Page 52 of Demon Touched

“Well, actually⁠—”

I sense the presence behind her a fraction too late. Her head snaps forward, blinding pain radiating across the base of her skull as something hard and heavy smashes into her. Her vision spots, but I’m aware of her slumping forward, her arm scraping against the wall.

“Leah!” I throw my magic into her muscles, trying to seize control, but the person behind her moves too fast, shoving her over the wall. She goes over on her side, body twisting so that I catch a blur of blond hair and a sneering face through her clouding vision.

I feel her falling through the air as her consciousness fades.

No. Please, no.

I try to hold on, to bury my grip tight in her mind. I’ll be ejected the instant she blacks out completely—there’ll be nothing I can do for her. And then I’ll shatter apart as surely as her bones when they hit the streets below.

“Leah,” I call again, desperate that she hears me. “Leah, I love you. Don’t leave me. Wake up. Wake up!”

But it’s no use. I can’t save her. I can’t do anything. I’m powerless.

The blackness swallows her, and I’m thrown from her mind, leaving her to meet her death alone.

Leah

Leah. Leah, I love you. Wake up. Wake up.

The words come to me in my dream. They’re nice words. The kind of thing I once ached to hear from that voice. No wonder my mind conjures them up now. Everyone should get to hear something nice before they die.

But the voice is fading, growing fainter, and that’s sad. I don’t want it to go. I want us both to stay here in the drifting clouds until⁠—

I jolt from the darkness, glimpsing the pale sky of Aradis above me through the hair whipping around my face. I don’t think I was out for long—maybe just a few seconds. And it only takes a second more for two things to become crystal clear in my mind: I’m falling, and the hard stones of Luminis’s streets are only moments away from meeting the back of my skull.

I don’t waste time thinking of the ancestors or the goddess or anyone else I should be praying to save me. No, my mind goes to the people I love—friends, family, and a man with a pair of crimson eyes who’s left his fingerprints all over my soul.

A searing pain splits me open, like it’s ripping me in two. I would think I’d finally hit the ground, except it keeps hurting too much for me to be dead. Agony burns across my back, licking like a flame over a pair of burning points between my shoulder blades.

I scream at the same time as a thwump surrounds me—a sound like air getting caught beneath a billowing sheet.

My back flexes of its own accord, a layer of muscle I’ve never felt before bunching and releasing in an entirely new movement. Somehow, my body knows what to do, contracting and spreading the wings that have just sprouted from me, slowing my fall as they catch on a current of air.

I’m still moving downward, but at a less deadly speed, as I drop in short, sharp bursts. Eventually, I’m oriented enough to look down. There’s a street below me—relatively empty, each individual cobblestone becoming visible as I close in.

I still land too hard, legs crumpling underneath me as I list over to one side, catching myself with a palm that scrapes against the ground. It leaves a bloody smear, but I’m not dead, so I’m more than fine with some cuts and bruises right now.

I gasp for air, my heart still racing because it hasn’t got the message yet that we’re on solid ground. But clearly some part of me is paying attention—the raw instinct that saved me, that ripped my wings from my back and told them how to ride the wind.

I survived, despite that bastard Keros trying to kill me. And I know it was him; I recognized that blond hair and ugly face from just the glimpse I got as I went over the wall.

There’s movement ahead of me, a trio of ephilium further down the road who’ve stopped in their tracks, seeing me kneeling in the street. I hold up a hand.

“It’s okay, I’m all right,” I call, but their eyes are wide, and one of them bends to whisper to her neighbor, whose expression is a cloud of confusion.

I follow their gaze, looking for the first time over my shoulder at my new wings. They’re beautiful, the glossy feathers stacked in a precise pattern, curving at the top and tapering down into neat points.

And every one of them is jet black.

Chapter 16

Leah

“They’re really something,” Filippa says, examining my wings for a third time since I dragged myself back to the academy, trying to ignore the whispers and pointing from every ephilium I passed.

Of course, when I got my wings, I couldn’t just thank my good luck and start putting them to use in training like everyone else. No, they had to come with strings attached.