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People scream.
Tables overturn as the crowd surges away from the field. Drinks hit the ground. Glass shatters beneath running feet, while roots continue bursting through the dirt faster than anyone can escape them.
Sage grabs me.
I pull her against my chest.
Rhett drags his mask down over his face. Ezra draws his knife. And somewhere beneath the screaming, beneath the chaos and the sound of the Earth tearing itself open, something reaches me.
A voice I haven’t heard in two hundred and thirty-five years.
Not the Sower.
Not the Reaper.
Not the Tiller.
Hundreds of voices rise from beneath the soil and speak as one.
Bride.
6
A Drop Of Blood
Sage
The ground fucking explodes.
One second, I’m standing in front of Malakai trying to process the fact that I just kissed a man who claims he’s more than two hundred years old. The next, something tears through the dirt beside my boot causing me to let out a high-pitched scream.
Malakai grabs me around the waist and yanks me backward as a root whips through the space where I was standing.
Not a little root. Not some cute fucking garden root.
It’s thick, pale, wet and moving. Actually moving.
“What the fuck!”
People scream around us as tables flip causing glass to shatter against the ground.
Another root punches through the grass, then another then twenty more.
Holy shit! The entire field splits open.
“MARIAH!” I scream as I twist in Malakai’s arms. “ALI!”
“Stay with me.” He growls.
“Fuck that!” I shove at his chest but his hold tightens. “My friends are out there!”
“I’ll find them.”
“No, I will find them!”
“Sage.”
“LET GO OF ME!”
