Neon Blue E Frost (speld decodable readers .TXT) 📖

down the invisible but very tangible barrier between us. As I watch, he drags his hands down through the protective barrier, leaving black ribbons of blood behind, suspended in the air. He cups his hands in front of his groin, the seat of his power. A gleam peeks between his black talons, growing to a ball of neon blue light.

We stare at each other for a long moment. His face has gone hard, demonic, the light from what he holds in his bloodied hands casting shadows up onto his face, turning his expression alien and terrifying. His eyes aren’t empty now. They’re filled with that cruel light. Doomlight. And that’s when it really sinks in. My life means absolutely nothing to him. He’ll kill me himself to get what he wants.

Something tears in my chest. A fragile cocoon of love and hope. Instead of releasing a butterfly, it collapses on itself, bleeding, rotting, leaving my eyes wet and my throat raw when I ask, “You’d do it?”

“That’s the way you want it, that’s the way we’ll play it,” he responds, and there’s no softness in his voice. He doesn’t let anything get in his way. His will, his damned indomitable will, is all that’s important. My feelings. My life. My dreams. They don’t mean anything to him, and they never will.

I bring one hand up between us, shake my wrist so the bindings the Squire so carefully severed slide down my arm. Just one loop still circles my wrist. One knot: black, red and gray.

I raise my wrist to my mouth and bite down on the knot. Feel fire, a thousand times hotter and more intense than when I bit off Ro’s binding, shoot up into my head. It spills out of my mouth, scorching my chin, dripping in burning ribbons across my breasts. I keep biting down. One chance. I want to live. I want to make my own choices, whatever they are. No one has the right to control me. The pain builds steadily. I can’t stand it. I have to let go.

Stop, Tsara! His voice in my head. Now he speaks into my mind. Not when Denys was cutting me. Not when my heart broke. Now that he stands to lose what he wants, he opens the connection between us.

I let silence answer him. Keep biting down. Finally, finally, my teeth meet.

The bindings break. The explosion rocks my head back. Blood spatters my face. Pain wraps my arms in a barbed wire embrace. I scream and yank my wrist away from my face. Lines of fire circle my arms where the bindings lay, where his magic worked its way under my skin. Burning drops of blood fall to sizzle on the hard-packed ground, and the stink of my own burning flesh fills my nose.

I hold my burning arms out to the demon.

He watches me impassively. He doesn’t care. Alive or dead. Maimed or whole, as long as my soul is his.

I fall to my knees as the burning bands on my forearms die to embers. When they’re ash, I let my arms droop to my sides. My hands rest limply against the cool dirt floor.

“You let him cut me,” I whisper.

“I woulda—”

I’m not listening anymore. Not to anything he has to say.

“You let me burn,” I say. An edge of power creeps back into my voice. A counterpoint to the tears.

“Sweetness—”

I shake my head wearily. Turn my hands over and dig my fingers into the dirt.

I reach deep. Down into the very fabric of my Element. Down into the mystical force that connects my plane with the others it touches. Whether it’s the Great Tree or the Wheel or whatever, I know what to look for now. His plane. Hell.

With a scream of pain and effort, I shove my hands into the ground and tear open the barrier between my world and his. There’s no exacting recipe or intricate spellcasting now. No skeleton key still lying in my handbag. Just raw power, and I can feel it ripping out of me even as it claws open the gateways between his world and mine. A few more moments and there will be nothing left in me. I’ll have drained myself dry.

The Hellhole opens with a howl of fury. It yawns beneath the demon. A vortex of wind and power. He hovers above it, staring down into the lightning-streaked depths. Then he looks at me. His eyes are filled with darkness.

He shakes his head. “You know something, sweetness?”

I can’t breathe. Can’t think. My entire being is focused on holding that tear between the planes open. I shake my head, shuddering.

“You never did say it.”

He lets his hands drop to his sides, and instead of flying at me the ball of killing light dissipates into streamers of smoke. He tilts his head back and with a roar like a sun being swallowed by a black hole, drops down into the pit.

It closes behind him. The light around and within me fades. Leaves me on my knees amongst the ruins of my hearth room. Limp and exhausted and so drained that I can’t even heal myself. I cover my head with my burned arms and cry myself into oblivion.

Whatever my connection with the Earth, sleeping on the dirt floor of my hearth room does not restore me. It just leaves me stiff and sore in places that weren’t injured before. At some point in the long night, when the pain wakes me, I crawl across the torn lawn, whimpering as the withered grass brushes the terrible burns on my forearms. It looks like I’ve laid my arms on a griddle. I can’t look at them. Thinking about the burns makes my stomach seize and my head spin, so I concentrate on making it the few yards across the lawn, up the steps to the porch, across the rough boards, picking up splinters in my palms and knees, through the back door, to sprawl across the linoleum when I catch my knee