Stop touching me.
"Not so fast," the douchebag holding my face grins, showing off his fangs. A vampire. I should've guessed. My track record with vampires is abysmal. "I wanna see her cry."
"You always like to play with your food," the other guy grumbles.
Sierra beams. "No, Jace is right. This fucking bitch cheated in a fight just to take a cheap shot at me and stole my entire future from me. She deserves to suffer for everything she put me through, and I know how to make that happen. Get her gloves off."
My stomach careens. Once again, I try to move, but I'm completely locked in place by the spell the blond caster must have thrown at me. Jace, the fucking prick, grins with excitement…and his other hand slips up under my shirt to caress my stomach.
I'm going to puke.
Panic is now beating in my veins so hard that I start to acutely disassociate before I can feel them stripping my gloves off me, cackling as they rip up grass and dirt to shove in the "germaphobe's" mouth. But even though I try to check out as fast as possible, I can still feel when Sierra laughs and spits on my face.
And when the blond caster licks my neck, laughing uproariously.
The vampire's hands are on my arms, my face, my throat…
Disassociating isn't working, and hot tears start to gather in my eyes as bile crawls up my throat. I can't move to puke, so I might choke on it. I hope I do so I don't have to feel their skin on mine anymore.
Stop fucking touching me. Get away from me.
From the corner of my eye, I see the changeling approach. It's no longer bleeding, so it must've been healing itself just now. Its fingers brush against my temple, and a sharp, painful surge of memories rises to the surface, drowning out everything else and forcing me to relive the hell that conditioned me to hate all of this so much.
I can see it all again—myself at eleven years old, screaming and crying as I pounded on the thick wooden door of a dungeon, so desperate to get away from the maggot-infested corpses surrounding me that I left bloodied handprints on the wood. I can feel the fucking maggots that wriggled against my skin, trying to get inside to eat me alive from the inside out.
Then I see myself at fourteen, biting down hard on a strip of fabric so my teeth wouldn't break from clenching them in pain. But it wasn't enough to muffle my screaming as another one of the necromancers' never-ending, agonizing rituals seared through every muscle.
And finally, I see my own tear-streaked face when I was seventeen, reflected in whiteless black eyes as my heart was ripped out.
This one is not to be touched. She will be my masterpiece,Dagon's oily voice echoes in my head from so long ago.If anyone lays a finger on her, tear them to shreds and send her back to me for conditioning.She must learn that she is nothing more and nothing less than what we make her. I will ensure she becomes thetelum.
Telum.
Scourge.
It's true. That's what I am. I’m the scourge—a living weapon. And I've been through shit that these three assholes can't even fucking imagine. They never would have survived a single day of my life in the Nether, so why am I holding back?
I snap back to myself as the changeling draws away with a smirk. I can tell it ate no memories, but it's smug that it got inside my head. It probably saw far more memories than I just re-experienced.
But right now, I don't give a fuck what it saw.
Their hands are still on me as Sierra mocks me, the blond one laughing as he rubs dirt on my face. They're preying on my trauma, enjoying my tears and horror. My panic hasn't subsided, but now it's just white noise as I draw energy out of the grass beneath me and give in to the life-devouring magic that flows through me.
Dark magic explodes out from all around me, finally shattering the paralysis spell. A shrill scream cuts short as Sierra slams into one of the nearby rocks and goes motionless. But I know she's not dead yet because I don't get the familiar buzz.
I want that buzz.
Letting my temper and the bloodthirst thrumming in my veins take the lead, I grip the blond caster by the throat to fling him aside. Jace yelps in alarm and tries to back away, but I'm already on my feet as I stalk toward him, spitting out the taste of grass and dirt and enjoying the shocked terror on his face.
"Calm down! Look, I could've killed you just now, but I spared you, so you should?—"
"What? Repay the favor?" I ask innocently, letting my lips curl into the sick smile that used to make even Lillian flinch. "Don't worry, I will."
He tries to dart away using his vampiric speed, but I move faster than he thinks I can. Immediately, I have him pinned tothe ground as the boiling rush of hatred and lingering horror pumps through my limbs.
They touched me. Mocked me. Fuckinglickedme.
I'm sure this vampire would have done far worse if I had never broken out of that spell, which only increases the turbulence in my stomach. I'm either going to throw up or kill him.
