I feel them rip through skin and muscle. My lungs seize. My ribs snap like branches. The force of the impact lifts me off the ground and slams me into the wall. Pain blooms white-hot through every nerve.
“Skye!” the boy shouts, stumbling forward as I collapse to the floor.
I taste blood. Everything in me screams. The fire in my veins flickers, once, twice, and then dims.
But it doesn’t go out.
Because even now, with half my body refusing to move and black dots swarming my vision, I raise my hand again.
The wraith turns her attention back to me, and I see her hesitate.
She knows.
She knows I’m capable of destroying her.
I spit blood onto the floor and smile through the agony.
“You’re afraid of me,” I whisper. “Like you fucking should be.”
And just before my vision starts to dim, I see him.
Cassian.
He bursts into the room, Talon and Nathaniel right behind him. They crash in disheveled, wild-eyed, and ready. Cassian’s limping, but it doesn’t slow him. He moves like a wild animal.
The second he sees me slumped against the wall, bloodied and barely upright, his entire body shifts.
The wraith turns toward him with something like curiosity, until her smoky head twitches and a strange sound rips from her mouth.
It’s not a screech this time. It’s not even rage.
It’s words.
“…You again.”
Her shape distorts, as if recoiling and coiling at once.
“Like cockroaches,” she hisses. “The three of you.”
Cassian raises his dagger, teeth clenched.
“You’re the cockroach here,” he growls. “Ugly thing.”
That gets to her. She grins, a hideous, nightmare grin—and readies to strike.
“I should have torn you out of existence when I had the chance.”
Her smoke coils out, like vines seeking blood towards him.
Cassian jerks his head back and slashes at them, but it barely helps. There are too many. They’re too strong. And worse, they’re not even attacking.
They’re probing.
The tendrils don’t strike. They slide. Curl. They move like a noose, slipping close without ever touching. Cassian shifts into a defensive stance, grip tightening around his dagger, but his expression shifts. Something cold. Stunned.
He feels it too.
She’s not trying to kill him.
