I don’t throw fire. I don’t warp gravity. I just step directly between the trembling ex-slayer and the death sentence looming over him.
The snake freezes.
“Hey,” I say, keeping my voice steady, so I don’t panic her. “You squash him, you have to squash me.”
She hisses, the sound vibrating through my ribcage. Her golden eyes narrow, the vertical slits dilating as she focuses on me instead of the prey. It’s a toss-up whether she recognises me or is deciding if I’m as tasty as the ex-slayer she’s trying to kill.
“I know,” I continue, taking a daring step closer. “He deserves it. He deserves worse. But you’re Nyssa Vale, not just a shiny weapon.”
She hisses again and rears up, clearly intending to go over me.
Chapter 19
Nyssa
There is no way I’m killing Dastian to get to Cormac, but I rear up anyway to try and get him to move.
He doesn’t.
Obviously, because he is a pain in my arse.
My thoughts are my own, but my blood is being driven by the snake. By the Wraith Crown… by the Wraith King. I think I have become the Wraith King. Or would that be Wraith Queen?
All of Voren’s undead are hovering like whirlwinds. He seems unperturbed, but I know it’s because they sense what I am. What I have become. They are confused. I snap my jaws. Dastian doesn’t flinch, though the spark in his eyes wavers between amusement and genuine concern.
“Don’t make me zap you, Nyssa,” he warns, holding up a hand crackling with red electricity. “I don’t know if giant metal snakes conduct, but I’d rather not find out.”
I huff, a blast of air that ruffles his hair.Idiot.If I wanted him dead, he’d be past tense. But he’s right. Killing Cormac feels good, but it’s small. It’s petty. The Crown demands something absolute.
The urge to destroy is a cold, rhythmic thrum in my blood, a bassline demanding a drop. Cormac is just a parasite. The engine is the host.
I shift my gaze past Dastian’s shoulder to the pulsating silver net. The vibration of the stolen power grates against my scales. It offends the silence. It offends the dark.
With a whip-crack motion that defies physics, I lunge. Not at the cowering ex-slayer, but to the side, aiming straight for the anchor jar I identified earlier.
“Wait!” Tabitha screams, but she’s irrelevant.
My metallic head smashes into the jar of teeth.
The sound isn’t a shatter; it’s a scream. The glass explodes, and the dull silver thread snaps with a backlash of force that sends a shockwave through the room. The syphon net convulses, the captured light turning violent as the weave unravels.
Pain—white-hot and blinding—tears through me. My form destabilises, metal melting back into flesh, scales retracting into skin. I hit the cold stone floor hard, human again, and absolutely furious.
“No!” Finnian roars and lunges for the pit.
“Don’t touch it, you idiot!” I yell, though it comes out more like a croak. My ribs feel like they’ve been used as a xylophone by a troll, and the floor is uncomfortably hard against my cheek.
He doesn’t listen. Of course he doesn’t. Arrogance is a hell of a drug, and he’s overdosed.
Dreven slams him into the stone floor with his shadows. He makes a wet thud that brings me a vicious amount of joy. “Leave it,” Dreven commands, voice like a closing coffin lid.
“Take the power,” Voren says, his gaze boring into mine as if he knows who I am now.
“How?” I ask even as a vortex of pure white power swirls around us.
“I told you, you need me,” Tabitha says, losing her Taye persona again, now that Cormac and Finnian appear to be out of commission. She leans down and, with magic, pulls on a thread. She snaps her wrist, and the vortex obeys with a sickening lurch. It doesn’t dissipate; it condenses. The wild, white storm spirals down into a spear of blinding light, aimed directly at my solar plexus.
“Brace yourself,” she advises, sounding like she’s telling me to mind the gap rather than prepare for a cosmic infusion.
