Page 92 of Bizarre Bonds
The light that erupts from me now doesn’t blaze but beams. It shimmers the same turquoise shade as my hair, as all our marks did last night when I declared my love.
It streams between all of my men, joining us by our marks in a ring.
A ring Viscera is now inside.
When she flings herself at the building, the glowing torrent between Jonah and Raze tosses her back. They step forward, driving her farther away with the thrumming light.
I keep pouring more out, giving them and her everything I am. Every bit of hope and denial, joy and anger I have in me, resonating stronger as those feelings are echoed by the men I’m connected to.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Viscera shrieks.
She hurls herself at one side of the beaming ring and another, but the currents of energy just bounce her back. When she propels herself toward the sky like she did with Hail’s wind, a turquoise sheen curves over her head, nudging her back down.
We’re doing it. We’re really doing it—the five of us together, penning her in, preventing her destruction.
But any dreams I might have of Viscera surrendering and accepting whatever help we can give dwindle with each cry that leaves her lips, each blow she aims at my men only for the glow to deflect her. She spins in the center of the ring, seething so visibly I wouldn’t be surprised to see steam gusting from her ears alongside the essence wisping from her skin.
How long can our combined power hold her when we haven’t even really touched her?
My horror at the destruction she’s dealt out peels back like a bitter rind. Inside lies a kernel of something tarter and more poignant.
I had us stage a spree of violence to pretend we were joining her rampage. Can I accept what she is and what she’s done for real, not just as a ploy?
She’s been cruel and brutal… because she feels as if she was tormented first. Because she wanted to fit in here but couldn’t.
Isn’t that what we all crave, in our own ways? Her recipe of wanting cooked up a storm of devastation… but I’m not sure she’s the one who wrote it.
My voice comes out gentler than before, pitched just loud enough for her to hear. “I’m sorry. It makes sense that you’re angry—that you’d want to break everything.”
Viscera falters in her flailing. She stiffens on a patch of road, staring at me. “What are you doing now?”
I swallow hard. “Telling you that I can see how hard it’s been. This is the way you were built. There was something you needed that never came. It must be so painful. I wish I could take that pain away, but it isn’t wrong for you to feel it.”
Her eyes widen. Her stance seems to deflate, but the next shudder that runs through her stocky body looks like a release.
“I thought I belonged here,” she says. “It was all lies.”
As she holds my gaze, her form spasms. More shadowy essence billows off her.
She hisses a breath through her teeth and squeezes her eyes shut.
And then she seems to detonate.
The burst of fractured essence slams into our barrier of bonded emotion. We all rock on our feet, my heels stinging harder with the impact.
I catch a flare of concern from Raze, but the basilisk shifter holds himself in place, knowing it’s riskier to break our circle than to let me hold my own.
Darkness flares across my eyes. An ashy taste fills my mouth.
When I blink the haze away, the shadowkind woman is gone. I can’t sense her fraught emotions anywhere nearby.
Her essence has dispersed into the world, never to reassemble.
A pang shoots through my heart. She wanted to destroy this city on her own terms… and she decided to go out with a bang herself rather than have the choice taken from her.
Did my acceptance helpheraccept what she assumed had to be her fate rather than continuing to rail against the rest of us?
I’d like to think I gave her some tiny bit of comfort in the end, but a lump stays lodged in my throat like I’ve tried to swallow a walnut whole.
