Page 145 of Silver Claws, Crimson Tears
“You don’t get to take anything else from me!” I scream, wind whipping around my body as my power surges, uncontrolled.
Hands grab me from behind. Dakar’s, not Vaylen’s. Someone shouts. The figure flickers, Tahranis becoming Silas again, looking confused and alarmed at my reaction. But I saw him. For that moment, I saw him. And the terror in my heart tells me he’s coming for me again.
—No need to be afraid, Tahranis’s voice speaks inside my mind.
I wrench myself out of Dakar’s grip, my feet barely touching the ground as I launch toward Silas. Vaylen is already in motion, but rage propels me faster. My vision tunnels until all I see is Silas’s face morphing again.
“You’re dead!” I scream, wind whipping dust into a frenzy around me. My fingers stretch toward his eyes, ready to gouge them.
Silas moves with unexpected speed, capturing my wrists before I can reach his face. I thrash against his hold, my knees seeking his groin, my teeth snapping at whatever flesh I can reach.
“Let me go, you bastard!” Blood from my split lip sprays with each word. The urge to do Breath Bind assaults me, but what if this is all in my head?
Vaylen is almost on us, his face a mask of cold fury I’ve never seen before. The air around him vibrates with power. Behind me, Zephyros’s roar splits the sky, the ground trembling beneath our feet.
Silas yanks me against his chest in a grotesque parody of an embrace, his mouth dropping to my ear. His breath feels wrong. Too hot, like steam from a forge.
“Wake up, Omneira,” he whispers.
The words hit me like lightning. My body goes rigid, electricity coursing through every vein, every nerve ending. My mind cracks open, and memories flood in. Not in fragments, but a torrent.
The sacred chamber beneath the mountain where they placed a robe on my shoulders and glyphs glowed like eyes.
Chanting.
Tahranis calling me Omneira as if it were my name.
Heratrix’s enormous sleeping form, her scales gleaming like opals.
A year of living among the people under the mountains being… happy.
Months and months of Tahr slipping into my bed, while I receive him with open arms.
Tahranis feeding me broth laced with something bitter.
Fern’s child-like hands holding my head as I vomit.
And the truth…
…the undeniable truth.
All of it.
I wrench myself away from Silas, gasping as though breaking the surface after nearly drowning. My mind reels with the returning memories. They’re visceral, overwhelming, intimate. I stare at the man before me, my entire body trembling as he begins to transform.
“It all begins today as I promised.” Silas’s voice distorts, deepening, becoming velvet and smoke.
His body stretches upward, gaining inches of height. Blond hair bleeds to white again, flowing into those precise braids I know too well. Gray eyes ignite with amber fire. His features sharpen, becoming achingly beautiful, inhumanly perfect. The face that haunted my dreams, the man who filled my bedis here.
“Tahr,” I whisper, the name sticking in my throat like a fishbone.
He wears black leather pants that cling to his muscular thighs and a fur-lined coat that drapes below his knees. It’s open in the front, revealing no shirt underneath, but an expanse of alabaster muscles chiseled to perfection.
For a heartbeat, I think I’m hallucinating, that only I can see him. Then Dakar steps forward.
“Who the fuck are you?” he snarls, wind coalescing around his fingers.
“Get away from him, Rhea,” Phoebe warns, but I don’t move.
