Six Goblets #5
“Take the poison out of his throat!”
Esme’s heart twisted in her chest, quite literally. The Bond snapped a burning whip through her chest when she did not immediately do Isobel’s bidding.
No. Nononono…
Esme crashed to her knees, gripping her neck to keep the Bond from pushing acid up her throat.
No! Isobel would not take this from her. She stammered at the floor but couldn’t conjure a sentence.
Isobel’s face morphed into a cruel grin, even as blood seeped from between her teeth. “You concocted a little plan, did you? And now it’s coming apart.”
It was Esme who was coming apart. The Bond was tearing her to shreds inside.
“You’re fucking pathetic,” Isobel croaked, spitting a mouthful of blood on Esme’s cheek. “Now get the fuck up and take. It. Out.”
Esme coughed and tasted blood and bile and acrid fucking failure. She pressed her forehead to the floor. All she had to do was hold out for a little while longer, let a little more of the poison get into him, and then… and then—
“Save him!”
The Bond’s whip sliced across Esme’s back and her dress felt wet.
She must be bleeding. Her vision blurred, and then the Bond fixed it again.
Its hand tangled in her hair and yanked her up to her feet.
When she refused to move her legs, it sunk its claws into her flesh and moved them for her.
It lifted one, then the other, and then she was up on the dais.
No.
She stepped over a cackling Isobel and distraught Mak’kon.
No.
The Bond threw her at Urias, made her push him out from between Janos’s thighs and yanked his fingers out of the prince’s throat. When it moved her right hand, she tried with every ounce of strength in her left one to force the limb down and trap it between her legs.
The Bond cracked her offending fingers backwards, and her right hand moved of its own wicked accord. She bit down on the pain like it was a gag. She had to keep fighting.
The Bond made her grab Janos’s face, and she begged her fingers to crush it, to just kill him, even if it would end in her own demise. But the Bond laughed at her silly attempt at free will and pushed her fingers into the prince’s mouth. His teeth tore into her skin as he gnashed at her.
No.
The Bond pushed her hand in further. The whole limb slipped down into Janos’s maw and Esme wept, trying to pull herself out.
It was no use. The Bond was feeding her down his throat.
His insides were white hot and wet, searing and strangling her arm like she was the offending poison.
She scratched at her own skin, trying to free herself. Janos’s teeth left tracks in her flesh.
She was inside of him almost to the elbow.
The Bond rallied the shadows in the prince’s guts and made a bubble around the poison in his belly. Esme begged the shadows to push outward, to rupture Janos’s stomach and let him bleed to death, but they were not her friends right now.
The bubble of poison slithered up through the twists and turns of his insides until it was sitting in her palm, and only then did the Bond begin to pull her limb out of Janos’s jaws, oh, so slowly.
She tried to thrash, hoping to rip his esophagus open in the process, but the Bond’s claws had sunk deep.
It eased her out gently, careful to leave the bastard in one dreaded piece.
Esme couldn’t contain her panic. She screamed at her arm to please, please listen.
She hadn’t heard herself beg like that in so long.
The Bond ripped her apart, punishing her for the disobedience it should have flayed out of her years ago.
Janos’s teeth were deep in her arm, and each inch she pulled the limb out of his throat tore out a new inch of her flesh.
And all the pain paled in comparison to the searing, maddening anguish of failure.
Of knowing what Janos was, of trying to do the right thing, of being so fucking close and now feeding herself to the monster she intended to slay.
Finally, the Bond removed her hand from Janos’s throat, and the bubble of poison with it.
Esme shook so hard that not even the will could hold her still as she looked at the black bubble quivering in the air in front of her.
There was so much poison that hadn’t even penetrated. It wasn’t enough. It was too much—
He might—fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!
He might live.
The Bond tossed Esme to the floor, the bubble of poison splattering on her dress.
She couldn’t even catch herself; she just lay there, even as a Viryan finally arrived.
The healer took out a giant syringe and injected a pearlescent tonic straight into Janos’s stomach through a needle as thick as a finger.
Esme prayed to every god on watch for her hand to slip and pierce his guts—but it didn’t.
Of course it didn’t. Of course this didn’t work.
What did Esme think was going to happen?
That she had a chance? That she… she had a choice?
Then Omniel hadn’t burned his name into her spine hard enough.
She tore at the dais below her, nails shredding the wood as someone loaded Janos onto a stretcher and rushed him away.