AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I tugged at it, feeling it pulse through my veins. It was like the honeyed berries I had tried once, sweet and sharp and electric. The sensation was everywhere, like the never-ending ocean was trying to move into me. It should scare me, but it didn’t. I wanted more of it. I needed more of it. I pulled at it, feeding it into me. The only food I would ever want.
A second later, the flame in his hand went out.
“What in the—?” He gasped, those hard eyes shifting from humor to fear. “Sypher.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but I didn’t care. He was scared. I could use that.
“Yeah, I’m a Syphel.” I tried to repeat the taunt, sure I said it wrong. A few of the guys laughed, but the sound was chopped and panicked. One of the guards looked to the shadow in the back, the man still leaning against the doorframe even as the others looked on in horror as the blond Fae shouted and tried to pull away from my grip.
That fear, that horrible, horrible fear I saw in his eyes, was the same that was twisting up in my spine. He was as scared as I was. This Fae who had come to kill me.
He was scared of me.
That shouldn’t be possible, but I wasn’t going to ask. I was going to keep doing what I was doing.
The Fae attempted to yank free of my grip again, but I held on tighter even as he lifted me, my other hand swinging around to his neck. The heat that radiated from him rose, that pulsing power still surging through me. I pulled harder at the power, even as my head spun and the comforting heat in my veins turned into a boil.
That crackling light had moved into me.
No! I should have thought this through! What was I doing? This was too much.
“Lily!” I screamed in an attempted warning, her name turning into an agonized shout from the heat, from the pain that was engulfing me. The flames that were everywhere.
Da yelled something behind me, Lily’s sobs turning into a scream, but I was stuck staring at the man who, even in his panic, began to smile again.
“You don’t know what you are,” the blond man taunted, my scream turning to a gasp as he pried one of my hands from him, holding my wrist in his giant hands. “And you don’t know how to control it.”
He pried my other hand away, both hands held out as he gripped my wrists. That heat continued to pour through me as he leaned in.
“Word of advice, rodent; when you play with fire, you are the only one who will burn.” All fear faded from his eyes as his magic pulsed through me again. This time, he was pushing it into me.
Every inch of his magic ignited my skin in that cold heat more intense than I had ever felt. My skin was on fire; my bones were cracking with it. Agony ripped through me, and I screamed and pushed at it, desperate to get it out, to get it anywhere but inside of me.
It moved in a woosh, right to my palms, to my hands, and to my fingers that began to spark. Light pulsed, jumping between my fingers as I kept pushing at it. The heat burned me from the inside out, and with one scream, I was the one who exploded.
Lightning ripped through the air as though it was devouring it. It shredded the back walls of our home like they were made of the broken nets the sharks ruined in the spring. Water flooded through the cracked wood, filling the floor of our house as everything fell apart and the ocean rose to engulf us.
“What? No!” I wasn’t sure if I yelled or he did. One second, I was in the air; the next, he dropped me to the quickly disappearing floor.
Water lapped around my knees and calves as the shard of floor I landed on struggled to float. I stared at my hands, at the power that still buzzed there. I tried to stand, to turn, to find and save my family, but the second my hands pushed against the water-covered floor, everything exploded again.
Lightning multiplied with screams in a strangled sound as the last of the floor ripped apart. The Qit groaned and rocked, screams echoing from everywhere in the floating town. But there was only one scream that sunk into my soul. Lily’s.
Her scream of pain and panic slammed against my heart as I kicked and crawled through the mixture of wood and waves. I couldn’t see her. I couldn’t even feel the gentle strum of her magic. Only the Fae’s.
“Lily!” I needed to find her. She had to be there somewhere.
“Rodent!” the blond man screamed and rushed me, water splashing over everything as I kicked away, holding my hands out as I let the last of his mutated power flow through me and out of my palms.
Sharp knives of light that screamed as loud as I did hit him and the few men that stood behind him in a blast of white and blue, their screams joining with all the others as they flew into what was left of the front wall of our house. I continued to swim and kick and skitter over the broken remains of our floor in an attempt to reach where Lily had been.
Except nothing was there. It had all been destroyed.
“Lily!” I screamed for her, staring into the debris, into the black water. The black water that was devouring everything, the bits of my home, of my life, sinking into the abyss.
“Lily!” I dove into the icy depths of the ocean before I finished screaming.
Kicking, I darted through the waves, dodging the pieces of our home, some of the slabs of wood glowing faintly white even as they sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Everything was black and silver as I searched, kicking and swimming as I had since the day I was born.
