Quickly wrenching Hadrix’s first axe from my side, I pitch it into the ground before returning my attention to Vulture.
I assess the way the wand behaves in her hand.
That bone won’t want to be taken away from her unless it finds itself in the possession of someone more powerful: me or Striker.
As I advance on Vulture, she shrieks a spell that would flay the skin off me. Then, another that would tear each of my limbsfrom their sockets. Finally, a third spell that would explode the blood pumping through my heart.
Sweat rolls down her face while I study her eyes.
“You’ve lost two children,” I say, reading her emotions and her crimes as easily as I can see the sky. “You lost one to hate and the other to love.”
Her son, Raptor, caused so much pain. If he were still alive, I would punish him, too.
Her daughter, Kaitlyn, on the other hand, was manipulated by both Vulture and Hadrix into making decisions that hurt others, but she escaped her parents’ clutches and… I’m surprised to discover from Vulture’s thoughts… it was with Striker’s help.
“Your husband will die today,” I continue to Vulture. “Areyouready to face your fate?”
She snarls at me. “Go to hell, bitch.”
The Berserker’s shadow looms again, this time at full speed from behind me, as he knocks me to the ground.
Although metal can fly through me, it seems that living flesh can still have a significant impact.
I hit the grass on my side, and Hadrix promptly kicks me with his hard boot, knocking me onto my back and breaking my ribs at the same time.
“I’m going to cut you so fast you won’t heal,” he snarls, brandishing the axe he must have retrieved from the ground. “All while I wrap that whip around your neck and strangle you with it.”
My sisters warned me not to use my whip, and now their alarmed shrieks ring within my mind.
Don’t let him get your whip!
His axe is already cutting across my arm and through my hip, and, even though my body heals, I can’t get my hand around my whip in time.
Hadrix wrenches it away from my mangled hip. At the same moment, his other boot smashes down on my chest, pinning me to the ground while I thrash beneath him.
He grinds me into the dirt as I struggle to free myself, his boot stomping on my face next, then breaking my ribs and collarbone, his violent roars echoing around the clearing as he kicks me over and over.
And, just when he gives me a reprieve, and I try to dart upward, it seems I do exactly as he wanted.
My head is off the ground, my neck is exposed.
The whip is ready in his hands. By using his feet, he had time to prepare the whip like a garrote.
The moment my head rises, he wraps one of the three unbreakable tails of my whip around my neck and uses his forward momentum to wrench me up into the air, holding me aloft by strength alone.
My neck breaks with the force of his attack. And heals. Breaks. And heals.
Even as I draw on my ability to levitate, kicking with my legs, the whip tightens so rapidly that my vision blurs.
My hands are around the rope, my claws trying to tear at them so hard that I’m cutting my own throat. My snakes are snarling and striking out, but Hadrix is slashing at them with the axe he holds in his free hand.
They will only live as long as I do.
I’m about to lose consciousness and, for the first time since Striker created me, fear rises up within me.
My sisters’ voices are suddenly far away, and emptiness threatens to swallow me.
2. STRIKER DRAVEN
