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My skin crawled with the violation. I didn’t want to be looked at. I didn’t want to be leered at. Not while I wore the skin of some foreign creature. I could stand on my own two feet with pride, tipping my chin up, if I were in my own skin. With my own features, they could have their fill of looking at me, but in this other twisted form, I felt small and stripped bare of the years worth of armor I had collected.

“Does it speak?” asked the one called Harebell to Lady Ever Bright before she looked to me. “Do you speak, daoire?”

The way she sounded it out loud and slow grated on my nerves.

“Well enough to tell you to go fuck yourself.”

I hadn’t expected to say that. I had expected that tongue lock Rictus had mentioned would have prevented me from any sort of speech. He had said he would increase the power, and from the name, I assumed it would prevent me from speaking. Oops.

Lady Ever Bright narrowed her cracked, mudflat eyes, and a sinister grin pulled her otherwise plain features into a menacing promise. “Bid on this one, Harebell. I will break her and throw her to the wildfire fields.”

Harebell, to her credit, swallowed and cast me an apologetic scrunch of her brows before ushering Lady Ever Bright away.

The leering populace of the Night Market drifted close to my cage in an unending sea of strangeness. By the time Rictus was stroking the bars aside, I was dizzy from the confusing, dazzling array of creatures that came to gawk at me.

I said nothing more to them, though, instead opting to trace the two and one on my thigh as hard as I could through the gauzy gown.

“You have made friends, I hear, Cricket.” He growled as he pulled me free and began pushing me toward a large canvas tent that looked like it was out of an old-timey circus movie.

“Guess that tongue lock needs a tune-up, eh, Old Rictus?” I snapped at him, daring to try and pull my arm free.

I could see a vast meadow peeking between the beige landscape of tents we moved past. I would run. Where I would go from there, I’d figure out when I got there.

His grip was solid iron, though, the sharp tips of his claws piercing the thin material to puncture small holes in my arm. I stared, confused, as beads of pearl bloomed against my unnaturally pale gold skin. My body seized and stalled, forcing Rictus to drag me a few steps before noticing I was no longer following him.

My blood. He changed my blood, too. My fucking blood.

I didn’t feel the hysteria creeping up. I didn’t stand witness to the chaos that pushed me out of my body and took possession of me. One moment, I was standing stark still, staring at the evidence that this bastard had robbed me of everything that was me right down to my fucking blood. The next, I was jerking wildly, screaming every obscenity I could think of from the top of my lungs. My new hands were pummeling the smaller man, no power, no thought, just the feral need to inflict upon him the same violation and ruination he had visited upon me. I kicked, my feet flying with their own rage.

Twenty-seven years of pent-up rage, hate, bitterness, and vitriol came pouring out as I attacked like the beast of burden he had made me. My eyes were squeezed shut, and the unending, ear-splitting shriek that poured from my mouth rose and fell with untamed notes mixed with snarling growls.

I sensed Rictus’s surprise and his recovery. I sensed the tongue lock snapping off the branches of the maelstrom battering him, but I kept screaming in my mind. The corridors of my inner sanctum filled with the wailing and echoed it back two-fold. His hands were everywhere, struggling to tame me as I unleashed everything on him.

It went on forever. I was an unbroken river of fury crashing down upon him.

Until I was not.

It took four sets of hands to finally restrain me. Four sets of meaty, sweaty, strong hands grabbing me everywhere to pin my arms to my body and wrestle me to the ground. Even there, I struggled, a fish on a hook trying to slither away from them. I wanted to bite, wanted to taste blood blooming behind my jaws and suckle upon the ichor that would pour forth from their wounds. I wanted to bathe in the chunks I would tear free of their arms and legs.

“Cricket!”

It was a male voice I hadn’t heard before that pierced the veil of my rampage. It sliced through it like it was wet tissue paper before a butcher knife, parting it and pushing it from me.

“Cricket,” he called again.

The image of my beloved Cricket formed in my mind. She would be at home, safe in her tank. Sitting content and quiet under her heat lamp.

“Cricket.”

His voice pitched down. Soft, conspiratorial, seductive, almost flirtatious.

“Cricket,” he whispered too close to my pointed ear.

It sent a live-wire shiver from the top of my head to the tips of my toes and back to settle heavy across me like a weighted blanket in winter.

I opened my eyes, and the dawn broke within my gaze. As sight returned to me, he was there. Soft, masculine features, a light dusting of stubble on his jawline. Long oak-brown hair shot through with pure metallic gold pulled into a sloppy bun, with hair falling from his struggle. Rich forest eyes bordered by a spray of dark lashes were twice as large as a human’s, and a sinful mouth tipped up into a self-satisfied smirk. His tipped ears adorned with simple steel caps.

He raised a hand and gently stroked it down my cheek, tapping on the metal plate that covered the center of my face. His fingers explored my skin, leaving wisps of sparks in their wake, until he cupped my chin and grazed his calloused thumb across my bottom lip. His gaze connected and held mine, and my heart stood still waiting to see what would happen next.