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“Get down!”
The roar stuck in my throat finally escapes. The deep, feral sound rolls through the warehouse.
Gav doesn’t ask questions. With practiced moves, he drops the two Deadwalkers he’s grappling with and dives, disappearing behind a large metal wall where a fucking kitchenette of all things is set up.
Thank the Fates. He’s safe.
The moronic, half-dead psychos surrounding us aren’t so lucky.
I scream as my body bows in half. Burning, white-hot agony shoots through every one of my nerve endings, starting in my chest and working through my arms, legs, and back. Even my Fatesdamned skull isn’t spared this special brand of hell.
I’m being ripped apart from the inside out. Pain sears through my limbs that’s so all-consuming, I can’t do anything but scream and pray for it to end.
My vision blacks out, like my nerves caught fire and decided to burn the world to ash around me.
I fucking hate this. I hate how it owns me. How, even after decades of not succumbing, the moment the Curse surges back, the pain and memories rip through me like a gunshot wound that’s never healed.
My parents swear that if I work with my Curse, I can learn to control it.
Well, they’re full of shit. Especially if they think I’d listen to a fucking word they say.
I’m like this because of them. This shit is their fault. I never asked for this. Never wanted it. Never gave a fuck about a family legacy of creating the only known Marrowblade Assassins in the world. Never gave a shit about the money or prestige the assassins brought to our house.
I don’t want this shit now, and I didn’t want it when I was a nine-year-old boy.
Mom and Pop didn’t give a shit what I wanted, though. I’m one of fourteen children— a feat so insane in this world that no one bothers to ask my parents how the fuck they’re able to conceive so often when most couples can only sire two or three children max over the span of centuries.
The vampires consider my family’s blessing to be a blessing for the entire race as a whole, so they let them get away with foisting bullshit like life-long curses using illegal dark magic no one else understands on their kids before they’re even old enough to hold a sword.
I never hate them more than I do in moments like this. When I’m on the ground of some shitty warehouse by the docks, lying in fuck knows what, covered in sweat and blood and gore and screaming for this fucking pain to just… stop.
There’s no taming this. It’s not a weapon. Not a gun, a sword, or a spear. It’s nothing but the raw, naked power of destruction carved from my very marrow that brings death to everyone around me.
It’s wild and untamed, and no matter what I’ve done or try to do, it’s uncontrollable.
It’s a fucking liability.
I’m a fucking liability.
My body warms, growing hotter and hotter as I scream and writhe in pain on the dirty floor. The pain comes to a crescendo as my skin splits along invisible seams. Shoulders, spine, skull, ribs, limbs—it doesn’t discriminate. My stomach rolls at the sight and I close my eyes, unable to face it.
Blades, two to three inches long and sharp as sin, punch through my muscle and skin before tearing from my body with a wet, sucking sound that has bile surging up my throat.
Once free, the blades tear through the air like a thousand screaming arrows.
The sounds of flesh slicing apart follow, accompanied by the terrified screams of dying Deadwalkers.
Their screams blend perfectly with my own. A fucked up melody of destruction.
Hundreds of razor-sharp blades home in on anything around me like fucking heat-seeking missiles. They cut through skin, muscle, and bone the way a hot knife cuts through butter.
Blood mists through the air in sheets, an endless summer storm of gore.
Twenty-something Severed packed into this warehouse means a lot of fucking blood.
Through the haze of pain, I wish whatever team gets called in to clean this mess all the luck in the world. I sure as shit won’t be doing it. Not when I’m the one who did all the killing—intentional or not.
The good news is, after less than two minutes, the Deadwalkers are down.
