Page 26 of Bizarre Bonds
“I—”
Her voice drops to a silky hiss. “Your supernatural tricks won’t mean anything if you’re not around to work them. Too bad your powers aresoout of control.”
“What—”
She doesn’t give me a chance to speak. In a blur of frigid air, she hurtles into me.
Icy shards rake through my flesh, dispelling smoky blood. Pain erupts all through my limbs and torso.
I cry out, and another glacial blade plunges straight into my throat. My voice cuts off with a thicker gush of essence.
Footsteps thunder in the hall. Someone’s yelling. There’s plenty to yell about.
But all I can do is crumple to the floor under Gloss’s onslaught, my mind blanking out with agony.
10
Periwinkle
Iwake up already blinking to clear the haze from my eyes.
Everything stays hazy white. My first glimpse of my surroundings is so blank my pulse hiccups with the fear that I’m back in an isolation room.
Then I notice that I’m lying down on a flat, softly padded surface. The isolation rooms I’ve been sent to before were one-hundred-percent bed-free zones.
I turn my head to take in the other simple beds and the cabinets beyond them. Oh, it’s just the infirmary in all its antiseptic paleness.
Raze’s gruff voice reaches me from somewhere near my feet. “She woke up!”
I twist to push my body upright, and a sharp tremor runs through my arm and down my chest. Okay, being upright is not on the menu today.
I flop onto my back again instead, peering toward the end of the bed.
Raze hustles over beside me, gazing down with his mouth twisted into a grimace. Jonah, Mirage, and Hail step into view too. Worry shows on all their faces and courses through our connections into me, a mix of sweet and sour like a tart apple.
“I told you it was only a matter of time.” The horned female shadowkind who doted on me here before pushes past Raze to touch my forehead and examine my eyes. “You just needed to recover your essence. You should be right as rain in another few hours.”
Raze shifts his weight as if it’s taking all his self-control to stay in one place. He can’t smooth the snarl from his voice. “What happened, Peri? Why did she hurt you?”
Mirage shudders. “You were all dismal misery, and then everything waspain. I was already coming to see what was wrong when the worst part hit.” He flashes his fangs. “Now we hit back.”
I open my mouth and close it again. The memories return in wavering images like a disjointed TV flashback.
Was it really— Did all that awfulness actuallyhappen? It feels like it should be a bad dream.
But I’m here in the school’s infirmary, recovering. Obviously I suffered from something.
With a rap of his loafers, Rollick appears by my shoulder, his expression tense. Ominous energy roils around the demon. “I’d like to know the answer to that question too.”
How exactly ishegoing to hit back once he hears my report?
They seem to already know it was Gloss. Raze said “she.” It won’t help anyone to keep quiet about the rest and let them speculate.
Of course, the “dismal misery” Mirage mentioned must have been my attempt to break my connection to Hail. I catch the winter fae’s gaze, and his posture stiffens.
Does he think I’m going to accuse him? He was playing along with my idea.
It wasn’t him who sent me here, though.
