Crisscross, back and forth, the spider spins her web, while the carved-in bird on my arm flutters and whimpers and chirps out a song that sounds very much like one I used to know. There’s something beautiful about it really—the way the spider weaves to the music, strumming my veins onto her loom, like an intricate dance of sinew and flesh. Leaning down every so often to bite and push her venom further into my blood.
Clack, clack, clack, her legs scratch. Transforming the thrum in my veins into pockets of cold, swirling energy.
Until she looks up with those glittering eyes, and I swear she scowls. Her scratching legs pause, then suddenly she’s skittering for the carved-in bluebird on my arm. I try to brush her off, but my fingers are heavy and cumbersome and by the time they twitch she’s pounced. A horrid chirp is followed by a broken note, and the last of the melody is replaced by the crunch of bones and chewing.
Vomit bubbles up. What has she done?
I try to move but the venom hits my spine and my veins begin to freeze. Then sting.
Suddenly my bones are seizing, writhing, as the poison rips out every last bit of Elemental so that all I can hear is a voice screaming to make it stop. Please make it stop.
The spider keeps devouring my arm.
I wake up screaming and clawing at my arm, but it’s too dark to see what in kracken is going on. I slap and hit at the beast before finally fumbling for the light along the bedside, twisting the gear to illuminate the scratching legs attacking my skin.
Nothing is on my skin.
Other than a crisscross of scuff marks made by my own nails along the puffy bluebird’s face.
I lean back and shut my eyes, aware that my sweat-drenched body is shaking like one of the earthquakes Colin used to make, and I can’t hold still because everything’s so wet and cold, and my bones are seizing. What in—? With a jerk, my chest curls down around my knees, and suddenly every frozen muscle I own makes a cracking sound. Like ice under too much pressure.
Oh litches.
My body is going to break wide open.
I force myself up into a sitting position and clench my arms around my legs to make it stop, to make them still. A movement in front of me catches in the corner of my eye, and it’s not until I glance up that I finally notice someone’s seated near my desk, rubbing her eyes, staring at me.
I frown. Rasha?
The red glow of her gaze is there. Growing. It’s lighting the dark between us with an intensity that says she’s scared, or concerned. Or furious.
“Nym, what in hulls have you done?” Her voice sounds like a ghost. An angry one.
I blink stupidly and continue shaking.
“I told you—I warned you not to trust him.”
I glance around the dim room before swerving my eyes back to meet her face. “What are you doing in here? What time is it?”
“Half past four.” She stands and draws near. “But do you even have any idea what you’ve done?”
I grip my knees harder so she won’t see how badly my legs are quaking. “Yes, I know exactly. How long have you been here?”
“For the past three hours and, no, you have no idea.”
“Where’s Myles?”
“Why didn’t you ask me? Why didn’t you come to me instead of lying about it?”
“Me? I asked you when you brought up his offer and you refused to tell me anything. Did you know this might allow me to save Eogan? That it’s the only way to save him?” I glance around again, my bones clacking around. “And where is Myles?”
“If he has any bleeding sense at all, he’s shaking in his nightmares for fear of me. And I’ll thank you not to lay it at my feet as if it’s my fault. Once he offered, you could’ve asked anytime.”
“Maybe if you’d stayed at the banquet I would have. If you’d seen what they did—”
“You’d already made your decision at the banquet. But if you’d stayed and heeded my warning instead of tromping off to absorb a power you know nothing about—”
“Your warning made no sense!” I choke out. “Look, it’s half past four in the morning and you standing here lecturing me in my room before my head can even think is not helping anything. I’m not going to apologize for trying to give us a chance. This can help all of us—Eogan, you, me, the delegates.”
“You don’t know it’ll give them a chance! If anything, it’s just as likely you’ll end up like Draewulf!”
I peer sharply at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She clamps her mouth shut.
My throat is jittering so hard I’m having a hard time getting the words out. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that that’s exactly my point. You have no idea what you’re dealing with or what it will do to you.”
“But apparently you do and you decided to withhold it from me. Lovely. I think I’d like to go back to bed now if you don’t mind.” I jerk my head toward the door.
Her eyes flash and by the time she’s crossed the five paces and opened it, her gaze has lit up her hair so she looks like an angel of death. She walks out and the whole room shakes as she slams the door shut behind her.
Bleeding hulls.
I sit there a moment, cursing her out in my head, then cursing myself out even more. After a moment I get up, and, quaking like a blasted avalanche, peel off my sweat-soaked leathers and slip on the only normal-looking dress I can find in the dim light. I wrap my warm cloak around me before yanking open the door.
Six guards snap to attention from a game of stones they’d been leaning over. Rasha is already gone.
“Can we help you?” one mutters.
I clench my teeth. “Take me to see Lord Myles.”
