It dawns on me then that my voice is clear.
The air no longer wheezes through my lips. I may be in terrible pain and can’t move my left arm, but at least I can breathe again.
His response is to roar at me again, but this time, it’s a wordless shout, a scream of sound, his lips so twisted and his eyes so full of hatred that they make his beautiful face look perfectly ugly.
Quietly, I bare my teeth back at him, letting them sharpen, wishing only for the chance to sink them into his throat.
He wants me dead, and he has claimed responsibility for my mother’s imprisonment and, as a consequence, her death.
Any reservations I had about killing him are now gone.
Without a sound, I propel myself forward, tearing my right hand through the feather, damaging my palm but leaving the stem embedded in the wall. At the same time, I shove so hard with my left foot against the wall that I dislodge his hold on my shoulder and rip the end of that feather out of the stone behind me. The feather remains embedded in my shoulder, and my left arm is still immobilized, but my right hand is free.
I drive my right claws at his throat, desperate to end him.
He’s faster than me.
Oh-so-much fucking faster.
All I feel is a cascade of pain as he strikes in a blur, every hit bursting with light magic that burns across my vision and sears my body.
He snatches hold of my oncoming hand, twists, and the bones in my wrist, thumb, and forefinger shatter. His other fist smacks my left cheekbone with acrunchand suddenly, I can’tsee out of that eye. So quickly it seems to happen at the same time, his foot hits my outstretched left leg and the bone in my calf snaps.
I can’t even scream.
I can barely process what happened as the onslaught of light stops and I plummet to the cold, stone floor, my broken leg bent at a horrible angle and my other leg folded beneath me.
His shadow engulfs me and it feels like death.
A cold, inevitable death.
I try to look up, try to make sense of what he’s saying because he’s speaking, but it’s a wash of noise garbled by the pain ravaging my body.
“Do you think me cruel, Daughter?” he asks. “I could have broken every bone in your body from the moment you were brought to me, unconscious. I held off because I wanted to know where Galeia is, but you’ve failed to provide that information. I’ll give you one more chance and if you answer my question, I’ll kill you quickly.”
Somewhere in the midst of the chaos within my mind, there’s a cold version of myself quietly cataloging my injuries.
I’ve lost vision in my left eye. My cheekbone is broken. So are many of the bones in my right hand and wrist, along with the bone in my left calf. My left arm remains immobilized with my feather still jutting from my shoulder. Blood pools in my mouth, making it difficult to breathe again, even though my ribs have repaired themselves. Where he hit me, I can see burn marks across my leg and hand. There are also scorches that stretch from one side to the other, as if the light splashed across me. The burns are easily visible since I’m wearing nothing more than a bra up top. I’m sure there are more burns across my face.
I’ve never experienced wounds like this. Not even at the hands of my jailer. He never broke my bones while using his light magic.
It’s clear that my healing power is struggling to cope because my bones aren’t knitting together and my vision isn’t clearing.
As for what is still functioning: my right leg, my right eye, and my hearing to some extent.
My heart is beating.
I’m breathing, but it’s difficult.
With a hateful sense of finality, I acknowledge to myself that I don’t have a hope of beating him. He’s fast and strong. But I suppose he has hundreds of years of fighting experience to draw on while I only had a short time learning basic combat from my mother.
My father approaches my broken leg, retracts his wings fully, and crouches beside me.
I have to turn my head to keep him within sight of my good eye.
As my labored breathing bubbles in the silence, he flicks my blood off his hands. “I was hoping you would come to me with anger in your heart because it would make this so much easier.” He sighs. “Galeia must have hoped I’d let you live if you came to me in good faith. Trust me—I never wanted to be the one to kill you.”
The fact that he’s stopped to talk, instead of snapping my neck already, gives me hope that there’s still some conflict within him about what he plans to do.
