Chapter 3 #2
Dominic was beside me before I could react, his hand clamping down on my arm and yanking me back in one vicious pull that nearly took me off my feet.
“Let me go,” I seethed, my voice low and deadly.
“Not a chance, angel lips.” His grip tightened as his eyes blazed with challenge.
“Hold her,” growled Trace as he blurred past us, heading straight for Famine.
The Horseman’s expression darkened with something pleased and wicked. Power cracked through the air as the two of them collided, the impact shuddering through the ground beneath my feet.
Trace threw everything he had into the first strike, but Famine caught his fist with ease.
The Horseman moved with brutal speed, faster and stronger than he’d been before, his strikes landing like blows from a war hammer.
Famine’s knee drove into Trace’s stomach, doubling him over before sending him sprawling into the fog with a violent backhand that nearly took his head clean off.
The Power of Four.
I could feel it then, the surge rippling outward from me and pouring into him and the others. Magnifying every part of him with a strength he’d never had before. He overtook Trace with terrifying ease, slamming him to the ground repeatedly and pinning him there as though he weighed nothing at all.
Dominic let out a low growl and then released me, blurring past me to back Trace up, but I already knew it wouldn’t be enough. They were outmatched and overpowered.
Blow after blow, Famine moved with savage force, his hits fluid and destructive and impossible to track. He caught Dominic by the throat mid-lunge and twisted. The crack echoed across the grounds like a dry branch snapping under a boot as Dominic’s body went limp in Famine’s grip.
I didn’t so much as blink as I watched Famine toss Dominic’s listless body onto the fog-covered grass beside us.
Trace stumbled to his feet, blood streaming from his nose and soaking the front of his shirt. He charged again, desperation overriding strategy, but without Dominic to create openings or cover his flanks, he had no chance at all. He was completely exposed and on his own.
Famine intercepted him easily, smashing him down onto the concrete hard enough to crack bone.
And this time, Trace didn’t get back up.
His head lolled to the side as his eyes found mine across the distance.
He wasn’t asking for help. He didn’t even look angry.
He just looked resigned, as though he’d already accepted what was about to happen.
“Run,” he pleaded, mouthing the word more than speaking it.
I gave a small, disappointed shake of my head. Even now, broken and bleeding out beneath Famine, he still didn’t understand. He was the one who needed saving, not me. I was exactly where I was meant to be.
The Horseman reached behind him for the blade strapped to his back, a near mirror-image of my Sword of Angelus.
They were the only weapons on earth capable of permanently ending any supernatural creature, good or bad.
No Cinderdust needed. No chance of ever returning.
It was almost poetic the way something that was forged for slaughter could be so beautiful to look at.
I drew closer as he raised the sword high in the air and held it suspended above Trace’s heart. I could feel the Horseman savoring the moment. Feeding off it like a starved beast.
Trace closed his eyes, shutting out the last flash of cobalt blue from my world. A strange, painful tug pulled at my chest as I watched him brace for the blade. It was barely anything at first. Just a small, hairline fracture splitting open somewhere deep inside me. Somewhere that was still mine.
But it was enough.
The soulmate bond surged into the opening, pulsing harder with every passing second, widening the crack until it was too wide to ignore. It clawed its way up through the haze, slashing at my insides as it fought to break free of the compulsion. To remind me who I really was. Of who I really loved.
Trace and Dominic.
The other halves of my soul.
Heat burst in my chest, white-hot and unrelenting, burning through the fog and the certainty and the pull that had wrapped itself so completely around my will that I couldn’t see anything else anymore.
Love, pure and real and more powerful than any spell ever cast, came roaring back up to the surface, dragging me with it kicking and screaming until I could feel everything again.
“Stop!” The word ripped out of me, raw and frantic. “Don’t!”
Famine’s cold, dark eyes lifted to mine. “The reckoning is upon us, sister.” The blade caught the moonlight as he tilted it for the strike. “There is no stopping it now.”
“NO!” I screamed, the sound tearing out of me as I lunged forward, my own dagger already in my hand.
Desperation shoved my hand up, my ether magic pouring out of me before I’d even consciously called it.
Time slowed around Famine, his arm suspended in its downward arc, the blade frozen inches above Trace’s heart.
The voices screeched in my head, rage and betrayal flooding through the connection, but I didn’t stop.
I struck.
The blade sank into him, light flaring violently as it met flesh.
Famine roared and staggered back, shock registering on his face as he clutched his chest. The blade’s power tore through him in a violent pulse, throwing the fog back in a thick, churning ring as his lifeless body slammed into the ground.
I stumbled backward, the dagger slipping from my fingers and landing in the grass with a soft thud. The compulsion shattered all at once, fragments of it dissolving as full consciousness rushed back in, loud and brutal and completely overwhelming.
What had I done?
What had I almost let happen?
My eyes flew to Trace, still laying on the ground where Famine had left him, blood smeared across his face, his eyes wide in horror as he stared back at me.
Then to Dominic, motionless in the grass, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle that made my stomach lurch before finally landing on my own hands, still raised in front of me as though they belonged to someone else.
They were shaking.
My whole body was shaking.
The voices were gone and everything was quiet in my head again, yet none of it felt right.
Not the silence or my racing heart or the fact that I was the only one still standing in the middle of all this.
I stared down at my hands again, turning them over slowly as I took in the wet blood under my fingernails.
The reality of what I had almost done bore down on me until I couldn’t breathe.
“Trace,” I whispered, his name breaking apart on my tongue. “I’m so sorry—”
He was moving before I could finish, dragging himself up off the ground despite the pain etched into every line of his face.
His arms came around me, pulling me into the safety of his chest as though I weren’t the one who had done this.
As though I hadn’t just stood there and watched as Famine tried to kill him.
As though I hadn’t done nothing but bring utter pain and destruction into his life from the moment I’d walked into it.
“I almost…” The words snagged in my throat, half-strangled by everything I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud. “I almost let him—”
“But you didn’t.” His voice was rough, but he didn’t falter. “You came back. You fought it.”
Tears streaked down my face as I apologized, over and over again, the words spilling out in a broken stream that I couldn’t seem to stop. I was sorry for everything. For using my magic on them. For leaving. For not fighting harder or sooner.
But sorry felt so small and useless then.
Not when Dominic was still lying incapacitated in the grass and Trace was holding me together with what were probably broken bones of his own.
Not when the echo of everything I’d nearly done was still ringing in my ears and drowning out every meaningless apology that would never erase even a single second of any of this.
Because I had let something in tonight. Something dark and ancient and merciless. Something that had taken me over so completely and nearly driven me to the brink of a mistake I would never ever be able to come back from.
And worse, I wasn’t entirely sure it was gone.