Page 54 of Branded By Shadow
“We always knew it would be,” she continued, and this time, her voice echoed, splintering into a thousand whispers. The call of the void. It poured into the hollowness where my bond with Cora had been, a tide of ancient, patient cold.
I tried to recoil, to shield myself from its fetid breath. But when I took a step back, all I found was emptiness. It reached for me with icy claws, slicing me open.
Cora had been there before. My Omega. Sharp, beautiful, soft, and brave. Now, all that was left was the pain.
A horrifying sensation began to unmake me from the inside out, as if I were being eaten alive. My blood turned to a thick, icy slush in my veins. My bones felt porous, as if something was chewing on them, grinding them down to dust and smoke.
“You were always the weaker one, cousin.” The words were a familiar, clipped reprimand, the kind Elara used when my temper got the better of my tactics. I could almost feel the phantom pressure of her hand on my shoulder, the grounding touch she always used to pull me back from the edge.
The scent of old archives and coffee filled my memory. But the hand wasn’t there. There was only the emptiness and the voice twisting her loyalty into a weapon of contempt.
The darkness consumed me, rewriting me, turning flesh and blood into the mineral nothingness of the Shadow Realm. The silence in my soul was a sharper, deeper torment than being devoured. The place where Cora had been was a void that screamed.
A flash of brilliant, sterile light blinded me, and for a heartbeat, I was back in the conference center hallway. Alexander stood before me, his hand outstretched, radiating an arrogance thatwas almost a physical force. “A predictable failure,” he purred, smooth as poisoned silk. “House Hades always consumes its own.”
Every instinct I possessed still reached for Cora, a phantom limb twitching for a connection that was no longer there.
“She is gone.”Marcus Dred laughed from somewhere in the chaos, a brutal, triumphant sound. “The little flicker of warmth is gone. Now, there is only the feast.”
The darkness that poured into me had to go somewhere. It erupted from my skin, a physical manifestation of my own private hell. It was not my power anymore. I was just the conduit, the broken gate through which the Shadow Realm spilled into the world.
“You were always unworthy of her, of your name, of—”
A wave of sharp, external pain blasted through me, cutting the void’s insidious taunting off mid-sentence. For a heartbeat, a ghost of my human body remembered the clean agony of a broken bone. It was a mercy compared to the wet, crushing sensation of being chewed on from the inside out.
Then a roar ripped through the air, a wave of sound so hot and alive it was tangible.
“Finally showing what you really are, Blackwood!”
My fracturing mind reeled. The sound in my skull had been a venomous thing meant to corrode. This was a blast furnace of pure, ecstatic battle fury.
The dissonance was a crack of lightning in the fog, forcing my attention outward. My eyes struggled to focus on the source of the sound. A shape resolved itself from the chaos, a face contorted in a mask of rapturous violence. Red light blazed from his eyes, a fire so intense it seared the cold rot devouring my soul.
Marcus. The name was a shard of glass in my mind. He was here. Not a phantom in my head, but a real, breathing witness to my unmaking.
The void felt nothing but irritation at the interruption.An insect,it hissed in my mind.A noisy, persistent insect.
The shadows that were my flesh gave way to his punch. It wasn’t a solid impact. It was the sickening give of rotten meat, of flesh already being stripped from the bone by a thousand invisible mouths. His fist sank into my chest, but my body unnaturally twisted around his, leaving him flailing in the emptiness. He stumbled back, the shock on his face a brief, almost comical flash in the gloom.
In that momentary lull, a single, piercing cry cut through the chaos. “Damon!”
My head snapped up, my gaze tearing across the amphitheater, pulled by the sound of my own name. Right there, in front of me, Cora was fighting.
“Let me go!” she screamed, thrashing in Helena’s arms like a mad thing. “You can’t do this! Leave him alone!”
“Child, stop!” Helena hissed, her face a mask of grim determination. “You’ll only hurt yourself!”
As I watched, a figure in green broke away from the fleeing crowds, moving with purpose against the tide of panic. Lyra. She reached Cora’s side, her hands immediately going to Cora’s temples. A wave of green Demeter energy flared, a fragile dam against an ocean of raw, untamed power.
“Her power is too strong,” Lyra grunted, her knuckles white with the effort. “I can’t contain her for long!”
The sight of them, two Olympians locked in a desperate struggle over my Omega, was a fresh wound in my soul. The void seized my own rage at the sight and gave it a voice. “Look at that. They dare touch what is ours.”
The ground beneath the amphitheater floor buckled and tore. Spikes of pure, solidified shadow speared up from the stone, turning the floor into a deathtrap. Council members screamed, scrambling away as the very foundations of their power were turned against them. Marcus, halfway through another charge, was forced to dive sideways, rolling to avoid being impaled.
“Contain him!” Alexander ordered from the amphitheater floor. “Don’t let the corruption spread!”
He thrust both hands forward, and the air itself seemed to split apart. A bolt of lightning, thick as an ancient tree trunk, screamed across the space and slammed into me.
