Page 90 of Devoted

“He threw me out a window the other day.”

“The way I heard the story, he tackled you.” Severin’s lip quirked. “But I’m splitting hairs. Give this a go, and if things go wrong, just walk back through the wards, and the spell locks back into place. It’s that simple.”

Oh, my fucking gods.

Give it a go might well be the final words this male ever spoke.

For someone who fought battles for a living, he was pretty fucking cavalier with my life. And his life.

And everyone else’s.

Or he was too stubborn to listen to reason. Probably that.

“Fine.” I stripped off my coat, my shirt, thought about kicking off my boots, then eyed the rocky, uneven ground and left them on. “But when this goes to shit, the aftermath is on you.”

“Good luck,” Emberline called from ten meters away, Dante tugging her back so she couldn’t come any closer. She gave me an enthusiastic double thumbs-up. “You can do this.”

“Remember, you can’t outrun Death, especially in those boots,” Dante called, laughing uproariously as he elbowed Ember in the side. “I’ve been waiting all day to use that one.”

“Gods, kill me now,” I muttered, dragging my hands down my face. “Fuck. I didn’t actually mean that. What I meant was, don’t let me level this entire island and everyone on it. Let Emilia’s wards hold.”

Before I lost my nerve, I stepped through the shimmering barrier, and magic cleaved through me, colder than a knife. The containment spell vanished, and for a single, too-long second, I hung suspended in midair over an endless abyss.

The transformation started slow, bones cracking like brittle sticks, tendons and muscles stretching into place around them, a hoarse curse rasped out of heaving lungs. My spine arched, vertebrae climbing along with the agony of shredding skin as my shoulders rose higher and higher, bone carving itself into sharpened angles beneath flesh that darkened from warm bronze to the deep, unnatural gray of a moonless abyss.

My face hollowed out, clinging to a skull too ancient to belong to anything alive, sharpened teeth and long, curved fangs bursting from my jaw. Elongated fingers unfurled, tipped by talons, each one curved like a reaper’s hook, shadows pouring from me like living ribbons, coiling around me as I straightened, my very soul groaning from the strain.

The world became a smear of white, too bright for me to see a thing.

Gods, this was going to fucking kill me.

Good, I decided.

Then I wouldn’t kill everyone else.

Shadows shoved up my throat in a vicious wave, choking me, pouring out of my unseeing eyes, from my palms in a flood of endless darkness that filled up the box I was inside, enveloping me in a thick black cloud.

Somewhere outside of myself there was screaming, but it was nothing to the screaming inside my head as I became the Emissary, ribbons of spectral darkness thrashing around me like sharpened swords, carving through stone and steel as if they were butter.

Blocks as big as houses fell, ancient mortar crumbled, part of the wall collapsing into dust.

I doubled over, the points of my claws sinking deep into the flesh of my temples, blood running down the sides of my face as the chaos inside my head grew louder. Red cloaked my vision, and my ears hollowed out; there was no way to escape the sound clawing into my brain.

I clapped my hands over my ears as the screaming—so many voices tangled together into a cacophony of noise—intensified. Magic whipped around me unchecked, powerful enough to raze this entire island. I couldn’t control my magic, couldn’t think around the noise as I bled and bled and bled.

I was going to destroy this island and everyone on it.

Truth.

That was my last thought as I was hit from the side, the breath knocked out of me.

Talons scraped rocks out of the ground, raking furrows in the dirt as I was dragged sideways.

What the fuck was this?

Some fresh hell I didn’t know about?

Once again, that knife of cold magic cleaved through me, the containment spell locked back into place, a cage powerful enough to crush the Emissary down and down and down until I was back in my own skin, arms and legs blistered, staring up at Dante, flames covering his body, his demon glaring down at me like he wanted to burn me alive.