Page 144 of Vicious Is My Throne

I lunged—too far—the thing almost bouncing out of my fingertips before I curled my hand around the warm, glowing stone and clutched it tight in my palm.

Power hit me like a lightning bolt, shaking the entire castle around us and cracking the library walls, books spilling down over the fighting beasts.

I couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear. Magic coated the inside of my mouth, rocketed through my veins, my spine, and flooded into my newborn wings the same time the vision slammed into me.

I stood on a cliff overlooking a city I hadn’t seen in eons, our home world as lush and beautiful as it had been before the twins destroyed everything. I leapt off the cliff, my muscles lifting my wings up then out, snapping them tight to catch the updraft.

Like muscle memory I’d forgotten, my body mimicked the move, and my wings opened, sending razor-sharp feathers slicing through thick, black hide with unnerving accuracy.

“Raziel. Catch.” Raz’s blood-drenched hand shot up out of the pile of churning bodies, and the second the stone slammed into his palm, bodies blew through the air, carried on a storm of blue-black magic exploding from him as he staggered to his feet.

Our attackers slunk back, eyeing us warily as they sniffed their dead companions.

But this wasn’t a win.

Over by the fireplace, Tavion was down, one of the monsters ripping at his shoulder, until Raz sent his death shadows hurtling like spears, pinning the thing to the wood-paneled wall.

Raz threw me a wild, feral grin.

The same one he’d given me a hundred times before on a hundred different battlefields.

We erupted at the same time, death and war, our final reckoning roaring through the room with deadly precision. Bex dove, hands folded behind his head as the wave sundered through flesh and bone, sending blood splashing up the ruined library walls, pooling on the floor, and suffocating the small fires.

Even the blight was blown away, eradicated, perhaps, by the sheer force of our magic.

Raz coated the room with a layer of magic, shoring up the gaping hole where the windows had been. The upside was I could breathe again. Unfortunately, he’d sealed in the foul scent of all these steaming carcasses.

But…I stared at the keystone cupped in my bloodied palm.

My entire life, I’d known something was missing. A hollowed-out, gaping emptiness that gnawed away at the deepest part of me.

I’d told myself it didn’t matter. That I’d train harder, practice more, become the deadliest soldier in the Shadow King’s army. But no matter how powerful I’d become, I’d never filled that hole.

When I closed my fingers around the stone, magic overflowed that formerly dark chasm, flooded my bones, my veins, filling me with cold, endless power. Raz crawled through the carnage, breath sawing in and out, a haze of frenetic power swirling around him as if he was struggling to wrestle back control.

The entire room warped and buckled beneath our combined power, the chilled air sharpened by the strong scent of ether like the library had been struck by lightning.

I took a deep, steadying breath, raised my wings experimentally, then ran my finger down one of the feathers, finding the razor-sharp quill at the center surrounded by soft down. These weren’t just for flying…they were fucking weapons.

“Godsdamn it, wolf, shift back so I can heal you.” Raz sent a blazing shaft of light over Tavion’s matted, black fur. The wolf was tethered to the library floor by thick veins of rot spreading outward and up the wall behind him.

Tavion wasn’t moving, his pale eyes half open and staring, mouth gaping while Raz worked on him. I went to my knees, watching Raz’s magic slide right off the blight, leaving the rot unaffected.

“He’s as corrupted as Anaria’s legs were. Your magic won’t help him, Raz. He needs witch magic. Bexley, get in here and fix Tavion. He’s in bad fucking shape.”

The mage picked his way delicately around body parts and sticky pools of blood, a look of distaste on his face. “Must you two always be so brutal?”

“You’re the one who tossed me this.” I brandished the keystone before stowing it in my pocket, where it burned against my palm. “So this is your fault, really. Next time, we’ll ask them nicely to leave.”

“Barbarians,” he muttered on the way past, hoisting his robe up above his knees to avoid the carnage.

One of the half-dead beasts snapped at Bexley’s ankles on his way past, sending the mage dancing away. I had my boot on its throat in an instant, and the second those eyes locked with mine, I recoiled. There was sentience in that malevolent gaze.

The beast’s mouth opened, hissing, “The Oracle sends her regards.”

I froze, wondering if I’d imagined the words, but then the thing laughed, a wheezing hiss that I cut off by plunging the tip of my wing through its chest into the floor below. Bex gagged when I yanked the feathers out, splattering blood everywhere.

This wasn’t some random attack caused by the blight or the wall coming down.

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