Page 146 of Remnants
“You swore we’d all make it through this! Yousworeit!”
I smack his chest. Shove him. I don’t care if it hurts him if it means it’ll wake him up.
“Because for as long as we’ve known one another, I’ve wanted you. I’ve loved you.”
The world spins around me, pressure weighing on my chest the longer he doesn’t move. The more blood stains his shirt.
“You are my everything.”
“Please!” I beg, tears choking me as I grip his shirt with all of my strength, refusing to let him go. “I love you, Aiden. I need you. The Guild needs you. We all need you so much. So,please...wake up.” I sob into his chest, and the smell of copper rather than cinnamon fills my lungs.
A scuffing noise snaps my head up. Charles smiles. “I think I’ve had my fill of your pain. It was exceptional.”
There’s a gun in his hand.
“You.Youdid this?!” I demand, my grief twisting to something dark and ugly.
“Come, now. Don’t look at me like that. Casualties are inevitable in war. You killed my ally, and I’ve killed yours. It’s fair, don’t you think?” The bastard pauses as if I might actually respond to that, then continues when I don’t, “In any case, you shouldn’t let your emotions get the better of you. We’re still in the middle of a fight. Here.”
Aiden’s ripped from my arms.
I gasp, and Charles flicks his wrist just as quickly. Aiden is thrown past the cliff, out to sea so far that he’s barely a black speck before Charles releases him to the ocean.
“Now you can focus again. Let’s end this, shall we?”
My mind blanks. Checks out.
Even if there’d still been a chance…
If I’d had any inkling of hope before…
My blood boils, seething through my veins as I release a scream of violence and pain.
Of death and destruction.
My gift surges through me, lighting my veins in fire until there’s nothing left but it and the wrath that feeds it.
I launch myself at him, throwing my body into him and knocking us both down as I scream and rage and lose myself.
I let my gift explode through me. To use my body as a vessel as it unleashes itself unchecked.
I want to reduce him to ash. To nothing.
It feels like lava’s flowing through me, filling me up with scorching heat, but I don’t feel pain from it.
It’s nothing compared to the agony in my chest.
The headland is dust when Charles’s body hits it, my gift skating over his burnt scales and to the ground beneath him. We fall to the sea, but I don’t care about any of it. Charles is laughing, his arms wide as he doesn’t even try to stop me.
The ground rushes toward us, and we crash into it, but still, my gift burns and disintegrates. The water’s not there, held back by some invisible force as the ground craters underneath with us at its epicenter. I throw everything I have at him.
My gift.
My soul.
My fury.
My screams.
