And I would take.
Eyes rolling back, I let it wash over me. “Yessss…”
Voice hoarse, the captain’s shout was the only thing that could penetrate the fog. “Mila,stop!”
But I couldn’t.
This was the only path. The answer I needed, that Sasha had died to protect.
I was just a weapon in the hands of an enemy.
Energy pulsed through me, through Asher, and straight into the gathered Caledonian civilians.
A subsonic boom that flattened grass, people, and anything inside my immediate radius of influence.
For the space of a single breath, there was nothing.
And then…
Pandemonium.
People crawling over each other. Desperate and trying to flee without a whisper of regard for those caught beneath their feet. Well-dressed officials, elegant ladies, terrified slaves—all of them were consumed by animal instinct. A single, seething mass of the collective. With eyes rolling white, lips frothed with foaming spittle. Reduced, one and all, to a writhing mass of consciousness hell-bent on consuming itself.
I watched, entranced, as two waves of people collided in the centre of the clearing, their panicked screams blending to create a symphony of horror. Faces lit by the eerie green glow left over from the general’s final, deadly act.
I watched as hapless individuals were thrown from the herd, stumbling and tripping in all directions. Watched as ankles twisted and snapped, observed the dull lowing of chattel until, without so much as a backward glance, several bodies landed in the pool of plasma.
Upon contact, clothing burst into flames. Skin crackled and split, shriveling as it gave up any whisper of moisture that might have been. Not so much burning, as melting. I watched a shelf of meat char and slip free of the bone, until all that was left behind was a greasy smear and the wretched, garbled screams that spattered before they died.
Some part of me knew to wince. Understood that their deaths would not be easy, for I was with them until the very end. Knew that I’d all but taken their hands and walked them into the arms of doom.
But everything else?
I indulged in the now-familiar electric tingle of life giving over to death. A tingle that sizzled high at the back of my throat, where I’d been singed by flames hotter than even those that made instant amputees of those too weak to fight. It was a tingle that soothed, even as it destroyed.
Starving for more, I was a glutton for their suffering.
Paralyzed by it.
Consumed, just as they were. My eyes blank and unseeing as the depth of feeling washed away everything else.
I could do nothing but feel. Aching where my silken dress touched my skin, ears assaulted by the commotion of the riot, nauseated by the scent of death and panic—I was drowning beneath the onslaught as it washed through me. Smothered by the rise of the empath who feasted on the gluttonous excess, who took every spare millimeter of freedom, and ran.
It was chaos. Untethered, wild chaos.
The beauty of destruction—of venting my repressed rage on the citizens who’d grown fat and opulent on Tritan’s suffering—was equalled only by the pain of being pulled in every conceivable direction all at once. Too much, too thin, toohungry.
Energy, hot and pure, burned through my mind. Wrapped about my shoulders, winding around my hips in a band of searing heat, it was an embrace as much as it was a tether. An answer to my directionless flailing.
Asher.
In an instant, I knew.
He was hiding a secret as deadly as my own.
I knew it as effortlessly as I knew to draw my next breath and then exhale.
It was a thing I recognized in my blood. In the electric tingle at the back of my throat.
