Page 166 of A Touch of Poison
I’d let go and now I couldn’t control it. Panic filled my throat, pounded in my chest, painful and tight.
“Kat? Are you—?”
“Don’t.” I shook my head, stomach churning. “Don’t look at me. I’m a monster.”
He caught my shoulders like he wasn’t horrified by the death dripping from my fingers. He met my gaze and cupped my cheek, his warmth only dimly registering through the tingling magic. “You’re not a monster. You’reglorious.”
He was wrong.
I was out of control. I was a killer. A—
Something smacked into me and I stumbled forward into his arms. I tried to draw breath to speak, but… couldn’t.
Bastian paled, eyes wide, jaw slack.
Nowhe looked horrified.
Sluggish with grey blotches pressing at the edge of my vision, I followed his gaze down to my chest.
Blood. Steel in a familiar pointed shape.
An arrow head.
Then darkness.
63
Bastian
Ikilled a dozen of them before they managed to knock me out.
The whole thing was a tangle in my mind. Snatches of moments. More fighters pouring from the forest and down the cliff. A body sliced in two, slumping to the floor. A neck in my grip as I squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. A man clutching his thigh as his life seeped out.
And Kat’s blood on my hands.
Standing over her, I roared through it all, more animal than man. More broken than the bodies scattered at my feet.
The empty space in my chest echoed with the memory of a heartbeat.
I wouldn’t let them have her. I wouldn’t let them live.
But my will was not enough, and the universe had other ideas.
I woke with a terrible sickness roiling in my stomach. Someone thrust a bowl before me just in time for me to throw up until there was nothing but bile.
Gasping for breath, I gripped the edge of the bowl. My hands had been cleaned, but there was still something red caught under my nails.
Kat’s blood.
Was she…? The arrow sticking out of her chest. She was. Had to be.
My eyes burned as the truth crept through every vein and nerve. It choked me.
I would kill them all. Even if this bowl was my only weapon, I would destroy every last one of them.
I shook, but not entirely with anger. Weakness seeped into my very bones, cold as iron. And my shadows…
No shadows.
