My magic.
It isn’t afraid. It’s furious. It surges up my spine like wildfire, slamming into the cage of my ribs.
My eyes snap open fully.
“GET,” I rasp, my voice shaking but rising, “OFF. ME.”
Anatol smiles.
Bruno laughs.
Their goons snort and cackle. They think I’m begging.
I close my eyes for one half-second, but this time it’s to focus.
Another laugh rings out, closer now, relishing the taste of my fear in the air.
Fuck these assholes.
My magic floods my limbs like fire and fills my throat. Itstreams through my palms, my chest, my skin until my ragged hollow shell is bright and alive. For months, since the first moment it bubbled inside me, I’ve treated my power like a dangerous animal that I needed to cage and starve.
But what is the use of power if it can’t be wielded to save me?
Tonight, I will unleash it and make it my weapon. I don’t have a choice.
I throw my hand outward, flinging my power into the world like a curse.
The pulse erupts from me with violence.
The forest shudders as it echoes outward in an arc, like a scream sent into the heart of the world.
For a moment, there is silence. Then Bruno is flung from my back with a shocked gasp, and Anatol’s big wolf body cracks against a tree.
Then the forest answers with a power so majestic, I can do nothing but gape.
The ground beneath me groans and rumbles like an awakening giant stirring in its sleep, and then the world lurches.
I'm propelled forward faster than I can run.
My feet barely touch the ground as the trees smear into streaks of brown and green. My hair whips behind me as I gasp, reaching out instinctively, but there’s nothing to hold on to. The magic sweeps me through brambles that separate like Broadway curtains, over roots that flatten beneath my passage.
Ahead, the forest breaks.
Unfamiliar rock rises into the night sky. A cave mouth yawns open where there was nothing before; a wound in theearth rimmed with frost.
It shouldn’t be there, but I don’t have time to question it.
The force hurls me toward it, and I stumble inside, the air instantly colder and older, smelling of damp rock and something faintly metallic. My magic sputters like a candle in the wind.
My legs give out.
I hit the stone floor hard, pain blooming in my hip, my shoulder, and my cheek. The knife skitters away into darkness. My hands scrabble uselessly against the ground, searching for it.
The world tilts as the last of my power drains out of me like water from cupped hands.
I'm so tired of living in fear and of being alone.
My eyelids flutter as the cave ceiling swims above me, dark and endless. Somewhere outside, distant shapes shout, confused by the sudden vanishing of their prey.
