Page 138 of A Dose of Agony
I swallow.I’m sorry.I don’t know if she deserves this, but I don’t have the capacity to care anymore. I need this game of chess to be done with.
Vincent thinks it’s his turn to make a move, but it’s not.
It’s mine.
“Check,” I whisper.
The first council member falls face first into her plate.
58
I Did This
Chaos explodes in the room full of massively powerful magical beings when one of them falls limp to the table. There are no outward signs of poisoning. There was no build up.
The woman was speaking one moment, and the next, dead.
But even so, these are not humans who’d consider possible natural causes of a sudden death.
Traceless or not, they know someone did this.
I did this.
But even as a thrill of success rocks through me, so too does panic. Not only did I kill someone, but that strange sense of wrongness has not left me.
Another rush of pain floods my link with Jarron. I curl over, the pain carving its way through my stomach.
“Candice?” Thompson says, holding my back. “What’s wrong?”
“Jarron,” I whisper. “Jarron is injured.”
My friends all freeze. There is chaos in my mind. Screaming and fighting.
Another battle has begun in Oriziah.
“He’ll be okay,” Manuela says, but her voice is tight. “He’ll heal himself.”
I swallow. Will he?
The memory of him lying in his own blood, a sword through his chest, bombards me. He nearly died when I used a nullifier on him months ago because he couldn’t heal himself.
We learned the secret to killing him from the very girl he’s now falsely claiming as his chosen.
Jarron,I say calmly.Ineed you to answer. Do you still have your magic?
I can feel his pain, even while he’s trying to block it out.He’s hurt, and it hasn’t stopped for minutes.Maybe that’s enough to confirm what I already suspect.
No. My magic is gone.
* * *
“Who did this?” Vincent yells at Emily on the other side of the portal. She’s the only one who could possibly decipher what happened.
My plan to get revenge on the council and free my sister is working splendidly, even while my heart is dying. Jarron is hurt. His magic is gone.
He’s in another world entirely. Unreachable.
I’ll be okay, Jarron tells me.It’s not that bad. What is happening there, though?
