I blink. Try to work moisture to my mouth. To question him.
Scream?
He spoke so softly and calmly that I’m certain I misheard.
Then his gaze hardens, the light in his eyes becoming sharp and glinting with icy power. “Your voice is small,” he says. “Your hands are weak. You are a mere sliver of light, easily extinguished. But even a whisper from you right now will carry the power we need to survive.”
I don’t know what he means. If he’s speaking of my Oracle power and the visions that help me foresee and prevent harm to others, I don’t control those visions. Worse, they haven’t functioned properly for days.
I didn’t foresee that the hammer that had forged the Dragonstone Blade would spread darkness across the land or that I’d have to carry it into the bloodlands to contain its power.
I didn’t foresee that the hammer would crumble to dust and the black runes etched into its surface would transfer to my arm.
I didn’t foresee that the Iron Fae who burned me with iron dust five years ago was Antony’s younger brother Hadrian.
And I didn’t foresee that Antony would succumb to the vampyr bite that was inflicted on him when he was a boy, a fate that was not of his choosing and has now led to his slumped body propped up by a slab of melting ice.
His life and all the hope he dared to grasp…gone.
If Stellen speaks of my Oracle power, then it’s a power I don’t trust any longer.
His hand tightens around my wrist, a painful grip as he persists, commanding me, “Scream.”
I want to.
I want to rage at fate and every pain it’s brought me. My father’s death. Losing Antony. My own physical weakness, these heavy limbs, and this clouded mind.
Above us, the swarm closes in, the scent of decay filling my chest, a hundred fleshy, gleeful faces flashing toward us. Fangs and clawed hands bared and ready to tear us apart.
I try to push sound from my throat, but my body is finally shutting down. Whatever final surge of energy gave me the strength to revive is fading.
My rage is draining away with my life.
Tears I’m physically unable to shed burn behind myeyes as I turn my focus to the Frost King and his otherworldly countenance. His long, white hair is icy pale, his pale-gray eyes like smooth stones but so near-white that they appear ghostly, and his high cheekbones, sharp and austere, but his lips…
They betray him.
Not icy. Not heartless.
His lips are forbidding and angry. Resentful. And maybe…regretful.
As each heartbeat brings us closer to death, he responds by raising his voice above a whisper for the first time.
Now harsh and cruel.
“Scream, Oracle,” he grinds between his teeth. “Or I’ll hurt you so badly, you won’t have a choice.”
He doesn’t give me a chance to respond. Not that I could.
His grip closes hard around my wrist, and he wrenches my arm up where I can see it, pressing his forefinger right over the image of the blade’s cross-guard.
Icy-blue power sparks beneath his forefinger, and I fear the pain he promised me for the split second it takes the thin line of power to shoot up my arm along the blade’s image.
His power streams toward the blade’s sharp point at the crease of my elbow, and with it comes?—
Excruciating agony.
A scream rips from my throat, the sound rising and rising as my back arches and my mind attempts to tear from my body, needing to escape.
