The mass shifts as if adjusting its awareness. Then it dives toward me.
I gasp in fear, only to be choked by shadow. It’s everywhere. Filling my lungs, my eyes, and my ears. I’m drowning in it, consumed by the rush of darkness like a swimmer caught in a riptide. It fills me, stretching to mytoes and fingertips, climbing up in between my ribs and pouring up my neck, filling my head.
An instant later, I can breathe again—can see and hear—but I know the darkness is still there, settling beneath the surface.
Something unfurls beneath my skin, bringing with it an onslaught of sensations I can’t explain. Invisible fingers stroke their way up my spine, the whisper of an unfamiliar touch slides across my legs, and a voice slips like silk past my ears, calling into my mind.
“Ah, so the sacrificial lamb has fight in her yet.”
I’m not alone in this body anymore.
I can sense…him—the voice is definitely male—moving behind my eyes, gazing out of them onto the scene around me. The sorcerers are arguing now, the blade wavering in the knife wielder’s hand as their panicked voices overlap.
“What happened?”
“He’s not supposed to do that.”
“Her eyes—look at her eyes!”
“Tenebrous save us…”
There’s an anger ripping through me, heating my skin, but I know it’s not entirely my own.Hispresence is simmering with a rage that is infecting me in turn, scorching me down to my nerve endings. My wrists jerk, straining against the bindings.
Did I do that?
“Tell me, little lamb, do you want to be free?”the voice drags across my mind like gentle fingertips.
Yes.“Yes!”I shout the answer in my head, into the same space his words caressed a moment ago.“More than anything.”
The presence within me uncurls, stretching like a cat, and then pounces.
My hands snap open without my direction, fingers splayed, and a column of shadow spins upward from my palm. It coils around the knife, ripping it from the wielder’s hand, and snaps it back into my own. I almost fumble it,but the presence inside me forces my grip tight around it like he’s a puppeteer yanking on my strings. He flips the blade against the ropes at my wrists, slicing through them, then lifts my forearms to cut away the bindings across my chest.
“Stop her!”
There’s chanting around me again—I think the sorcerers are trying to undo what they’ve unleashed—and the former knife wielder has finally come to his senses, lunging at me just as I sit up.
My arm snaps out, the knife in my hand meeting his neck without a moment’s hesitation.
“No!” I scream, my voice tearing out of my throat as the sorcerer’s splits open, his blood spurting over my knuckles.
I try to yank my arm back, but I’m not in control anymore. The presence—the demon possessing me—sends my elbow out, shoving the dead sorcerer to the floor before making quick work of the bindings around my ankles.
He forces me to my feet, the fabric of my nightgown fluttering around me as I stand on the table, staring down at the hooded figures. Some are still chanting, the cup bearer is frantically trying to draw fresh runes on the table, but most are backing away from me—fromus.
My mouth opens, but the voice that speaks from it is inhuman. It echoes like I’m shouting into a hundred empty rooms, rumbling out of me with a force that sends vibrations through my whole body.
“You dare to summonme? Insolent fools.” The knife spins in my hand, flicking blood across my nightgown.
The cup bearer abandons her runes and sprints for the door of the chamber.
“I will not be leashed like a dog,” the demon growls. “But you will die like one.”
“No.”I plead with him in my mind. Even though I suspect it’s hopeless, I have to try.“That’s enough. Please, just let me go.”
He either doesn’t hear me or doesn’t care. Instead, he jumps down from the table, taking my body with him.Five more sorcerers managed to escapeout the door after the cup bearer, but the rest aren’t quick enough. As they scramble for the exit, the demon attacks.
My body moves in a rhythm I don’t understand, every gesture smooth and sure as it plunges the knife into the stomach of the nearest sorcerer.
