I stagger to my feet, lift my arms, and plunge both the daggers I still hold into its back. The jolt up my arms tells me I hit the spine. The creature releases Griffin’s arm long enough to snap at me, and I reel back, narrowly avoiding a vicious bite.
I look to the others for help, but it’s pandemonium across the clearing. One huge creature, the most terrifying of the three, takes hit after hit, keeping its neck out of reach and making it impossible for anyone to get past.
There’s no time for weapons, and they don’t work anyway. Snarling, I throw my weight forward and ram my hands into the beast’s side, frantic because I don’t have a chance in the Underworld of saving Griffin like he saved me. He sacrificed himself for me, and I willneverforgive him.
Lightning leaps down my arms and shoots from my hands with a deafening crack. The twin thunderbolts throw the creature off Griffin and puncture two smoking holes in its side, destroying the wards. It lands with a pained yip and then tries to stand up again—and fails.
It’s not healing!Hope rises in my chest. I hold out my hands, willing more lightning to come. I extend my fingers. Shake my arms. Nothing happens.
Griffin regains his feet, disheveled and dirty but miraculously intact. He places one large, warm hand on my lower back. “You can do this,” he encourages quietly, although there’s steel in his voice.
I try. I really do. The magic just won’t come. Something inside me feels off. “Gods damn it!” I explode. “The wards must be doing something again.”
“It worked before,” Griffin points out. “And the wards were intact.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand, then.”
“We’ll practice.” He raises his sword, stalking forward as the creature snaps, twists, and shudders into an approximation of a man, two holes still punched through its oozing side. The Vrykolakas looks at Griffin with defiant yellow eyes. This is a being that even Death won’t claim. It has no mercy—and it expects none.
Griffin takes the monster’s head, and the undead creature shrivels, leaving behind parchment-dry skin clinging to distorted bones in a sickening parody of humanity.
“Talia!” Mother’s voice is a guttural snarl in the final creature’s mouth. With just one Vrykolakas left, I have no doubt she’s back in control and fully aware of everything that’s happened here.
The creature sheds its wolf shape, standing on two legs but keeping the elongated arms, razor-sharp claws, and lethal fangs that continue to hold Kato, Flynn, and Carver at bay. Even in this grotesque half-form, the monster is so huge that it makes three of the biggest men I know look small.
I draw my sword and charge the Vrykolakas in a blind rage, ignoring Griffin’s startled shout.
“How could you!” It turns toward me, and I slice the monster’s middle, cutting deep enough for rotting intestines to spill out. “How could you do this to me?”
“Talia! Enough!” The creature twitches angrily but doesn’t attack.
I swing again, slashing at its throat. It dodges and then just barely misses clawing Carver, who slices the tendons behind the creature’s knees from behind. It drops, and Flynn darts in, his ax whistling toward the monster’s neck.
The Vrykolakas somehow avoids Flynn’s attack. Hissing in fury—or maybe that’s Mother—it grows dark claws the size of daggers, wielding them so fast they ping and hum. Carver drops, twists with athletic grace, and then slices from underneath, severing one of the creature’s hands before rolling back to his feet. Kato lunges forward, his mace thundering down just as a pulse of blinding green light sends all three of them flying across the clearing. They land sprawled on their backs, stunned.
I lurch when the surge of power ricochets back to me from off the blackened trees.What is that? She’s…telekinetic? From a distance!I had no idea Mother could channel physical magic through creatures. I didn’t even know that was possible, which fills me with an even deeper rage.
“I hate you!” I chop furiously at the Vrykolakas, my hits wild and reckless, made up of impulse, and chaos, and wrath. They open the creature’s torso over and over, so the wounds don’t have time to heal before I inflict another. This is retribution. Torture, maybe. And I don’t care.
I feel Griffin’s strong, steady presence right behind me, but it does nothing to calm my savagery. And he does nothing to stop me. The creature evades anything lethal but still doesn’t attack. Mother has never wanted me dead. Sometimes I wish she had. Maybe Eleni was the lucky one, ending up in the Underworld instead of beaten, terrorized, and nearly raped. I shake, pitch-black emotion pounding through me.
The undead creature’s hand and claws grow back. Black fluid seeps from its open wounds. Needing both hands to lift my sword now, I throw my weight into yet another attack. My body wants to quit on me. It needs to stop, but I keep swinging because the devastation inside of me hasn’t even begun to run its course. Was I really stupid enough to hold on to some idiotic morsel of hope that Mother would look at me one day and see a person, a daughter, instead of a vessel to use and mold for her own nefarious gain?
I wipe my forearm across my face, clearing my eyes of splattered blood. Then I slash and hack, knowing that Griffin is watching my back, likely my front, too, and letting me burn through my rage.
Mother knew exactly what kind of monster she was dealing with. She knew that sending three of them at once was a risk, especially from a distance, and that she could lose control. And she knew better than anyone that I never practiced compulsion or creature driving, and that I had no hope of controlling one, let alone three.
Yet here they are. And there I was…
“What are you waiting for?” I cry. “What do you want?”
“For you to cease your temper tantrum,” Mother answers. “It’s unbecoming.”
Temper tantrum? Unbecoming!
“You. Are. A. Monster!” With every word, I carve a deeper gash across the Vrykolakas’s chest. Its stinking blood nauseates me, but I don’t stop, blind to the gore, insensible to anything but my twisting emotions, my hammering hate.
“Your fits have always been a waste of my time,” Mother says. “And now you’re wearing men’s rags and trolling the Sintan swamps for companions when you could be draped in Fisan pearls and associating with Magoi worthy of our line.” The creature’s chin jerks toward Griffin. “He pollutes you every time he touches you. Don’t think I don’t know where he’s been, and how it’s changed you. Your blood is different.”
