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Convulsed.
Tilted.
I pitched sideways, my hands instinctively reaching for the wall. My shoulder hit the stone first, my temple followed, sending a shockwave of pain through my skull. A shower of sharp pebbles and debris cut into my skin. My knees buckled under me, and I collapsed onto the ground.
Something small but pointed struck my eye. I snapped it shut with a yelp, instinctively curling up as another wave of rubble cascaded down. A soul-rending groan echoed around me, the very air vibrating with it. I rounded my spine against the assault, folding my arms over my head as the world seemed to cave in around me.
Because it did!
The stone beneath me shifted and cracked, and then…
… silence.
I was buried in the dust and rubble, my nostrils filled with a choking cloud of stone dust, the collapsed bell tower turning into my tomb.
No…
No, this couldn’t be the end.
My trembling fingers blindly found their way to the amulet that hung from my neck, the salt crystal cool against my skin.
“Please…” I murmured in the silent tomb, pressing a knuckle into the salt crystal until it cracked against itsaerymelsocket, shattering into shards. “Let me be a deathweaver so my shadows can get me out of here.”
But there were no shadows.
Only a gaping emptiness at my core, an abyss that seemed to devour me from the inside. It pulled at me, sucked at my being.
Swallowed me whole.
ChapterThirteen
Malyr
Present Day, Tidestone
The taste of copper hung heavy in the air, an acrid testament to the swath of death that whirled through the castle on pitch-black wings. A savage symphony of screams and clashes echoed around Tidestone, its fear-strung melody utterly… intoxicating.
I crossed the outer bailey toward the barbican, my gaze jumping from one fear-painted face to the next.Soldiers. Stewards. Stableboys. Where was that bastard? Where was Brisden?
Bones crunched beneath my strides, the squelch of entrails underfoot bringing a smile to my face. This was revenge, this was retribution, this was the outpouring of a lifetime’s accumulated wrath.
And it was glorious.
My gift pulsed beneath my skin—scratching, scraping—writhing with the need for bloodshed and death. I let the darkness surge from within, shadows extending like tendrils, sliding through the chaos. They coiled around those pitiful soldiers within reach, binding them, enveloping them in a web of darkness the way a spider would wrap its prey in silk. Oh, how lovely they screamed…
I pulled them behind me like an eerie funeral procession, a grim garland of trophies, nothing but lifeless marionettes in a morbid puppet show that dragged over the ground on shadowy strings. Goddess, spare my rotten soul, it was beautiful!
“Oh, come on, love. Don’t be so coy,” Lorn cooed nearby at a soldier who quaked by her feet, a smile curving her painted mouth. “Let me have a look at those pretty eyes of yours.”
She grabbed his face, digging her nails into his skin, letting little black offshoots slither into the gaping, screaming cave that was his mouth. This, she enjoyed best—letting her shadows burrow through the cavities in his skull. They clogged his nose, tied up his throat, infested his brain until, with a squelch and a blood-curdling scream, they wiggled out from around his eyeballs.Popwent the first, then the other, blood and brain matter oozing out of every orifice the man possessed in his head.
She leaned over the soldier’s jerking corpse, letting her tongue lap at the dark red blood that trickled from his empty eye socket before her eyes flicked to me, a twisted grin splitting her face. “Delicious.”
A perverse thrill swept through me at the sight, like an echo of the bloodlust we shared, the urge for revenge that bound us, if not much else anymore.
Arrows whistled.
I burst into my unkindness, dodging the deadly projectiles with ease before I reshaped from the inky mass of birds. “Archer on the battlement!”
