The potion traveled down my throat, a slight burn following in its wake. Horror reared up inside me, but the amount was so small, so tiny. In a blink, I’d swallowed it.
“Very good, Primelle.” He released me, and the reality of what’d just happened hit me. Absolute fury filled me, but Arnel just smiled.
“Now,” he said. “We wait.”
CHAPTER THREE
The second the potion hit my stomach, the burn I’d felt in my throat increased, except now the burn waseverywhere. Fire raged along my limbs, entirely alien from my natural fire elemental magic. It stung and seared, making me feel as though I was being flayed alive.
A scream ripped from my throat.
Pain.
Agony.
Searing, unrelentingtorture.
I screamed and screamed until my voice grew hoarse, and I could no longer speak.
My uncle winced. “Ah, yes, I’m afraid the pain is a side effect of the potion’s expedited rate. I altered it after the one Verin stupidly gave to your uncle instead of you, but fear not. It shall be over soon.”
But his reassurances faded into the background. Something was sliding through my veins, taking hold of my essence. Something foreign, somethingother.
“That’s it. It’s almost completely taken hold of you.”
I had just enough awareness to understand my uncle’s excited comment and know that the beginning stages of thetransformation were already upon me. It was similar in a way to my uncle’s illness. Initially, he had a fever and felt weakness and fatigue, but it wasn’t as drastic or as quickly onset as this.
Yet he’d been hot too. Stupidly, we’d thought he’d been running a fever, but now I knew.
It wasn’t a fever at all.
It was the last thought I had before blackness came.
The sun penetrated my eyelids.Bright, unrelenting sunlight. I fluttered my eyes open, my head groggy and feeling as though it was filled with cobwebs.
Blinking, I held up a hand and blocked the sunshine then drunkenly surveyed my surroundings. Confusion filled me.
I was in a decadent bedroom chambers with the curtains pulled wide open. Fluffy, warm covers surrounded me, yet I felt...cool.
I brought my hand closer to my face, and the vague recollection of a rope pinning me in place swept through the cobwebs.Had that been real?
No rope confined me. I was entirely free.
I waved my hand just to be sure, and my limb movedfast. All I’d wanted to do was gaze at my palm and turn it around, but my arm had moved in a blur.
I sucked in a breath, and a realization hit me that I’d done such an act out of habit, not because I needed to breathe.
Memories came next, one after the other, of what my uncle had done. My eyes flew wide open.
A ropehadbeen binding me, and I’d drunk the potion.
Pain and fever had immediately set in.
Arnel had said he was going to change me into avampire.
“No, no, no, he didn’t. I’m fine. Ihaveto be fine. I’m notthat,” I whispered.
Swallowing, I tried to ignore the impending sense of doom that began to settle over me like a dark cloud cover. Instead, I concentrated on studying my skin. I looked like me, but...something was different.
