Page 43 of Wrath of the Fae

I rest my hand over my heart. It feels like a fist has clenched it.

I can’t fucking breathe!I scream to Lucca in my head.

‘Pup!’ Lucca looks at me. ‘Stop using your powers! NOW! STOP!’ He slams his fists against the shield, desperately attempting to get to me. ‘You know you can’t use these powers. STOP!’

His voice echoes all around us, and I pull back the power. He falls from the shield. They both do.

But it’s too late!

They both run over as I fall to my knees. Lucca takes my face in his hands, forcing me to look at him. Someone has sucked all the air from my lungs and sealed them closed. I grab at him. At his hands. His clothes. I grip his shirt and shake him.

I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!

‘You’ll be okay. Look at me, Pup.’

I start hitting him in the chest, desperate.

Please help me! I can’t breathe!

‘I don’t know how!!’ He turns to Reid. ‘You. You have to help her! HELP HER!’

Reid looks on in horror.

‘What’s happening to her?’ He shoves Lucca away and places his hands on my face instead. ‘What’s happening, Little Bird? What do you need?’ His eyes narrow. ‘Your eyes are glowing. What-’

I blink.

Everyone and everything is gone.

The stream. The warriors. Reid and Lucca. The Thirteenth Kingdom’s eternal night.

Replaced instead with a cavernous room made of sandstone. I linger there as wind. A breeze. As nothing solid. Nothing real.

An archway starts to glow. A vast structure, the same size as the one where I died.

Men stand around it.

Human authority agents as well as First Kingdom soldiers.

That golden shimmer forms over the arches, and the pain I feel… my Goddess, the pain!

It steals everything from me. My sense and thought. My fear. All I am is pain.

Again…

It pulls me in. My power and my life, sucking it away and funnelling it back into that fucking thing.

No! No!

I reach out with all I have and demand it returns to me. I refuse to let myself be syphoned away again. To be trapped and used as a weapon against this world and the other.

Fight. Fight it. Don’t let them win.

The words whisper to me from afar. Reid’s words.

As the gold spreads, I flitter between this place and another.

To a stark and sterile room of white filled with machines, men and Dark Fae. Snarling beasts are lined up, all twisted limbs and scaly skin. Electrical equipment beeps and trills. Sparks of power light up a man in a white shirt. His sleeves are rolled up, and his collar is undone. He looks up at another arch, holding his breath in anticipation as the portal slowly powers up.

---