Page 84 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers
My skin feels like someone lit a match and trailed it over every hair. It takes every ounce of control I have to stand here silent while all I want to do is scream loud enough to rip myself free of the flames rising from my bones.
The prince never takes his eyes off me. And in the cold sting of his stare… no, that can’t be fear.
The High Queen stands.
Her lips move, but I don’t hear the words.
Vibrations hum through the air, the crowd’s movements darting and quick, but I can’t hear clapping, any sounds at all, as their hands move. The rhythm of distant drums beats through the earth like a pulse, flying faster and faster. No—that’s myheart.
The remaining four noble daughters move away from the table to the crowds at the pavilions.
But I can’t move. My muscles lock.
No.
The ice had barely melted.
Soft hands reach out for me, grip tightly on the living flames where my hands used to be. Pain scorches at their touch, skin smoldering to ash where their hands squeeze tight in mine, the sudden surge of agony so intense I hear the cry catch in my locking throat.
My eyes search wildly, somehow the only part of me I can still control. I fight to make my tongue work behind my gritting teeth, battle with my traitor lips to get the word out, to tell someone so they can help me.
Creatlach.How hard can that be?
Impossible, it turns out.
Sand scratches against my cheek, but how? I never bent down, never felt my body collapse. My ribs spasm and panic floods my veins.
But I can’t move, can’t speak.
Clouds shift above me, blotting out the sun. Shadows cover me, and pools the color of the darkest sapphire night bleed into the spreading black at the edges of my vision.
I drown in them.
TWENTY-ONE
I am nothing but pain.
Endless fire scorches the blackness drowning me.
My limbs jostle, useless and hanging.
Voices, muffled and impossibly far away, barely reach me. None of them are clear enough to pick any words out, except that neither are strangers’.
My lips part, and something acrid feels like dust over my tongue.
Is this how Finn felt?
This has to be what dying is. Nothing else explains the agony, the torture of burning alive inside the scaffold of my own flesh and bones.
I simmer. I smolder, like coals banked for hours, for eternities I can’t possibly survive.
Let me go,I ache to whisper.
Old Ones, I’d carve the words into my own skin if I could, to make the pain stop. But I can’t even move my fingers. Can’t even scream.
I feel myself slipping, feel the shift of air inside my lungs and weight bearing down on the impossible scorching place where my heart lies. I feel it struggle, feel the fluttering quiver of it in my chest as it tries to give out.
I always was stubborn, and a surge of fresh fight licks inside me.
