Total pages in book: 401
Estimated words: 390373 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1952(@200wpm)___ 1561(@250wpm)___ 1301(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 390373 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1952(@200wpm)___ 1561(@250wpm)___ 1301(@300wpm)
Kolis’s head turned to my right.
Delano stiffened, then shuddered. Crimson poured from his eyes and nose. His mouth opened, and blood—gods, blood gushed from it as his knees collapsed and his head fell back.
My father caught him as he shouted. I staggered back.
“What did I tell you?” Kolis’s voice boomed.
My father’s head jerked up, his eyes locked with mine and widening.
I halted.
Everything came to a stop inside me. My heart. My lungs.
“What did I promise?” Kolis’s voice slithered through the Great Hall.
The flesh peeled away from my father’s face, his throat. His armor shattered as Delano slipped from his arms, crumpling to the floor. Exposed muscle ripped and splintered. His spine snapped. Bone crunched and turned to ash.
“I promised both of you,” Kolis hissed. “That I would kill everyone you held dear in front of you.”
Valyn Da’Neer didn’t make a sound as he held my gaze.
He didn’t scream.
He didn’t groan.
My flesh went taut. My insides cold.
The last thing he did was move his eyes from mine to Kolis. The last words he spoke sounded wet and broken. “He will kill you.”
Kolis laughed.
He laughed as my father fell beside Delano in an unrecognizable heap of blood and bone.
A buzz hit my blood, and the corners of my vision darkened. The air around me charged as I stared at my father. He was gone. His last words a threat.
Delano was also gone. My last words spoken to him a taunt.
Hisa and countless others were gone.
I couldn’t sense Poppy.
And I knew they would all still breathe if I had not remained here.
Something dark and needy, hungry, unraveled inside me.
“What is it about this bloodline that’s so stupidly arrogant?” Kolis questioned, his voice strengthening and becoming less garbled. “I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.”
“What,” I said, the air chilling around me until I could see my breath, “did you do to her?”
“What did I do to your precious Poppy?” His laugh crawled over my prickling skin. “Your pretty flower?”
The distaste in his tone, the loathing… I twitched.
“She thought she could kill me.” Kolis’s laugh turned my stomach. “That I would still be in love with her.”
My fingers spasmed.
“A thousand years entombed is a long time,” he growled. “I was conscious for quite a bit of it. Had a lot of time to think. Had even more for whatever I felt for that bitch to wither and die.”
What had I said? Kolis had not behaved like a man in love when he controlled Poppy. Energy ramped up inside me. No one had listened to me. And I’d been right. Everyone, including the true Primal of Life, had been wrong.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I drained her—”
I threw my hand out as I turned to him. Dark-gray-and-crimson-streaked eather erupted from my palm. The bolt of essence flew across the chamber.
There was a flicker of surprise as Kolis waved his arm. The bolt collapsed an inch from his chest. “Parlor tricks,” he laughed. “Adorable.”
I fully turned.
His eyes flared with crimson, but it was a dull pulse.
The essence swelled in me. In my mind, I saw what could not be seen by those with the essence of life in them.
I saw marks of death.
The torn arteries that still hadn’t healed. The fluttering essence weakened by the use of eather. The sluggish beat of his heart and the inch-long wound there, where I knew Poppy had planted the Ancient bone. She had wounded him deeply. Maybe even Attes. Perhaps even whoever had intervened and fell, causing the ground to tremble.
At the moment, the only thing that mattered was what that meant.
“You’re weak,” I said. “I can sense it.” My head cocked. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
“I see the slut gave you some powers—”
I shot across the Hall. Kolis started to rise, mist seeping out of him. I prowled forward, the bodies sliding out of the way as the eather slipping through my veins took hold. My flesh hardened as Primal mist spilled out of me, thicker and moving faster than what surrounded him.
Kolis’s eyes narrowed. “What the fuck?”
I launched into the air and through the stinging, churning mist. It tore at my skin and burned, but the pain didn’t stop me as my nails sharpened and strengthened. It couldn’t stop me.
He didn’t have the power to do so.
Not right now.
Crashing into Kolis, I thrust my hand into his ruined stomach and slammed him into the wall. He grunted as the impact cracked the gold-veined marble.
Kolis stared at where my hand was now buried below his sternum and then lifted his gaze to mine.
“My Queen,” I spoke, my voice filling with shadows and smoke, “gave me more than just parlor tricks.”
Tearing out ropey tissue, I gripped a fistful of his hair and pulled him back from the wall. My head snapped down, lips peeling back. I sank my fangs deep into his throat and didn’t release them.