Page 93 of These Eternal Bones
My tendrils tunnel toward her, breaking past her barrier with ease as they connect with her chest. The effect is immediate. It spears her, lifting her graying, wrinkled form high into the air before slamming her to the earth with a crunching thud. I stagger again before I’m slammed from the side, hard. Knocking and ripping at the wounds on my back as I skid across the clearing away from Molly.
I snarl, leaping to my feet, but he’s on me again. The fox is savage as his fist connects with my face. “You’re killing them!”
I blink, my eyes snapping toward Tien, my oldest friend, the one who betrayed me. His screams cut off as I release my dominion. His mixed form trembling, gasping, his blood matting pale, sheared fur and dark green scales. My tendrils lash out at the fox striking him in the chest, knocking him away from me, his own face smeared with blood and dirt. The tracks in them speak to something else, but I pay his tears no mind. I have plenty of my own.
My mind comes back to me in chunks, horror and guilt suffocating my thoughts. My eyes cut to the Nephilim next. The picture of him shoving her over the edge as the witches’ power collided with me, locking my bones. I’d heard her bones crunch against the unforgiving snow too late, one second too fucking late.
The sound that leaves me shakes the gods as I lash out, decimating everything in sight. The fox rolls in enough time to escape my tendrils, darting toward Molly as he raises the earth around her, keeping her from my rage. The selkie’s limp body is tossed backward, thrown to the opposite side of the clearing, but I pull in, knowing that would upset my Molly. My dominion eases from the small fae creature, unsure of her soul's state, but her body is broken. Of that, I’m certain.
I lash out as Cartiel shoves his hand toward Tien, his power gathered in his palm. My tendril severs it; his scream falls on deaf ears.
I reach him in an instant, fisting his shirt as I roar. “Why?!” I demand, my chest throbbing.
“Let me tether him!”
“You killed her! You took her from me! You betrayed her!” My tendrils sink into his golden, blood covered form, over and over again, visceral coating my flesh, only for him to knit back together while his screams never stop.
“I was trying to save her from you! To end this! It’s what she wanted! You fucked it up, you fucked everything up!” He bellows back, myeyes falling to my mate, to the fox running his hands up and down her arm, tracking my venom as it takes hold of her.
Monster.
You ruined her.
She’ll hate you.
You failed.
Again.
I’m lost in my thoughts again when a bright flash takes over my vision. I rage, severing that arm just as the feverish glow took root around Tien’s body.
The Nephilim screams. His movements are slow until the sound cuts off with a cough, his blood mixing with spittle as he hacks. “Tell her I’m sorry.”
“I will do no such thing,” I growl, unblinking, as my dominion sinks in. I can feel it, the ending of his life, but a gentle heat halts me. His breath is wet and ragged as his head turns toward the selkie.
“Let me help her,” he pleads, and I watch, my chest heaving. The glow that envelops the small fae’s body suddenly roars and pulls taut, forming a line, a sparkling rope that snaps to him, making him cry out. I watch as he tethers her soul. I watch as a bastard child of god dies.
Not by my hand.
But his own.
A strangled sound comes from the crumbled form of the witch. I blur to her as a gasping, wet laugh fills the air. She laughs even harder at the sight of me. Jarring her muddled form. “There-” she rasps, her broken, mush of a face plastered to the ground. “There will be no peace for you. You have won nothing.”
Her laughter is crazed this time, making whatever fuels her wretched form ooze out.
“Gods, you are all so blind to your mates. So…malleable. It is perhaps the biggest joke of all. They make you weak–”
I press my shoe into what’s left of her jaw, halting her words. Rage is an inferno in my chest. When she speaks again, her voice is one that does not require a functional face. “You are a vile, disgusting aberration of life. I have taken from you so much more than you know, and I am not done you foul fucking–”
I roar, lashing into her, making her scream as I bubble what’s left in her veins. It is not blood, not in its pure state. “You are a hypocrite, every bit as monstrous as I.”
Her scream dies off into more laughter, her blank, bloodied eyes cutting to me. Her hatred is every bit as pungent as her diseased blood. “The curse was intact,Beastof Port Clyde. You are as stupid as you were back then, and you have done the one thing capable of getting around it. You have made her vulnerable, because a vampire’s soul cannot be reborn–” My fist plows into her chest, punching through the cavity with ease. My eyes never leave hers as her slow beating heart, rotted from her own magic, gives its final thuds in my hand. Her words are acid on my mind as I drop it to the ground beside her.
The horror of her final statement doesn’t have time to sink in when everythingexplodes. Waves of ether burst from her corpse, slamming me into the ground, razing and peeling my flesh. I roar my agony as my tendrils snap out, blanketing Molly. Understanding dawning on me too late as I fight my battered form off the ground. Blackened blood, blown wide, arcing like morbid art against the ground and sky. Something falls from my side as each agony joins new ones, my arm thudding to the ground, tangling underneath my feet, making me stumble. My form shakes with agony as I force it toward my mate.
The fox fared far worse than me in the ether blast. The power of an entire ancestral line of magic hitting us all at once, detonating likea bomb. Panic rises with the pain, because she’s right. I made her killable.
A death that sticks.
