Page 108 of Wolf of Ashes
Halle gives a scream of pain.
Blood bursts across her fingertips as though I’d cut her hands instead of the vines.
She recoils, her eyes wide, fear striking through her expression. She attempts to backpedal even as I land right in front of her.
Her scream of agony continues to peel from her lips while she fixates on my claws and stumbles in her attempt to get away. “No… It can’t be…”
I don’t stop.
My mother taught me to fight dirty, so that’s what I do.
I slash at Halle’s face, the tips of my claws slicing her cheekbone, cutting through the illusion she wears on the dead side of her face.
Black bones are exposed through the wounds, and I want only to strike deeper, to slice right through them. I slash again, but she manages to throw her arms up in time, taking the cuts across her forearms.
With her arms up over her face, her chest is exposed, and I ram my other fist at her heart, my claws making it within an inch of her skin before her hand snaps down and closes around my wrist, stopping me.
But not my other hand.
My other claws slip between her ribs, puncturing one of her lungs. Desperately, she tries to defend herself, audibly struggling to breathe as I strike again. And again. Cutting open her shoulder, gashing her ribs, driving my claws straight through her bones until her blood flows freely across her face, chest, and arms.
Any other supernatural would be dead now, but a goddess, well, it seems she’s hard to kill.
I wrench backward, giving myself space to kick her chest, right where I punctured her lung, and knock her to the ground.
She falls heavily, her arms held up over her face once more. “It wasn’t me!”
Her words barely register. The strangeness of them. As if she didn’t kill Anarchy.
I drop onto her, ramming my knee against her chest, gratified by thepop-popwhen two of her ribs break.
“You killed her,” I snarl.
“No,” she screams—a breathy cry as she tries to drag air into her body. “I would never betray her! It wasn’t me!”
I pause, my forehead creasing. “Betray?”
Who does she think we’re talking about?
Now that I’ve stopped striking Halle, I’m aware that, in the background, Lucian is shouting and Jonah is restraining him—or attempting to. Lucian’s fighting hard against his hold.
I can only assume Lucian has discovered that Elijah’s gone.
“I’ll fucking kill you, Veda!” he screams at me. “You’re fucking dead!”
“Veda.” Halle’s whisper draws me back to her. “Is that what she called you?”
“Who?” I ask, but my hollow heart is sinking because I think I know the answer.
“Galeia,” she whispers. “You have her claws.”
I’m frozen as it hits me that this woman, who stood at my father’s side, had to have known my mother.
It seems she has recognized my claws—the same claws my mother had.
Now, my mother finally has a name:Galeia.
But that knowledge comes at a cost and an awful realization.
