Page 164 of Black Sea

He was pressing me so hard that I didn’t even have the luxury to think, the darkness swirling around us like eels, along with the white flakes falling from the sky.

Suddenly, I swung a horizontal slash at his neck, but Mornon dematerialized, causing my sword to crash into a house wall with some sparks. I didn’t wait a second longer and started running back to the main square. I had a very quick premonition an instant before entering an alley and managed to duck just in time to avoid Mornon’s broadsword, which hit the house wall so hard that it shattered the stone blocks.

I whirled my weapon, but he blocked it just an inch from his neck. He blocked it with his hand. A hand covered in black flames that stopped my blade from slicing him.

I shot him a furious stare, and he responded with a look full of twisted excitement.

A sort of shock wave emanated from his flaming hand, hurling me so forcefully against a villa wall that I broke through it.

The pain in my spine was so intense that it took my breath away for a few seconds. Surrounded by a cloud of dust, I pushed my hands through the debris to pull myself up and coughed up a rush of blood.

Blood that mixed with the one in the pool I was in.

Gingerly, I raised my eyes. I had ended up in a kitchen where cabinets and hanging wires with herbs and dried meat were studded with the remains of the servants, dripping and teeming with flies. One severed arm’s hand was still clutching a ladle, while another hand still held a bouquet of thyme.

These poor people had been caught off guard; they hadn’t even had a chance to try to escape.

I was so terrified by the surrounding horror that I didn’t sense the sphere of darkness that bolted through the gap I had made in the outer wall. My left pauldron flew off, and a sharp burning sensation beneath my collarbone caused me to burst into a scream. Quickly, I grabbed my sword again and stood up, retreating into the bloody pulp. A second globe of darkness shot toward me, but this time I raised a glass shield to deflect it and ran into the long inner courtyard, pressing against the wall of the kitchen doorway.

“Oh, come on, Nauriel,” Mornon taunted me.

I ventured to peek out with my head to see if he had entered the kitchen, and a shadow-blade passed close to my cheekbone, scratching the doorframe. I examined the burn on my collarbone for one brief second, grimacing at the sight of bubbles forming on my red skin, then I heard the debris creaking under my enemy’s boots.

“I fought by your side for months and saw what you could do when you were barely more than just a human.”

I somersaulted to the side a moment before a black fireball blew up the wall behind which I had been hiding.

Mornon stepped through the widened doorway, and our eyes met with a longing that shook me to my core.

“Now give me all your elven strength,” he said, then threw a crescent of darkness at me.

I deflected it using a glass blade of the same shape, then immediately raised my sword to block the slash Mornon aimed at my head.

“Give me more,” he provoked me, with such hunger that it stirred up his darkness within me.

“You want more?” I retorted.

I recalled what I had given him before I knew who he truly was, and what I had given him even after uncovering his identity. I thought about what he had taken from me without my noticing, and what he had taken from me as I watched him do it as if he were my entire world.

No, I wouldn’t give him any of the rest of me. Because I had nothing left.

Anger swept over me with the incisiveness of an avalanche. A shockwave, similar to the one he had used to push me away from him, radiated from Calien’s Crystal, throwing Mornon against the small altar in the center of the courtyard with such force that it shattered.

“ I’ve already given you everything!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

And before I knew it, I summoned a glass stalactite from the palm of my hand and hurled it at him.

90

Mornon

My hand snapped closed, catching the spike just inches from my chest. I clenched it so angrily that my blood smeared its sharp, uneven surface, dripping onto the snow and the fragments of the small altar I had fallen on. Very slowly, I shifted my gaze to the tip of the stalactite.

She had aimed at my heart. My mate had aimed at my fucking heart.

She had aimed to kill me.

In disbelief, I turned my attention to Nauriel. She was so still that she appeared frozen, with a shocked expression that made her eyes look as if they had bulged out of their sockets.