Page 16 of Forever Frenzy
His eyes stared sightlessly at her stomach.
“Wake up,” she tried again. “Don’t leave me. Please?” She lightly tapped his face and cried, holding Saul’s head and gathering his shoulders closer to her. She raked her fingers through his hair and bawled.
She was in agony.
She raged, cried, and raged again.
When she was spent, she turned to me with pleading eyes. “I want you to turn me.”
I shook my head. “That’s not the solution, Porschia.”
“You know she’s going to come after me, and if I can’t fight her, I’ll lose,” her voice broke as she continued to rock Saul in her arms.
“Please, Tage. If you care about me at all, give me a chance to defend myself.”
I looked at Seth. His jaw was set but he nodded once.
“If I do this, there’s no way to heal you again, Porschia.”
“Then lock me in here. If I make it, you put me here. I’ll stay in The Sand so I’m not a danger to anyone outside. Just... I want to end this. I want to end her.”
Sekhmet was vengeful. I knew she would hunt down everyone Porschia loved and kill them one at a time, before she turned her focus back on Porschia. I couldn’t let that happen, but I didn’t want to see her as a vampire again, either. I couldn’t do it.
“Give Seth and me one chance first.”
“What if she gets to me like she did him?” she cried out, clutching Saul’s head and shoulders. “Change me, Tage.”
She eased Saul to the sand and closed his eyelids. “I want her to feel this.” She stood up and turned to me. “Change me. Now.”
Seth stood beside me while Tage stared at me from a few feet away. I remembered feeling rage when I was a vampire before, when I drained Dara, when Mercedes tried to corner us in the city, when she bit me, when I learned Mother killed Meg and the others from our Colony. But I had never felt rage like what was coursing through my body now.
I’d always thought it was red, hot as a poker. But true, unadulterated, impassioned rage was black; thick as the tar we’d sunk through to escape the Underworld. It was poison, racingthrough veins and vessels. It whispered in my ear to let it free. It was all I could think of.
Rage.
Unleashing it on Sekhmet.
She bit my son.
She killed my husband, my sick and dying husband. He was supposed to live on in The Sand. He was going to be preserved. But she took that from us, took him from us. And now, I wanted to hunt her down and kill her slowly and savagely.
Roman once said that killing was different when you weren’t a monster. It was clear to me that I was one now, that I would always be one, because killing Sekhmet was the only way to sate the demon crawling inside me.
Seth turned away from me and Tage, tearing at his hair and letting out a scream that made every particle of sand underfoot tremble with fear. The dunes dissolved and then formed again, and when he roared a second time, they disintegrated once more.
Unshed tears pulsed in his eyes when he looked directly at Tage. “Turn her, and I will use my power to make sure she only craves one thing—Sekhmet’s blood,” he bit out.
Tage stepped toward me. I looked at Saul’s prone body and then back to him. “Are you sure this is what you want?” he asked softly.
It would change me – change everything, he wanted to say. I could see it in his eyes. The warning. The edge of the sword he teetered on.
“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.”
And it was true.
The one thing more powerful than love was hatred, and I was filled to the brim with it. I rocked back and forth, waiting as he slowly moved toward me.
“Seth,” he barked. “Stay back until I say it’s okay. Then move in and use your power.”