Every guard turns toward me and I swear their eyes all harden at once. It takes me an annoying minute before the awareness dawns of how such a request must appear. The girl from Faelen, rumored to be Eogan’s love interest, embarking on a tryst with Faelen’s lord protectorate.
“Miss, are you—?”
“Now.”
With an uncomfortable tsk, the Faelen man turns and leads me down two doors to Myles’s chambers.
He taps.
Taps again.
I reach out my shaking, deformed hand and bang on the blasted thing just like at the old woman’s house.
There’s a mumbling followed by a crash inside just before the door’s yanked open. Myles is standing there in a pair of pants displaying the whitest bare chest I’ve ever seen on a man who prides himself so highly on looks.
“There’d better be a bleeding fire or a woman with very good legsss standing here because . . .” He stalls, seeing me for the first time. His face pinches. “Oh.”
“I’d prefer not to be seen as either of those,” I say, jaw chattering. I slip by him into his room, which, from all appearances, is identical to mine. I pick up a pair of what appear to be his silk pantaloons tossed onto his desk and drop them on the floor, then slide up to shakily perch myself in their place and tug my cloak around me.
He flips around. “What do you want?”
“Help.” I lower my voice and glance toward the door. “Whatever that woman gave me is poisoning my body. Something’s wrong.”
“And thisss is cause for getting me up before the Creator himself is awake?”
“How do I fix it?”
“You’re a woman—how in hulls should I know?”
“I had a dream—”
“I would be too if you weren’t ruining my sleep.”
“Of spiders.”
“How nice for you. We can talk about it tomorrow, now would you—”
I narrow my gaze. “I’m not leaving until you help me.”
“Help you what?”
I glare at him and lift my gimpy hand from my robe, holding it out to him as it violently tremors.
He shuts the door. “Tell me about your dream.”
I tell him about the spider and the glittery gaze and the poison in my veins and arm. He closes his eyes as if imagining them, except now he’s moving his lips, repeating my words, and the air around us has rippled until I’m watching the very same spider crawl across the carpet toward me.
I yelp and yank my legs up onto the desk, and the creature dissipates.
Myles opens his eyes. “Interesting. Other than the cold and shaking, how doesss it feel?”
“Like there’s a blasted vortex inside tugging my bones apart.”
He smiles and rubs his face with the base of his palms, then turns to pull a shirt off the foot of his bed to slip on. Thank hulls.
By the time I glance back, he’s walking toward me—stopping three feet away to roll up his sleeves and smirk. The moonlight glints off his silver tooth, making my spine rigid a moment.
“As to your question if this is normal, I’m no expert, but I’d say the potion’sss working through your system and attaching itself to your blood. The chill and tremorsss will ease once you’ve managed some control. You recall your training with Eogan?”
I ignore the hunger such a simple comment brings. Of course I remember. That’s part of the reason I’m standing here—because I don’t want to simply remember. I want it back.
I swallow and nod, which feels more like a jiggle since even my head is convulsing with cold.
“He taught you to tap into the idea of protecting others as a way to control your Elemental abilitiesss, did he not?”
“Among other things. What’s your point?”
“Were you ever able to gain complete control of them?”
“Not without his help, but only because he hadn’t finished training me.” I swear my chest bones crack a little wider as the words tumble out.
“Exxxactly. Lucky for you I’m going to finish his training—just the other side of the coin, so to ssspeak. The side he wouldn’t show you for fear you’d become too powerful for even him to control.”
“Because he knew I’d keep hurting people if he didn’t help me.”
“And so can I. The difference isss . . .” He steps closer and lifts his hand, touching one finger to a strand of my white hair. “I don’t think you need to be controlled. I think you need to be ssset free.”
Eogan would be horrified. My teeth begin clacking again as a shudder lurches through me. The bluebird marking on my arm begins aching, flaring, flittering her crushed wings against my pulsing vein. But when I look down, it’s nothing.
I grind my jaw. “So get on with it. Show me.”
“As I said, Eogan used the technique of tapping into your, shall we call it, merciful side. My way is similar. Except I’m going to teach you to reach for your jussstice side.” He dips his face near mine and whispers, “The part of you that hates Draewulf for what he’s done—that hates the injustice done to you by years of being enslaved to perverse owners. I’ll teach you to fight against that.”
My stomach turns. How many times did Eogan and I argue about this—about my fear of becoming a weapon? “I want to do justice, not strike out in vengeance.”
“Oh my dear,” he breathes. “When I’m finished with you, you’ll be able to use thisss power for whatever you want.”
I swallow and force my head to believe him even if my heart doesn’t. “Because I’ll be able to control it.”
“More than control it, you’ll be able to control others with it. Like Draewulf.”
“That witch said Draewulf needs me to achieve something. Will this stop it?”
“It’ll do more than stop it. It’ll kill him if you want.”
