Page 97 of Kiss the Dawn
I locked gazes with her, and an eerie calm washed over me.
Another whirr. Another click, and cold fire pierced me everywhere at once. My scream was nothing but a wheeze. There was no breath. No thought.
Someone screamed, but it was a faraway sound.
I was floating on a sea of fire edging closer to darkness.
I saw Ezekiel’s golden eyes filled with love for me, felt Ordell’s embrace, and bathed in Hemlock’s first real smile. I sat at the table with my team, brownies in hand, laughing at something Edwin had said. Laid in the bed, snug in Lorenzo’s arms, then moved to the apartment, where I drank coffee on the balcony at night with Kaster. I was in all those places at once, and then I wasn’t.
I was drifting.
A teen standing in the clock tower with my friends, Nyx and Quinn.
My safe place.
My family.
My sisters.
I’m sorry.
I’m…
Chapter 36
PADMA
Iwatch my friend die. Powerless. Impotent.
Watch as metal spikes pierce her body to jut out of her chest and belly. Watch as her blood seeps into the machine that she’s bound to and is funneled to the plinth that is powering the golem.
All I can fucking do is watch and scream and rage.
Holly shakes the bars, rocking our cage, and I scream for help. Where is he? Where is the fucking entity when I need him?
Merry cries so hard I can feel her pain low in my solar plexus, but my tears don’t come; there’s only rage.
“You bastard! You fucking bastard!” My words are buried beneath an unearthly rumble as the golem begins to shake.
“She’s here!” Jacqueline yells. “I can feel the dark power.”
“Yes!” Christian throws up his hands. “We have her. She’s trapped.”
The gems pulse and flicker, and the blue lines of power on the golem fade in and out. Micah, still attached to the plinth, begins to shake, his head whipping back and forth.
A melodious voice saturated with wrath fills the chamber. “You think to hold me in stone and spells and curse? You think to control me!” The golem shudders, and Micah screams—a high-pitched, unnatural sound before being catapulted away from the plinth and into the far wall.
He hits it with a crunch and slips to the ground, his head at an odd angle.
“NO!” Christian runs toward the plinth, but lightning strikes it from nowhere, and the whole structure splits in two. The pieces fall away with a crash, and the golem explodes.
We curl away from the bars, covering ourselves to shield from the stone fragments.
The ping against the bars, too large to make it through.
Silence falls. Thick and pregnant with expectation, and I turn back to the scene below. To the golden light that beams from within the shattered remains of the golem.
A statuesque woman emerges. Her flowing darklocks are threaded with silver, her eyes like the moon. She’s a butterfly exiting a chrysalis, and my heart is too large for my chest as I stare and stare, but she only has eyes for Orina. She glides across the ground toward her broken and bloody frame. Christian rushes forward, but she flicks her wrist, and he explodes in a mist of blood and guts.
