Chapter 5

M adness.

I feel it inside me like a poison. I search for Caspian and find emptiness—a void. Blank. Anechoic nothingness all around. I see him, my mate. I feel him. I think I hear him. But no.

Maeve? I hear his voice, however.

A taunt. A tease.

"Caspian?"

Silence.

I dream of his touch, his kiss, but when I emerge from the trance, there is no touch upon my lips.

How long? How long do I languish in the cell, pacing in circles, scrabbling at the walls of the ward with my mind? How long do I sit on the cot, looking within, examining the dense, infuriating marble of light that is my magic, my maya, my prana?

The slant of light crosses the cell and vanishes. Crosses and vanishes.

Days? Weeks? It's hard to tell.

I lay down and close my eyes, but I cannot find The Dreaming. I cannot sleep.

I smell blood—faint traces and hints, and my mouth waters, my canines elongating against my lips, leaving grooves scratched into the stone of my unblooded lips.

Maya, I realize, is the problem. According to Elias—Grandfather? My feelings about him are terribly complicated, and I do not have the mental or emotional space to sort through them—maya is required to transition into or access The Dreaming. With my magic partitioned, I cannot access it.

Seems like I really fucked myself with that little stunt. Did it help? Did it do anything? No way to know.

Time stutters, flows, twitches, twists. I hear Caspian, and feel him—and something inside seems to sour. Did I imagine him? Have I always been in this cell? Did I dream of him? Sometimes I wonder.

I feel a clock ticking inside me, somewhere. Days counting down. Hours. Minutes. Till what? I don't know. Till something breaks within me? Till something terrible happens? I don't know. I just know I feel the passage of time, and it frightens me.

I can make no sense of the de-partition. I don't know how I did it in the first place, so I can't even reverse-engineer the process.

How do I manage the feats of glamour that should be beyond my ability? I don't know that either.

Desperation builds and piles up in my soul like heavy stones. I throw myself against the ward until the heat forces me back, burnt and scorched and in weeping agony.

Again.

Again.

I try to see the magic of the ward, but without my prana, I see nothing.

I grit my teeth and step forward. Heat blasts my face. This is the edge—as close as I can get without damaging my body. But…fuck it. What do I have to lose? I'll die here. Or, not, I won't, will I? I'll just go mad, madder, maddest—until there is nothing left of me. I push forward, and my skin crisps and blackens, my eyes dry into throbbing raisins. Pain lashes through me—magical pain, since I'm unblooded and have no physical sensation. The pain lacerates me, but I growl and clench my teeth and push forward. I smell burning hair. Another step. Another. I scream, raging against every impulse and instinct inside me, pushing forward.

I'm within inches of the threshold. My hair burns, flames licking and consuming. Muscles tremble, fighting my control. The agony is my whole world.

PUSH.

PUSH .

Another inch.

My throat is shredded from screaming, but I surge forward…

The air itself condenses into transparent stone, and I'm hurled backward through the air to slam against the far wall. I can't breathe—the ward is pressing against me, pinning me to the bare rock of the wall.

After a moment, the pressure vanishes, and I fall onto the cot, shaking all over. Whimpering. Weeping involuntarily.

Ages pass, and the light angles across the floor, and the agony crushes me, unabated. I pass my hand over my scalp—bare. Hairless. The skin is pitted, rippled, melted. My face as well.

Good thing I don't have a mirror.

Then, footsteps. Boots tromping on stone. Lighter steps—female. I smell fae—seven? Eight?

I don't know how much time has passed since I attempted to bulldoze through the ward, but the pain has not left me. It's like an infection, bone-deep, aching. I shouldn't feel anything at all, but I do.

Damned magic.

The footsteps clomp nearer and nearer until they arrive at my door—seven Enforcers in physical armor rather than magical, wielding shocksticks—two each, one as a shield and one as a weapon. Moving in practiced unison, they arrange themselves in a semi-circle around the doorway, shields activated and planted on the ground, shocksticks arcing and spitting—turned to the highest setting, I imagine. One touch and I'm incapacitated at best. For a long moment, nothing happens.

