Page 28 of Something Worth Keeping
Chapter Ten
Cillian materialized at the mouth of the alley and felt his human form shatter.
No!
Mine.
The three men had their hands on Julian. One held a knife. Julian’s face was pale, his glasses crooked, and there was already bruising forming on his jaw.
They hadhurthim.
The rage that tore through Cillian was primordial. It predated language…predated thought. It was the fury of the void itself, ancient and absolute.
He dropped the human skin he wore, letting it dissolve like smoke. His true form erupted outward - a mass of living darkness that filled the alley, blotting out the weak morning light.Tendrils of shadow sprouted from his core, each one lined with teeth that had no name in any human tongue. His eyes multiplied across his form, dozens of them, all fixed on the three men who had dared touch what washis.
The leader stumbled backward. “What the…”
Cillian’s shadows lashed out.
The first tendril wrapped around Grey Jacket’s throat andsqueezed. The man’s scream cut off instantly as his trachea collapsed. Cillian lifted him off the ground, watched his legs kick uselessly, and felt nothing but satisfaction as the life drained from his eyes.
Not fast enough.
Another tendril pierced through the man’s chest cavity, punching through ribs like they were wet paper. Cillian’s shadows burrowed into the wound,spreading through the man’s circulatory system, filling his lungs with darkness. The body convulsed once, twice, then went still.
Cillian dropped the corpse.
Hoodie was running. He made it four steps before shadows erupted from the ground beneath him, wrapping around his ankles and yanking him down. His chin cracked against the pavement. Blood pooled beneath his face.
“Please,” he gasped. “Please, we were just…”
Cillian’s tendril punched through the back of his skull and out through his mouth, silencing him.
The leader had his gun out. His hands shook so badly he could barely aim. “Stay back! I’ll…”
Cillian’s laughter was the sound of grinding stone, of collapsing stars. The gun was irrelevant. Bullets wereirrelevant. Thisinsectthought he could threaten a guardian?
He’d touched Julian. He’d given the order to hurt what wasCillian’s.
The shadows ripped the gun away, crushed it into scrap metal. Then they wrapped around the leader’s wrists andpulled. The shoulders dislocated with wet pops. The man’s scream echoed off the alley walls.
Cillian wanted him to scream. Wanted him to understand exactly what he’d done, what he’d tried to take.
More tendrils emerged, these ones lined with serrated edges. They peeled the skin from the leader’s arms in precise strips. Blood ran in rivers. The man was sobbing now, begging, but the words were meaningless noise.
Cillian’s shadows plunged into the leader’s chest cavity and wrapped around his heart – squeezed - theorgan ruptured in his palm, and the body went limp.
Still not enough.
Cillian’s form expanded further, filling every corner of the alley. His shadows found the corpses and began dismembering them with surgical precision. Limbs separated from torsos. Heads rolled across the pavement. He reduced them to component parts, to meat and bone and…
Julian.
The thought cut through his rage like a blade.
Julian was still pressed against the wall, watching. His beacon-bright soul blazed in Cillian’s enhanced vision, but his face… Cillian couldn’t read his expression. The shadows around Julian’s feet had formed a protective barrier without Cillian’s conscious command, shielding him from the worst of the carnage, blocking the view from the street beyond.
But Julian had seen. Had watched Cillian tear three men apart. Had seen what he truly was beneath the human disguise.
