And she didn’t hesitate as she sank that dagger into Titus’s neck.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ophelia
“RUN!”I shouted hoarsely, the skeletal fingers crushing my windpipe, nails digging into my skin. Its touch imprinted itself on my throat, something haunting passing through me.
I reached for Starfire, but I was shoved back. Rock came crashing down, and a body—adecayedbody—exploded through the wall, rising from its eternal resting place.
It was a warrior by the looks of its tattered clothes—or it had been. Shrunken and withered, any skin remaining on its bones barely clung there. Long hair flowed from its scalp, and hollows stared out of where its eyes once belonged, yet it watched me with a sentient, knowing intensity.
The corpse clenched its fist tighter around my throat, and as spots popped before my vision, a deep hatred burned in that vacant stare.
My feet scrambled for purchase as it forced me back, back, back. I slammed into a wall, my head snapping against stone. Angelborn dug into my shoulder blades.
“What in the fucking Angels are you?” I gasped.
Its yellowed, rotting teeth split into what I thought was a feral grin, snapping before me.
The corpse pressed harder on my throat, shoving me up. My back scraped against the rough wall, and my feet dangled over the floor. I kicked and kicked, aiming for all the weakest spots on a body, but it didn’t flinch or crumble.
Nothing harmed what no longer lived.
My vision swam. Shouts echoed, and blades sang through the tunnel.
Tugging, I clung to the warrior’s wrist, but its grip was as stony as the walls of these catacombs. My dagger at my thigh would do nothing, and there wasn’t room to pull Starfire.
I swept my hands against the rubble piling up around us, searching for something loose. A stone I could use to deter the corpse. Its grip was tighter than a cobra’s.
“Mystique!” Lancaster yelled from somewhere down the tunnel. “Use your magic!”
I can’t, I couldn’t say through my crushed throat. I didn’t know how the power would backfire—who else it would hurt.
The corpse squeezed my neck tighter until I thought it would snap.
“I call in my owed debt!” Lancaster shouted, his voice laced with an authority only magic could grant.
“No,” I barely gasped.
But already, my body was bending to the will of the bargain.
If I didn’t do as Lancaster demanded—if I did not pay this debt—Tolek would suffer for it. Die for it.
What little air resided in my lungs tightened as the dead bore down. The bargain tugged at me, taking what it was owed and stealing my autonomy.
“Blades are no longer your only weapons, Mystique,” the fae panted through whatever fight he was also facing. “Use your fucking magic!”
With both hands latched around the corpse’s wrist, I stashed my fears and gave into the insistent fae magic pressing on me.I used the breath fading from my body to reach toward my own power.
And as I channeled every bead of withering desperation, every morsel of air snaking down my throat into the magic in my soul, power mounted beneath my skin.
It rose, a beast awakening. With claws and teeth and wings flared, but?—
But it was too much.
It wasn’t the warmth I had come to recognize. “No,” I muttered again, kicking wildly.
This wasn’t the glorious Angellight I commanded. This was the hissing thing that had launched itself at Jezebel earlier.
