A sharper pain zapped through my gut, and I dropped to the floor with a choked cry. My vision swam. The chandelier above me twisted into jagged bone. The walls breathed.
“Did I…do something?” My voice came out smaller than I wanted. “What did I do?”
His shadow stretched across the floor toward me. It warped as it grew, horns rising from its head, a tail unfurling behind it.
“You existed,” he said. But it wasn’t Dad’s voice anymore.
It never had been.
The illusion shattered like cracked glass.
The surrounding room warped. The golden glow of chandeliers turned green, then red. Shadows pulled in around the walls like curtains being drawn shut. My body flared with heat and cold, like my mind couldn’t decide which realm I was in.
A wave of nausea hit me. I staggered, gripping the edge of a shifting table. One moment it was a table from our castle, the next, a slab of stone crusted with blood.
I blinked rapidly.
And then the rage came.
A voice boomed—too loud, too deep, too much.
“He’s the enemy, Kara!”
My dad’s voice.
It shook the walls. My bones rattled like they wanted to escape my body.
My eyes widened as a flicker of the Devil walking toward me flashed through my thoughts, slicing through the fog. The pain in my stomach eased—no, changed. A sick warmth replaced it. I knew that sensation.
Hell.
I was in Hell.
Dad…he faded away. He couldn’t be here. Not really.
But my limbs felt so heavy, my mind turned to sludge. Everything was slow. Wrong.
“A daughter of mine lusting after the Dark One?” Dad’s voice roared again, furious now—spitting hate as he stomped toward me.
Veins bulged across his forehead. His form blurred at the edges like smoke struggling to stay solid.
I scrambled back, falling to the ground. My palms slapped against cold stone.
“I—” I wanted to say I didn’t. That I couldn’t. But the words dried in my throat.
Why couldn’t I say anything?
My cheeks burned.
I didn’t want the Devil.
…Right?
The illusion grabbed me by the front of my shirt, yanking me up like I weighed nothing. Dad’s eyes were flames now.
“Don’t deny it!” he bellowed. “You’re already changing!”
I looked down at my arm and screamed.
