Chapter 41
Evie
“Malcolm!” Clare screamed. “What did you do?” She turned on Evie, and Evie let her. The plan itself had been made in haste, but it had been necessary.
When the Silk that had escaped the dungeons appeared where Malcolm had been, arrow piercing its black hide, Clare’s voice cracked. “Oh gods. It’s not him? It’s not him?”
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you all before we came to greet them.” Evie winced, feeling slightly guilty for nearly giving Clare a heart attack. “A missive arrived from Malcolm a few hours ago. Keeley found it in a pile of correspondence. He and Winnifred are safely at your mother’s house.”
Kingsley shut his eyes, shoulders dropping, and Clare mirrored him.
Evie tsked. “A valiant effort, gentlemen.” Then she snapped her fingers with a small laugh. “Oh, look at that! Living up to your name. Do me a service and deliver a message to Benedict for me.”
Scare them, she urged her magic.
Dark mist surrounded her feet, not unlike a cat brushing against her ankle, scenting her before it surrounded the knights.
“Go and tell Benedict that wherever the coward is, there will be deadlands to pay when we meet again. That he will suffer, and may the gods help anyone who gets in my way.” She felt their lifelines, the colors lighting up around them, the bit of darkness over their jugulars.
She could kill each and every one of them; all she needed to do was will it.
The magic would handle the rest.
But no.
She released the knights, taking a deep breath when one of them crawled away from her, whimpering with a sound that should’ve tugged at her sympathetic heart. It did. The kindness she’d lived by all her life screamed and begged for mercy.
She ignored it.
And, one by one, willed the magic to strike them where it would wound—hurt but not kill. Each man dropped at once.
“Tell the king I did this!” she yelled, feeling overcome, a bit like she was watching someone take hold of her. Someone she didn’t know.
And that someone was content—content to be feared, to be hated.
Content to be…The Villain.
“Tell me yourself, why don’t you?”
The familiar voice gripped her violently, and her magic flared out in every direction, stripping color from the nearby trees, tingeing the grass gray.
The voice of goodness and reason in her head begged her to stop, to tamp down the anger, the fear, the violence taking over.
But even optimistic souls could wither in the darkness.
“Benedict,” she spewed hatefully, stalking forward, her dress tearing further on the fallen branches with each step. The king sat atop his horse, surrounded by blindly loyal men, carrying out his orders with lethal execution.
Evie unsheathed her dagger.
Benedict grinned. “That’s it, Ms. Sage. Allow yourself to be who you truly are.”
Something was wrong. Benedict looked far too smug for a man who was down a book of Rennedawn, two guvre younglings, and a curse anchor.
Had they missed something?
Suddenly, her dagger vibrated in her hand, the scar on her shoulder tingling unpleasantly. She grimaced, willing it to go away, but the sensation only grew until her shoulder felt on fire and the dagger was nearly uncontrollable.
“Magical daggers are truly a wonder,” Benedict said. “But be careful; they sometimes have minds of their own.”
Evie gripped the hilt, her heart pounding, fear choking her as her magic answered the call, coming to meet the dagger as it continued to glow.
“Evangelina.” Trystan stepped up beside her, facing off against Benedict at her side. “Let me help you.”
“Trystan, stand back,” she pleaded, fighting the dagger’s movements, fighting an impulse that was too horrific for her to even fathom. Her hands didn’t feel like her own. They weren’t. They couldn’t be. The gentle voice in her head was crying out desperately, trying to pull her hands up, up—
Because those hands took the dagger—and they stabbed Trystan Maverine in the shoulder, just above his heart.
An astonished expression formed on Trystan’s face as a nightmare unfurled before Evie’s eyes. A bad dream. It was a bad dream. It had to be.
He dropped to his knees. Wake up. Please wake up, Evie.
“I didn’t mean to,” she started. “I don’t know…how I did it—”
“Move away!” Clare screamed at her, and Evie fell back a step, her eyes never leaving Trystan’s. He held tight to the dagger in his shoulder. Blood. He was bleeding.
I made him bleed.
If that gentle part of herself hadn’t resisted, would she have stabbed Trystan through the heart?
“Isn’t that a shame.” Benedict grinned, then kicked his horse’s flank until it broke into a run through the forest. In mere seconds, he was gone, his men following loyally behind him.
And Evie realized a truth that had been chasing her since she was young.
Life was not made for the gentle.
Evie’s spirit had been battered and bruised, ripped at, torn, and tested. So much pain and sadness, it was too much for her body to handle. Everything was too loud, and every brush of wind against her skin stung, the agony rising so high inside her until she gripped her head and screamed.
Something broke.
Or many things. All she could hear was her, shattering. All the times she’d bent this way and that for the people she loved—all the time she’d spent making herself expendable. And yet her father disowned her, her brother stayed away, and now her mother, too, was gone.
They would never stay.
No one ever would.
Except, perhaps, him…and now she’d hurt him.
Her screams grew louder, and through the haze she could hear several people yelling her name. When her eyes opened, she saw the devastation she’d wrought—the proof that she was indeed the kingdom’s scourge.
The trees. Oh, gods, the trees.
Felled. So many blown to smithereens, the rest completely stripped of color, of magic. She’d destroyed them all. “No,” she choked out, spinning in a circle to find nothing untouched. Even the dark mist was still seeking to harm, wanting to take her pain and turn it outward. She couldn’t hold it in.
“Trystan.” She took a step forward, but Clare stopped her with a hand.
“Stay back, Evie,” Clare ordered, but Trystan’s pained eyes glared at his sister as he shoved her away, locking instead with Evie’s.
“Don’t, Sage. Don’t—” His brows pulled together, his head shaking stiffly, and he winced as he pushed himself to his feet, still clutching his shoulder.
But she’d already turned.
And she did the one thing she vowed she’d never do.
She ran.
Away from him. From all of them. From her found family.
She wouldn’t stop, even knowing that the one person she would never outrun, no matter how far she went…
Was herself.