Page 58 of Something Worth Keeping
Julian is bleeding. This thing made Julian bleed. This thing threatened to take Julian away.
The thought sent fresh waves of fury through Cillian’s form. His shadows lashed out, demolishing industrial shelving and pulverizing concrete support columns. The warehouse was coming apart around them, but Cillian couldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop. Not until every molecule of Marcus Vane had been systematically destroyed.
He started with the fingers, crushing each bone individually. When that was done, he moved to the hands. Then the wrists. Methodical.Thorough. Each break was accompanied by Vane’s increasingly weak moans. The man was going into shock, his body shutting down from trauma.
No. Stay conscious. Stay aware.
Cillian pumped a tendril of pure void directly into Vane’s heart, forcing it to keep beating. Forcing the blood to keep flowing. Forcing consciousness to remain despite every biological imperative screaming for merciful oblivion.
More of the warehouse collapsed. Cillian could hear Thorn and Silas retreating, could sense them pulling Julian to safety. Good. Julian shouldn’t see what he was doing. His precious light should never witness what Cillian truly was when all restraint was gone.
Vane’s remaining eye had glazed over, but Cillian kept him anchored to awareness. He’d reached the ribsnow, cracking each one systematically, turning Vane’s chest cavity into a shattered cage of bone fragments and pulped tissue.
“You wanted to study us,” Cillian’s voice reverberated through the dying man’s skeleton. “You wanted to understand what we are. Observe.”
He opened Vane’s abdomen completely, spreading the wound wide enough to expose organs still struggling to function. Vane’s body jerked in his grasp, but the tendrils held firm. Cillian reached inside and wrapped shadows around Vane’s liver, squeezing until it ruptured.
The warehouse was falling down around them. Steel beams twisted like paper. The apparatus finally collapsed completely, its rings clattering to the ground in a cascade of broken metal. Cillian barely noticed. His entire being focused on the creature in his grasp, onextracting every possible second of suffering.
You threatened my mate. You shot my beacon. You tried to take the only thing in four thousand years that ever mattered.
Cillian’s form had grown so large that he was no longer contained within the warehouse. Tendrils erupted through the walls, through the roof, spreading across the industrial park like a cancer. His consciousness fractured across dozens of simultaneous perceptions - other humans fleeing, vehicles peeling away in terror, the distant wail of emergency sirens.
None of it mattered. Nothing existed except the dying man in his grasp and the all-consuming need to make him pay.
Vane’s heart was struggling now despite Cillian’s intervention. The body could only sustain so much damage before even shadow-forcedcirculation failed. Cillian could feel the man’s consciousness slipping, sense the final shutdown approaching.
Not yet. Not done.
He crushed Vane’s pelvis, shattering it into fragments. Drove tendrils through both lungs, filling them with void. Wrapped around the spine and squeezed, feeling each vertebra crack in sequence from sacrum to cervical.
The warehouse gave a final groan and collapsed completely. Cillian rose above the wreckage, his form blotting out the sun, still holding what remained of Marcus Vane suspended in the air like an offering to absent gods.
Only then, with the building reduced to rubble and Vane’s body destroyed beyond recognition, did Cillian finally crush the man’s skull and let the corpse drop.
The rage didn’t dissipate. If anything, it intensified, searching for new targets, new threats to eliminate. Cillian’s shadows spread further across the industrial park, seeking anything else that might dare threaten Julian.
Mine. Protect. Kill. Destroy. Keep safe. Mine. MINE.
The thoughts weren’t rational anymore. They weren’t thoughts at all. Just pure, primal imperative.
Cillian turned toward where he could sense Julian’s presence. Thorn and Silas had pulled him away from the destruction, but it wasn’t far enough. Nothing would ever be far enough. Julian needed to be somewhere safer. Somewhere nothing could ever reach him.
His form rippled and expanded, reality warping around the edges as he prepared to…
Chapter Twenty-One
Julian’s shoulder burned where the bullet had torn through muscle, but the pain registered as secondary data compared to the catastrophic problem currently destroying the industrial park.
Cillian had become something that defied description. The creature loomed three stories tall, a writhing mass of void, teeth, and eyes that kept multiplying across its surface. Tendrils lashed through the rubble of the collapsed warehouse, seeking threats that no longer existed. The air itself seemed to warp around Cillian’s form, reality struggling to accommodate something that shouldn’t exist.
“We need to move back.” Thorn’s hand gripped Julian’s uninjured shoulder, pulling him another twenty feet from the destruction. “He’s completely gone over the edge.”
Julian watched a tendril demolish a parked truck, reducing it to twisted metal in seconds. “I can see that.”
“You don’t understand.” Silas materialized beside them, his own shadows coiling defensively. “When we lose ourselves like this, we don’t recognize anything. Friend, foe, it doesn’t matter. He could kill you without realizing it.”
“He won’t.” Julian’s certainty cut through their warnings. As far as he was concerned, he was stating an observable fact, not optimistic speculation.
