Page 29 of Fractured
Something wasattackingme from the inside, and it was going to make me explode, just like Rune’s shadows had slipped to the other side of that pile of rocks and had torn it apart from within. I was seconds away from collapsing, I thought, yet my legs didn’t shake. When I looked up, my view didn’t tilt. I saw the soldiers and the Broken Crown and Rune fighting, and I saw the dogs, too. I saw one biting the arm of a soldier and dragging him to the side.
I saw, and I knew that I was in way over my head here. I wasn’t a fighter. I was merely a human.
Except…that wasn’t true. Not because the seer had said so, and not because the scratch of an alpha werewolf hadn’t killed or shifted me.
Because of this cold that had frozen all of my insides, had covered my bones and my mind. Because of this cold that was finally—finally—going to come out of me for real and tear me apart piece by piece in the process.
I tried to stop it, I really tried. The warmth I’dunderstood. It had been solid; I’d known what to expect of it. The warmth had been a friend, had filled a void I had no idea I even had inside me until I got unbound from Lyall and lost it.
But the warmth was no longer there to save me, just the cold carrying promises of pain.
Someone called my name, I thought. Could have been Rune, but I no longer saw anything. I could have sworn my eyes were open, but the world had lost its colors, had turned completely dark. My ears worked only halfway, but I still heard the metal and the bodies and the magic slamming everywhere.
Then it was my turn.
The scream that ripped out of me came from all that was left of my soul. The cold that had taken over me slipped out of my hands and arms and chest and fuckingmouthtogether with my voice.
It came out of my very eyes, too, and it somehow expelled that darkness that had stolen the world from me in the process.
But the colors didn’t come back. Instead, everythingaround me had turned white.
The energy that came out of my body was light, so cold that itburnedandfrozethe air at once. That’s what it looked like to me in the first of the two seconds that I was able to remain standing—nothing and nobody was moving and everything was frozen.
But it wasn’t.
Instead, that silvery white shimmer that had been on my skin just the night before was out there in the world now, like some unusual kind of hail or snow, covering the trees and the leaves and the earth.
The fractured earth.
Cracks as thick as my entire body had spread out from underneath my feet, as if I had suddenly become as heavy as a giant. My eyes moved, though the rest of me was locked in place, and nothing had frozen over for real. No ice was anywhere around me—but even so, leaves touched by that silvery white had suspended in the air halfway to the ground, and bodies that had been about to hit trees were stuck mid-movement, andRune, Rune, where the hell is Rune?!
I couldn’t find him.
I couldn’t findme.
The world tilted. The cold hadn’t faded away from me now that it had covered the forest and everything in it. Instead, it felt like it wasfeedingon the sudden silence around me, the lack of movement, of gravity, ofair.
I dropped to my knees first, then on my side against the ground.
It wasn’t cold. It was…normal. The silvery white shimmer moved like someone had blown on it, and then slowly,so slowly,the bodies and the leaves fell, too. Soundlessly.
My eyes closed and my mind shut down, and I was certain that I had died. I was certain that whatever that cold was, it had torn my skin and cut off my limbs, even if I hadn’t seen the pieces of me on the ground.
It had killed me—itmust have.
Yet I was still alive.
Minutes or hourscould have passed. The fear didn’t lessen inside me—on the contrary. Thoughts of Rune and the people and the dogs—thoughts of those soldiers and Lyall himself coming to find them, finish them off—us!
Lyall coming to finishusoff all by himself—they tortured me, those thoughts, yet I couldn’t even move. Image after image of what it was like out there in the world I couldn’t access right now filled my mind— spilled blood and broken bodies and cut off heads. Dead eyes staring into nothing.
Merenith, Hessa—Rune.
The thought of him dead was worse than anything that cold could ever do to me. The thought of him dead made me want to rage.
It wasthatfear that finally gave me enough energy to open my eyes.
I wasn’t breathing. I couldn’t move, and I expected to see blood and soldiers and gold—armor and weapons and magic.
