“I won’t.”
She let out a flat giggle like she’d practiced the emotion a hundred times, but it wasn’t real.
“Do you know what it feels like to be compelled?” she asked.
“What?”
“Probably not. I do.” She lifted a hand to her cheek, gently caressing her long nails against her skin. “I know quite well what it’s like to be under the control of another. It’s like… a knife slowly cutting away at everything you are and slipping deep, deep inside and twisting until you’ll do anything to make it stop. It’s not pain. No, I don’t mind pain. It’s like… a parasite. It wants what’s yours and it feeds on it, making you weak.” Her eyes focused on me like rusted blades pinning me in place. “Change, Dahlia.”
“No.”
“Change,” she said again, her voice crawling toward me like magots, burrowing into my ears and past my skull until it squirmed inside my head.
I bowed off the ground, pain scraping at my mind like claws. I could hear someone screaming, loud, shrill and in agony. It didn’t take long to understand that it was me. My legs began to break and bend. My bones shattered beneath my skin and my muscles cramped and twisted.
Change,Lyla’s voice echoed inside me, again and again, sending ripples of involuntary spasms down my spine.
My skin began to split. My tendons snapped and stretched, giving in too soon. Never had shifting been such a nightmare. I was used to the pain and shock of changing, but what I wasn’t used to was trying to resist it. As I fought to keep my body from reforming into a long tail, something in me contested, forcing my legs to fuse into one.
“No!” I yelled.
Lyla straddled me again, perching her elbows on her knees as she watched me writhe and buck.
“Your screams are so loud,” she said, leaning over me. “But I need you to scream louder. He’s close, but I need him closer.”
With her nails sharp and extended, she drove her fingers between my ribs and twisted. Another scream tore through me, filling the whole town with my anguish.
“Bring him here,” Lyla whispered.
Vidar. She meant Vidar and suddenly I bit my tongue, my cries muffled behind clenched teeth.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I need your voice strong and loud or he won’t hear.”
She twisted her fingers again, but I continued to hold back my voice, rebelling with all my strength against what felt like hot branding rods being driven into my lungs.
When she could not get anything else out of me, she pulled away, standing with a low growl.
“Fine,” she said, her tongue licking my blood off her fingers “I think I know what you sound like well enough, sister.”
She raised her chin, taking a deep breath of the foul-smelling night air. Then, she screamed, her voice emulating mine down to every broken tone in my exhausted shrieks.
“Vidar!” she cried out. “Please! Please, help me! Vidar, please! She’s hurting me!”
Panicked, I began to squirm beneath her, realizing I no longer had legs to kick with. I thrashed, tugging at the leather ropes around my wrists.
“No!” I tried to yell over her. “No! Vidar, no! Vidar, stay away!”
My words were so pathetic and strained. Her gaze dropped toward me again and, pressing her foot to my neck, she hissed, “Beg me, sister. Like I have begged.”
I choked under her weight, my tail coiling around her like an eel, but on the dry stone, it only caused me pain and did nothing to deter her.
“Beg me to stop!”
“No.”
“Beg me like I have begged!”
“I don’t know… what you’re talking about,” I wheezed.
