My lungs empty as my heart crashes to the Castle’s stone floor.
I blink once, twice, to clear my blasted vision. But there’s nothing to clear.
It’s not a trick of Myles.
It’s the face of the man I love taken over by a 130-year-old shape-shifting murderer.
Draewulf. My breath is reeling and my heart is choking out of my chest. “You didn’t. You couldn’t—”
“Couldn’t?” He lifts a hand to my snowy-white hair.
My veins ripple, and that half smile I’ve come to care for most in the world goes eerie as his green eyes flicker to reveal black wolf eyes. “You chose Faelen,” he murmurs.
One heartpulse . . .
Two heartpulses . . .
“You should’ve kept a better eye on him, Nym.”
No, no, no, no. This is not happening. I curl my hand into a fist and cause the sky to thunder so loud my words shake the walls. “What. Have you. Done?”
He bends closer. “Took over Eogan while you were too busy saving the pathetic people who enslaved you.”
My breath explodes and I ignite like fire and maelstrom and murder. My body sizzles with the static sweeping through my blood as the siren inside that pushed back the airships, the siren that saved Faelen, flares through my Elemental veins.
I lift my deformed left hand and place it against my trainer’s broad chest that now holds a monster. He clamps down on my arm.
I don’t even think about it—I just let loose a surge of energy against him, as if to burn the beast from his body before considering the damage that doing so might cause. His skin lights up like brilliant night skies, but instead of melting him out, my energy molds into a shield over him—Eogan’s block somehow countering me in the only way it’s ever been able.
“Mother of a toothless—” I let loose choice words owner number four’s mum taught me and press harder, drawing in a mass of clouds above the Castle courtyard where the atmosphere darkens.
“That erratic temper of yours that he found so appealing does not amuse me, girl. You’ll stop. Now.”
A flick of my wrist and the lightning it elicits rips through the slit in the window seam, blasting the whole pane open in explosive shards across the floor. The lightning narrowly misses the bed as it cracks the air and practically shatters my eardrums. Eogan growls, and the curtains catch fire—the flames of cloth quickly drip to the seat before sliding to the small carpet.
He snatches my crippled hand as if to soothe me, control me. “You will stop or—”
“Or what?” I shove into his chest again to shoot a thin layer of ice from my gimpy, curled fingers, spreading it out across his skin and down his body onto the floor, toward the window and up onto the seat and curtains where it smothers the fire. The next instant the ice is crawling up from my hand to enter his mouth, his throat. His breathing turns labored. He begins choking. Gasping.
Dying.
Eogan’s body is dying at my hand.
His eyes widen. As if Draewulf in him is surprised. Impressed. “Kill me, and you’ll kill his body.” His voice crackles in a tone that’s suddenly too close to Eogan’s. Too intimate. Too perfectly familiar.
My hand falters.
His grip tightens over the memorial tattoos on my left arm and Eogan’s ability to soothe rushes my veins, muting the fury, deflating the curse in my blood.
I pull back. How dare he use Eogan’s block against me.
But his lips curl as his other hand lashes up to rest right above my screaming heart. And suddenly he’s squelching something. Sucking the life-pulse.
My insides are being carved up and cut out.
“What the—?” The siren in my veins begins fluttering and beating, like a bird flailing for escape from the wave of heat barreling through. I try to jerk away, and for a second, I swear a cry breaks out from my rib cage before the hot surge courses in and cools to harden like doused metal underneath my skin, searing my blood to my bones. The siren’s scream falls silent and there is nothing but heaviness.
My powers.
My ability . . .
I twitch my wrist at the sky to resummon the storm, but the clouds keep dissipating. What in hulls? I wrench harder, twisting my fingers to claim the night air, the wind, the rain.
Except it’s not there.
It’s gone.
As if my Elemental blood has been drained and I am left a normal, non-Uathúil, Faelen person.
“What did you do?”
He merely pinches harder.
I bat him away as his hands grab for my waist, my shoulders. I shove and squirm from his grip, but his fingers crumple my dress as he draws me firmly in place against his chest and sneers down from the mouth that kissed me exactly one week ago when we stood at the Keep while the world went to hulls around us in bursts of bombs and lightning. “Consider it a gift—a deliverance from your curse,” he whispers.