Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
And then he focused on her with haunted eyes. “Lyric… you have to go. Nothing matters but you. Nothing.”
* * *
Right before the evil grabbed him on an existential level, Dev prayed that Lyric would listen to him and get the hell out of there. Except there had been no time to talk sense into her—hell, he didn’t even know what she was doing at the house at all. But then his father had reached out and snagged him, and he’d been pulled in by an undertow so powerful, there had been no fighting it.
Determined to keep her safe, at any cost to himself, he had ducked and rolled, sprung up and fired back at his sire, sending out a burst of energy that made them change places: He might have been sucked into the house, but Lash had been expelled.
It wouldn’t keep his father busy for long, however. And he needed to get—
Lyric burst into the bedroom, going barefoot right over the broken glass. As he caught the smell of her blood, he rushed across and swept her up off the carpet—then rerouted for an interior door. Opening it with his mind, he was about to start running out of the suite when the lights flickered and went out.
He glanced around his shoulder.
Lash was coalescing in the night sky, like a flock of crows pulling together, and the rumbling underfoot was a harbinger of what was to come.
If you give all you have, all that is within you, your destiny will come true.
Dev stopped and looked Lyric right in the eyes. “I love you. And I’m sorry.”
Before she had a chance to respond, he put her behind him, sheltering her with his body, and closed his lids. All around them, thunder rolled through the sky, and he could tell there was lightning, too, the reflections of the strobing registering and constricting his pupils.
But he had to ignore all that. He had to tap into the wellspring of what he felt for this female.
With grim resolve, he thought back to the way he’d spent his day, spinning a pathetic fantasy where he actually was the just-normal-mortal he’d pretended to be, and the two of them lived happily ever after like everybody else on the planet who was mortal. No curses, no magic—and not because he was shutting it all down as he’d been doing for the last decade.
No curses and no magic because there was none inside of him—
The pulses started with the beat of his heart and emanated out from there, great waves of energy gathering around him from the very origins of the universe, the power that had brought the first spark of life into being, the essence of the Creator, doubling and redoubling within him.
His soul purged everything that he’d been born with and hadn’t wanted into a barrier that protected Lyric, surrounding her, fortifying her… protecting her.
And just in time.
Dev’s eyes blinked open right as his father stepped back through the broken pane.
“Really,” came a warped voice. “Over a vampire?”
And then there was no more talking. Lash let loose a barrage of dark magic, the power so great the whole house rumbled on the foundations that had been drilled into the very bedrock of the mountain—
As the force hit, Dev’s metaphysical shielding of Lyric held, the evil diverted so that she wasn’t hurt. But as the barrage continued, Dev could feel himself losing strength.
And he knew what he had to do. One shot. He needed to take his one shot—
Give all of himself, as the angel had said.
Summoning his strength, Dev yelled out a battle cry, and embraced the opposite of what he felt for his female. Instead of love, he accessed the deep hatred he had for his sire—and in doing so, he started to absorb the dark energy being sent at him, his corporeal being turning into a repository for the evil, until he felt his soul sicken and contort. But he took still more, the longer his father continued, the further down he sunk as he collected the root of all that was cruel and conniving and angry in the world—
When he couldn’t hold it any longer, when he was full beyond bursting, he flipped the switch and sent the hatred back to its source.
The explosion of energy was so great, it blew out all the windows along the front of the house, the shards of glass mixing with the flurries that fell, the shock wave also felling trees and shearing rocks off the mountain’s elevation.
Lash was swept off the porch and carried far, far out over the lake, his form spinning in the midst of the black energy, trapped in everything that he brought to fate and destiny, captured by the dense darkness that contaminated hearts and souls and condemned those who acted as evil to an eternity in Dhunhd—