Something in the way he says it curls my spine. “By interrupting the blood of kings,” I whisper.
His answer is to slide his hand from my hair he’s been toying with down to the fifteen owner circles on my right arm. And squeeze.
The old familiar energy comes, but instantly it’s not familiar. This one is slicker, cooler, oozing into my veins where my Elemental strength would’ve surged. With it comes an utter sense of hopelessness, of emptiness, as if everything in me is being poured into that vortex in my chest and is flowing, fading inside it, draining everything that is me into an entity that is pure energy.
I begin to yank away but pause.
There’s a quickening in my veins even as the shaking slows and the teeth chattering ceases. The rush is sick and nauseating and thrilling, and for the first time in days I feel a fleeting sense of normal.
Because I feel physical.
Powerful.
Myles’s words are quick, stirring the atmosphere and confusing my vision as he conjures up the scene of the little redheaded girl at the auction stand. The one I accidentally killed trying to defend her from her new owner just before Adora purchased me.
I start to pull back, to yell at him, but his voice is swift. “Don’t resist the power this time. Follow it. What is the ability wanting to do?”
It wants to destroy the man all over again.
“Do you feel it?”
I nod.
“Good. Now act on it.”
I can’t.
I won’t.
I flatten my good palm against my curled fingers and hold them stiff.
He lessens his grip on my owner circles. “What you’re seeing—the little girl, her owner—they’re not real, but in order to release this new energy, you have to act on what it wantsss. Act and watch what happensss.”
I reach one hand toward the mirage of the man and, crumpling my gimpy fingers into a fist, allow the energy to increase. Instead of bringing down lightning on him, the energy in me is seeking to deplete his. I can’t curb it. It lets loose and I immediately see a darkening mass accumulating in his chest. I hear his heartpulse slow. It doesn’t stop though.
Even when he slumps over and his skin has gone gray, it keeps thumping, but something tells me his ability to torment others has been drained from him forever. The bloodlust has faded, and the little girl is left. Unharmed.
The vision dissipates until it’s just Myles and me standing in his room. Surprisingly, confusingly, the cold in my bones has lessened. I smile. Because as terrified as that scenario was, it also felt safe. And I haven’t felt safe since the last time Eogan held me.
“Again,” I mutter.
The air ripples like before and this time Draewulf’s standing before us in Eogan’s body. He reaches for me like he did yesterday on the airship, going for my throat, black eyes burning. His claws sink into my skin, but instead of evoking fear, it unleashes a vortex of hunger, a craving to draw out his power and destroy it. Destroy him. I lift a hand to his and feel the cold in my lungs start to surface.
It erupts and fades in one clench of my fist as Draewulf clamps down on my owner circles. I tug away but he’s too strong. He keeps pressing down, until what felt so powerful a moment ago now settles limp and small in my veins.
His ability is too great.
I sag and the vision fades. Myles is standing there with his arms crossed and an eerily pleased smile.
I cough and wheeze. I nod, and we run through the scene again.
And again.
The fourth time my shoulders and chest grow feeble as Draewulf leans in closer, smelling of wolf and metal and sundrop skies on Eogan’s skin. His gaze flickers and abruptly it is Eogan, his touch, his warmth, his hand on my neck that is taking over, accessing the ability in me and bringing it to the surface. I gasp. My chest cracks and crumbles until it’s disintegrating and falling, falling, falling into nothingness. A faint cry pushes up my throat, and I fear my aching heart might burst open to bleed all over this room.
The vortex inside me begins tugging, lashing up from my chest and out through my arms and fingertips. I reach for him, pressing my palms against him as my lips spill forth mutterings that make no sense. The gaping black inside me grows wider as does the hunger, and suddenly my hands are drawing the breath and life and energy from Eogan’s body. His eyes flicker between wolf black and emerald green until all at once they’re gray. His entire face is gray and he’s slumping, falling, as his life energy becomes mine.
I gasp and pull away.
The air ripples and Myles is standing two feet away. His pale complexion has turned the color of ash, but he’s grinning.
I slap at him. “What was that? What just happened?”
His smile broadens and my skin tightens. “The images feed on fear.”
A knock on the door interrupts. He steps back. “Enter.”
It’s the Faelen guard from earlier. He’s hesitant, peering around the door before pushing it farther open. He exhales when he sees us, relief softening his features. “Pardon, miss, but . . .” He indicates the hall with his eyes. “I thought you might want to be informed the other delegates will emerge from their rooms shortly. In case you preferred to be there instead of . . .” His gaze flashes to Myles and the hint is clear.
“Thank you.” Flexing my gimpy hand, I slide off the desk and head for the hallway, looking back at Myles. “Let’s resume later.”
His response is a nod, but I barely catch it because just as I reach the hall, I notice the chill shored up inside me is no longer consuming me.
And my spine has stopped shaking.