Page 101 of Veradel
“Love,” he hisses. “It makes you so weak. So foolish. All I had to do was shove over a silly littlestatueof someone you once loved, and you came crawling right to me, didn’t you?”
“Not once.” My sob cracks my words wide open.
“What?” Arad asks, annoyance etched into his hardened voice.
“I didn’t love heronce,” I say, gripping my mother’s stone hand in mine, the heat of the fire making it warm as if she’s still alive. “I’ll love heralways. Forever. Something you will never understand, not because you’re a vampire…” I cough as he presses his foot harder against my chest. “… but because you have chosen not to. Because you didn’t use your human heart that you could have wielded like the greatest of weapons.”
Arad throws back his head and laughs at the smoke-infused sky. “Greatest of weapons? Well, I’m going to enjoy ripping yourgreatest weaponout of your chest. Any last words, Saskia?”
Despite the grief weighing me down more than Arad himself ever could, I smile through my tears and blink at the two yellow lights glimmering above me.
“Yes, actually.” I exhale. “There’s a Monster behind you.”
Before Arad manages to turn around to find me looming behind him, I’ve already caught his wrist, twisted, and ripped off his hand.
I’m in my human form, relishing how it feels to face him man to man. I used to wonder who’d be stronger if we were on even ground, but there’s no doubt in my heart anymore. Watching him destroy Saskia’s last hope for her mom has solidified my answer.
He screams. I toss his hand aside, rip off his other one before he can use it against me, and grab him by the neck one-handedly, holding him at arms-length as he spits and thrashes like some kind of angry alley cat without the claws to scratch anymore.
Pathetic.
I reach forward with my other hand, right into his open mouth, and rip out one of his fangs by the roots. He tries to bite me, of course, but I’m used to the pain by now, so I don’t jerk my hand back before wrenching out the others.
One by one, I fling them over my shoulder until he has nothing left to bitewith. Until his gums are a bleeding mess, and I’m clutching one more fang in my hand.
Holding it up in front of my face, I inspect the bone-white tooth with morbid humor.
“You know,” I muse, “I always envisioned stabbing you with one of your own fangs. Turns out they’re way too small.”
I let it clatter to the ground before I extend my claws one by one. Arad’s eyes widen, darting to each as they rise out of the tips of my fingers. Then I plunge all five of them into his chest, hitting between each rib—puncturing his body just like he impaled so many others over the last five hundred years.
His scream catches in his throat before I snarl, “And this is for putting your gaze on what’smine.”
I switch to his eyes, digging my claws into his sockets one by one, plucking out his ability to ever look at my little nightmare again. Maybe it makes me more of a Monster than ever before, to drag out his death, but I can’t help loosening my hold on his throat to drink in his sweet screams, and I swear Saskia shudders with relief when those eyeballs roll onto the ground far away from her, where she’s still clutching her mother’s dismembered stone hand.
“Saskia,” Arad begs, trying to crane his neck to twist toward her anyway, stolen blood pouring from his empty eye sockets, but I keep a firm grip on his throat. “Don’t let him do this.”
Slowly, Saskia rises to a stand, glancing down at her mother’s pieces all around her. Her own eyes are swollen, puffy, and glazed with tears that I wish I could kiss away when they spill onto her cheeks. The Wall blazes behind her, outlining her in furious, sparkling red.
“You’re really going to let him kill all the Guardians?” Arad continues, his voice nasally and muffled now that he doesn’t have fangs or hands or eyes. “You’re really going to let theMonstertake over again? He’s going to destroy Xantera, Saskia, and you know it. Please.”
The way he says that word,please, only ignites me with more fury that crackles in my bones. How many people beggedhimfor mercy, only to be met with pain and death? And now, after everything, he’s going to try to manipulate her?
But this is Sakia’s call. I won’t take that away from her, even if I know what her answer will be.
She floats forward, until she’s close enough for me to count each blood-splattered freckle and to see my reflection in her irises. She doesn’t look at Arad, only me, as she says, “Yes, I’m going to let the Monster take over again. And yes, he’s going to destroy Xantera.”
She bends at her waist, reaches out with a slender, graceful arm, and tears off the key to the Wall still wrapped around Arad’s neck.
Behind her, even more of the Wall crumbles away as the fire devours it, leaving us a clear view of the forest spreading in waves beyond it. Mountains and rivers andfreedom.
“But he will rebuild Veradel.”
Then she plunges her hand into Arad’s chest.
There’s a moment where his face goes slack—where I’m certain he’s aware that his death hovers moments away and he’s surprised it ever came for him—before she rips her hand out.
I release him as his body falls, and Saskia holds up the tiniest, most rotten, useless thing I’ve ever seen.
