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An earsplitting scream pierced the veil as the blade sliced through Jude’s leather jacket.
I realized the scream had come from me.
The brutes leisurely circled, snarling as Jude grew unsteady, weary after a full day without food and proper rest. He wouldn’t be able to last much longer.
In the span of an enraged heartbeat, I lost all sense of sanity.
There was the ash and the clouds of cold blue.
And then there was a vengeful darkness.
A foreign wind jolted my body, sending my frame bowing back at an unnatural angle. I felt ice shatter through me, an electrical current blasting from the very core of my being.
I was drowning in the night, ripped apart from the inside out.
Ash coated my mouth, and the stench of rotten skin clogged my nostrils. My lids drooped and shut, and electricity detonated from everywhere and nowhere at once, sending me to my knees with a scream.
Agonized shrieks saturated the air, haunting and full of the kind of pain no person—friend or foe—ever deserved to experience. They crippled me, the screeches ungodly and depraved, and my body bent forward abruptly, curving in on itself.
Gritting my teeth, I forced my heavy lids open, tilting my eyes up from the ground to the scene of death I expected to find. But that same perverse breeze that had saved me earlier whooshed past my ears, parting the fog. The trees swayed and cracked, the rotten wood splintering down the middle and shattering like glass, the shards blown in every direction.
But that wasn’t the only disturbing sight.
The men—our attackers—clawed at their faces, their eyes. Gut-wrenching screams reverberated and shook the forest, muffled only by the ravishing wind.
They were dying, slowly. So very slowly.
My taut body relaxed, the unexplained hold on me loosening its unholy grip. And amid the tormented shouts and bursts of black shadows and fiery electricity, I saw the commander rising from the ashes.
Nearly unscathed.
He walked through the charred remains, the Mist gradually washing across the woods, engulfing the world in white once more.
Jude looked like a vengeful angel above me, his left eye aglow. My head lolled to the side, and soon, all thoughts were lost to the screams of the dying.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Kiara
I plead with you to come and take your son. When I look into his eyes, I feel nothing but coldness. It unnerves me. Something isn’t right with that boy.
Letter from Jack Maddox to unknown recipient,
year 38 of the curse
My dreams spun a tale of magic.
I was in my room back home, a thick white coverlet tossed over my head, my toes swathed in my favorite fuzzy socks Mother knitted me last winter. There was no aching or bruising weighing down my body, which currently felt like it was made of cotton instead of bones.
A whisper of a breeze grazed the soft linen shielding me, the air tasting of freshly baked pies and nostalgia. My eyelids fluttered open as the wind whistled a melancholy tune that gingerly hinted at hope and rebirth.
Answering its bittersweet call with a grin, I flung the covers from my face, eager to discover its source.
Light.
It struck me like a punch to the gut—rich, dazzling rays of light traversing across every inch of my bedroom. I blinked at the harshness of it, convinced my eyes were playing tricks on me.
But no otherworldly shadows took shape upon the walls, and not a single torch or melting candle was lit. There was just that spectacular light painting the room like a thousand brushstrokes of gold. It touched my skin and coated it in pure warmth, the hair framing my face glinting as rays kissed each strand.
