“You are right, Vrath, you took my father from me,” he barks, suffocating on swollen lungs. “You could have stopped it. He was—a good man. With a big heart.”
Vrath twirls the stick and avoids eye contact. “You made me do it. Why did he not beg do you think? Why become dead without a single plea?”
As the sickness drains my body, I hold Uncle Niles’s face close. I remember the hugs. I remember the nights he would make Mom laugh after she had clearly been crying for our dad. I remember the look of absolute awe he had for Aunt Marilynn.
He was too good for this world.
And his death has given me wings. Ones that materialize behind an invisible veil, side by side with the Nightlung. Ones that contort into cascading plates of volcanic black. They give me strength as if the Void is pumping enough power to withstand the symptoms Vrath curses me with, opening a window to the ability I need the most.
I crawl forward, with a low harmonic rumble cracking the tectonic plates beneath my hands. My world is sheathed in a layer of black and red as I aim for him.
Vrath stumbles back a step, caught off guard by my persistence to eat away at the barrier his World Dark Twin tree branch has ensnared me with.
I am a holy furnace of revenge that refuses to tear my gaze away, though blood and tears drip from every pore. My body losing its life force with each movement.
But I can’t let him go.
My broken heart will always be tied to him.
“Webeggedyou to spare him,” I call out, now inches from his languid, insipid posture.
“Yes, you did,” he replies.
The ancestral beast that has formed wings sends forth every drop of power to break the ceiling of his hold on me. An exiled seraph cast out of heaven and willing to risk it all.
I rise to my feet, levitating until my toes hardly touch the dirt.
“You may keep your body,” I say, low and bruising. “But I will have your mind. I will move it through time until you are nothing but the mental scape of a little old man. You will forgeteverything.”
He isn’t fast enough to overcome my daggered talons as they plunge into his neck and puppeteer the strings of time in his brain. I fast-forward seventy years. Giving my uncle’s assassin every ungodly mental illness one can obtain in the end years of their life.
Only, externally, he hasn’t aged a day.
“Goddamned you, child!” he whines like his tongue has gone numb.
Vrath swipes his hand across my bloody forehead, streaking the red color down the brittle stem in his hands. The gore of my body absorbs into the wood, and my world is sunken in a sea of hell. I’m on my back, unable to move. Niklaus inches closer as blood gushes from his ears.
Whatever he is doing, we are dying.
Dying.
“Niklaus!” I cry. “Get out of here!”
Though in my heart, I know he will never leave.
I should have done more.
It’s my fault.
Uncle Niles should live, and I should be dead!
I should have done more!
“Undeserving! Undeserving! Undeserving!” Vrath enforces every pain upon us.
My heart sputters and slows, unable to keep up, unable to survive—
A portal of darkness stretches open from above our heads, and in a blur of white teeth and a mist of onyx fur, Dellilian dives forward, chopping her jaws around the branch. It snaps. It breaks. Its other half is whisked off in a soft breeze.
