought it was hilarious.
“You didn’t even get anywherecloseenough to kill me,” he said, with so much contempt and so much amusement that she wasn’t sure what happened. She just felt something boil up inside her, something that felt like her and yet not, something that knew how to hurt someone without needing to be near at all.
Toss it up and catch it by the blade, this voice said.
Because by the blade makes it easier to—
“Throw,” she said, and then somehow she justdid. Like someone had taken over her arm briefly, and made her something other than clumsy and slow. It took only a split second to turn the knife, to get it by the tip. And even less time than that to hurl it. One straight shot directly at his heart.
Perfect in a way she knew she wasn’t.
But once you were, the voice said.
As the knife thudded into his chest, easy as pie.
Chapter Twelve
The first thing she thought was:No, no, no, this isn’t right. It couldn’t be right, because she’d read the thing he’d said herself. You couldn’t kill someone with their own magic. It just wasn’t possible.
And yet the results spoke for themselves.
He staggered back the moment the blade went in. Eyes wide, mouth a circle of shock, one hand going up to clutch at the hilt. Like he wanted to try pulling it out, it looked like. But he didn’t even have the strength to hold it for long. He let go after no more than a few seconds, and suddenly that arm went limp.
All of him seemed to go limp, in fact.
He sagged back against the now curtainless side of the stage, as if he needed something to hold him up. And just as she was thinking,No, this can’t be; vampires cannot even be killed by a dagger through the heart, he met her gaze. He looked at her with eyes full of wounded shock.
How could you?they said.
“But I didn’t mean to,” she blurted out in protest. Though, of course, she knew protesting wouldn’t do any good. You couldn’t unkill someone with good intentions, or an insistence on some misunderstanding. All you could do was try to fix things—and she had a good idea how to.
He’ll heal if you take it out, she told herself, and didn’t even think twice about it. She scrambled to her feet, heart somehow thumping harder than it had in that suffocating velvet darkness. And she stumbled forward to take hold of that knife. “Hold on,” she gasped, as she clutched the hilt. Eyes on his face, so she could see exactly how much damage she was doing.
But that just meant she saw his expression change the moment it did.
Like a switch being flicked. One second it was hurt and shock. The next it was the smug fuck she had come to know all too well. “I just cannotbelieveyou fell for that,” he said, so firm and clear and kind of exasperated, it was as if he had never bled at all. Though it still shocked her anew, when the red on his lips evaporated. When the blade dissolved. When it became obvious that all this had just been an illusion designed to draw her in, and nothing more. And now he got to grab hold of her wrists, as he carried on saying the most annoying things in the world. “You were doing so well. I really thought that was going to be it. I really thought fury was the key, but not only was it not, you gave in to sympathy the second you felt it. Even though you knew, even though you read it with your own eyes that vampires cannot be killed like that, that my own blade could never even be turned against me, you still caved tokindness.”
“Kindness isn’t a weak thing, you fucking cheat.”
“It is when you think cheating is something your enemy should be above.”
“I don’t think that. I just thought that you—I didn’t think that you—”
Do not finish that sentence, she ordered herself. Because sheknew the end waswould do that to me, and god, that made almost no sense at all. He’d just tried to suffocate her to death. He’d made her scream around a mouthful of old velvet. He was rotten, he was rotten, he was rotten.
He was worse than that.
