Page 98 of Devoted

This time I didn’t bother stripping off my clothes. What did it matter anyway when I was going to be dead in a minute?

I walked straight through the wards; the cold carved me apart like a blade before my foot hit the ground on the other side of the containment field. When it did land, the air around me echoed, like the gong of a bell without the sound, a sudden pressure compressing my chest.

Darkness found me first.

Seeping beneath my skin like frozen ink, it settled into my bones before the agony.

Every joint twisted, every vertebra ground against the next, forcing me taller until the world shrank beneath my feet. My muscles pulled tight over a bony frame and jutting ribs, skin darkening to the shade of a thundercloud at night.

I bit back a scream as talons erupted from the ends of my fingers, as I disappeared beneath the Emissary, buried under ancient flesh as though he was scoopfuls of grave dirt, piled on a casket.

My entire being was shredding apart, disappearing completely… and then…

I took a breath that didn’t taste like razor blades.

Some of the pressure eased off, my vision clearing.

My thoughts were… my own.

I could breathe, big, gulping lungfuls of air that tasted like life itself.

Something—or someone—was helping me control my magic, siphoning away enough power to keep the darkness from consuming me.

I lifted my arms, shadows rolling off me in slow, living waves, hungry, waiting for my command. Every mortal heartbeat around me became a deafening chime, every breath tasted of awed fear. I was no longer flesh and blood.

I was eight feet of darkness and ruin.

The screaming inside my head was so loud, I could barely think, but I was still on my feet.

Holy shit.

I was… impossibly alive.

Lifting my hands in front of my face, my fingers were nearly a foot long, ending in sharp black nails, my palms cut through with a myriad of silvery scars, each of them meaning….

Something I couldn’t quite remember.

Oaths, maybe.

All around me, ribbons of black slashed, violent and wild… every bit of the chaos contained within Emilia’s fragile, shimmering field.

The walls of the fortress were still intact, the island—so far—still solidly beneath my feet. The air hung thick with the loamy smell of freshly turned earth, of raw magic that shouldn’t be here, of darkness from another realm. Unbreathable for a mortal.

Charged with electricity and ozone.

The wards crawled with bolts of energy, flashes of fire, and they strained beneath the assault, bringing me back to reality. Even with Emilia constantly reinforcing the shield, if I didn’t get my shit together, I was going to destroy this island and everything on it.

You have your father’s strength.

“Yeah, well, fuck that asshole,” I muttered, the words echoing all around me more like a gale of wind than a voice. I held my hands out in front of me, palms up, like I used to as a boy, blowing out a calming breath and letting my shoulders relax. Calling my shadows was second nature, but these shadows… these were not of this earth.

They slashed with an anger I couldn’t comprehend… or I knew all too well.

Like they wanted to rend this world to pieces.

You have his patience. I closed my eyes, trying to block out Emilia’s voice, the words I did not want to be true. There was nothing left of my father inside me. I’d nearly killed myself, scraping every hateful piece of him out. The only thing left was the slope of our cheeks and our noses, and mine had been broken too many times to be recognizable.

But… I closed my eyes and curled my fingers, claws scraping skin.