Page 51 of Drown Like Heaven
Genuine instability clawed at my throat and I swallowed hard to try and keep it at bay. But the moment I recognized the amount of control I’d just snapped, the battle was already half-over. One fracture was enough to set off a chain reaction.
The change happened in a split-second.
I felt it building, and there was too much akrasia in my blood for me to stop it now. I gritted my teeth, grasping wildly at any thread of control I could still pull on, but they were all slipping through my fingers.
One instant, I was throwing a punch across the other angel’s face.
The next, I was throwing myself backwards across the room, wings out as I slammed into the concrete wall. I shut my eyes, agony tearing through my muscles. Even though I couldn’t see, I could sense that all the other angels had already gotten the fuck out of here, knowing what was about to happen.
A single, shaky inhale through my nose.
It felt like every single one of my veins was being flayed open.
Fractures raced through my consciousness, lightning-fast, splintering like glass.
I jammed my head back, skull cracking the concrete.
The light came an instant before the sound, a blinding bright white, a flash of pure electric energy.
And then everything around me shattered into a million pieces.
It was sheer chaos, utter destruction, concrete and steel mangled beyond recognition, a giant hole drilled through the entire building, and I was sitting in the center of it all, chest heaving, skin on fire, mind churning through the most complete darkness in existence.
Thrausian.
The most powerful. The most unstable.
I was trying to come back to myself, clawing through the darkness and rage swallowing my brain while stumbling to my feet. This was what happened when I spent too long trying to suppress the unbridled power flooding my body. It exploded without my control.
At least the entire building hadn’t crumbled into dust.
I grabbed the shredded fabric hanging loosely around my torso and ripped it off—the remnants of my shirt and jacket that’d torn when my wings came out. The fabric fell into a dark heap on the decimated gravel below my feet. Pain still buzzing through my body, I tried to stretch my muscles, work out the tension enough to make the discomfort stop.
But I couldn’t do it. The feeling spread, like a cramp.
This was the other reason Thrausians were hated. Because we had aseverelack of control over our abilities. It would’ve been better had I not already had so much akrasia in my blood; I could’ve honed it, possibly harnessed the explosion somewhat. Bur it was a little late for that now.
It was also extremely difficult to get a grasp on that control again once it’d been lost. I was breathing hard, trying to get as much neon into my veins as possible, to get as far from death as I could reasonably expect to be right now. But my thoughts were still swathed in anger, in suffocating darkness.
Electricity webbed across my skin, each point where it anchored to my body a bright spark of agony. Slipping farther into the abyss, I fell to my knees, planted my palms on the cold ground. Fissures spread from my fingers, zipping across the stone.
He isn’t here to help you this time.
Sweat was dripping down my back and beading on my forehead as I tried to pull everything back into myself, to find an anchor, to seal up the fracturing. The longer it took me to get back in control, the harder it would be, the deeper the darkness would dig its claws into me. It’d happened before; I’d gone weeks like this, blindly following my power and fury, a walking explosive with a hairpin trigger.
A face drifted through my thoughts.
Not the face I’d become so accustomed to clinging to, but someone new.
Dakota.
It was like being doused in cool water, the second I was able to latch onto the thought of her. Green eyes, sad eyes. Dark-painted nails, always chipping, digging into my neck. Her little body, fighting me, arching into me. A quiet voice that everyone else spoke over.
I shouldn’t be thinking about her now.
I shouldn’t let her bring me out of this.
Because I’m never letting her walk away from me now. No matter what she wants. She’s mine. I won’t let her go.
