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Asha blinks, and with the gag in her mouth, I can’t tell if the magic is even listening.
“Please, I love him. I don’t know how to survive without him. I’ve lost everything. Everything. Surely you know what that feels like. I know you do. I’ve heard the stories. Heard how you lost your siblings. Please, I’m all alone. I can’t…I can’t…”
I can’t breathe now, and Asha’s dark eye goes wide with sorrow.
“Will he agree?” I ask her.
She shakes her head.
Sorrow cuts at my heart, a stray shard not meant for me, but it cuts me all the same.
I take one glance at Nox, at the male that I love, lying motionless on the ground. I listen for his steady heartbeat, dull as it may be.
And I know what I have to do.
“You know, I had one of you living inside me once,” I whisper, my words sharp as the edge of a blade. “You know her, know what she’s like. From what I understand, you’re the one who imprisoned her, tied her up to the moon so she could no longer move about freely. They say you did it because she was careless with her hosts. That she hopped from one host to another, shredding their minds in the process. Until they couldn’t even remember how to breathe. They say you couldn’t understand it, couldn’t fathom how your sister could be so cruel. Not when you mourned the deaths of your hosts. Not when you fretted over how helpless they were against old age…”
Asha’s gaze stills, but her body begins to tremble.
“I take it you don’t like losing your hosts, do you?”
My question hangs in the air between us.
“Good. Because now I think you understand. When I take this gag off this time, you’re going to open the Rip. And you’re going to use it to separate Farin from Nox’s body. And Nox is going to wake up as himself. Because until that happens, until he wakes up and drags me away from Asha’s neck, I’m not going to stop.”
“Wait, Blaise.” There’s panic in Az’s voice, but I can barely hear him.
I sink my teeth into Asha’s neck, and I allow her blood to drown out the guilt.
I have no use for it anyway.
CHAPTER 42
ASHA
I can’t move, can’t fight back as Blaise slowly kills me, leeching the blood from my veins.
I can’t move, and Calias is drowning me all over again.
At least this time it doesn’t hurt, with Blaise’s venom coursing through me.
I don’t even care, not really. At least, I don’t think I would care if my magic wasn’t screaming drunkenly in my mind, his voice reverberating off the edges of my brain.
Asha. Please. I’m sorry.
He’s fading slowly, I can tell. Eventually, the venom will do what it did last time, push him under.
A part of me feels a swell of wry pleasure at this, because Blaise threatened my magic with my life, telling him she wouldn’t stop drinking until he did as he was told and opened the Rip.
I don’t think Blaise knows what the venom does to him, that it numbs him as much as it does me.
But my magic is resisting it, fighting to retain consciousness, even as it slowly slips from my fingertips, as easily as the silky Fabric I held just moments ago.
It’ll be funny, in a way, when Blaise kills me for no reason. When she realizes what she’s done.
But my magic is screaming. I can’t make out what exactly he’s screaming, but he certainly has much more of a will for me to live than I do at the moment.
If only he’d let it work; the venom really isn’t that awful. Sure, there’s a certain cruelty about taking away a person’s will to survive, but at least I’m not afraid.