Then one of the Tribunal Enforcers steps forward and to the side, and a wizened, hunched old woman shuffles through the gap and to a halt in front of the doorway.

She's an ancient fae, hair steel gray and tangled, wearing a robe like Zirae's. She's tiny, barely five feet, but even through the ward I can feel her power—she wields more power than Zirae, in terms of raw capacity—I can feel it, sense it. Zirae probably just has more control. Not that it matters to me at this moment—I'm as helpless as a baby.

The old woman claps her hands together, once, sharply—the sound echoes like a gunshot and echoes, and echoes, beyond the capacity of physics and acoustics. The echo builds, and builds, and becomes an overlapping series of echoes that shudders everything, and then she extends one hand with her middle finger isolated, makes a complicated series of gestures—and all at once the ward falls.

I feel it fall.

Instinct—bloodlust—claims control of my body. My sight blurs, I pounce so fast. I'm on her, her skinny arms clutched in my hands, and my fangs are in her neck, and I taste blood—sweet, glorious blood. Honey and sunlight. I catch a brief hint of the woman—a childhood in the dirt of a long-dead epoch, a stone hut, rough garb, a mate…

A stunning impact jolts me—paralyzes me. Another, and another, and another, electricity searing through me, turning my muscles to stone, boiling my brain.

I hit the ground, spine arched, teeth clamped so hard they crackle and strain.

"By the Blood, she's fast," the old woman says, clapping a hand to her throat. Her voice is sandpaper and silk, a dry, rock-strewn streambed damp with a trickle of water.

I'm twitching, fighting. But the blood, god, the blood of the ancient is powerful. I feel it filling my veins and percolating through my muscles…it's dense and potent. If I wasn't paralyzed, I could probably rip through these Enforcers like tissue paper.

It's too late—I feel magic pressing on my skin, like the feeling of ozone before a lightning storm. I hear her mumbling under her breath, and I fight the paralysis. I get a toe-twitch, a finger curling, but it's too little, too late.

She claps her hands again—no echo, this time—and I feel something colder than ice coiling around my body like the bands of a boa constrictor. Icy bands coil around me, around my shoulders and arms, pinning them to my sides, and then down my hips and legs and ankles—and then they tighten. And tighten. Brutally tight, until my lungs cannot inflate all the way until my bones crack and scream in protest. The bands are invisible—air? I wish I had my magic sight so I could figure out how to replicate this glamour.

I grit out a groan, breathless, agonized. The old fae woman's face swims into view above me.

"Bite me, will you?" Her dark brown eyes spark with fury. "Damned bloodsuckers. Never cared much for vampires." She clucks her tongue. "Thought you could bulldoze through my ward, did you? Serves you right. Not so pretty, now are you? Face all melted, hair burned away. All that power, and what good does it do you? Hah. How you even managed a partition is beyond me."

She seems to be talking as much to herself as to me.

She mutters under her breath again, and I feel magic pressing on my skin once more, and she claps a third time, again without echo. A warm cushion of air squeezes between me and the ground; she holds her hands out before her, palms up, and raises her palms toward the ceiling. I rise up, the cushion of air lifting me. The Enforcers stomp their feet in unison once, and the woman nudges me—the tiny push sends me coasting into motion. The old fae woman keeps a hand on my foot so she can guide me, and the troops fall into formation in a square around us: two in front, three on each side, and two in the rear, with the seventh within the square behind the woman.

I can turn my head from side to side, and I can wiggle my arms and legs, but no matter how hard I strain, I cannot break the bands.

The journey is long and winding, up stairs and down, along endless corridors, through stone passages and modern drywalled hallways, until eventually, we come to a set of double doors like you'd find in a hospital between sections. The guards open the doors and hold them as the fae female guides me through. I crane and twist to the limits of the bonds to see where I am—a short hallway that could be in any hospital on the planet. Drop-tile ceiling with harsh white LED tube lighting, bare white walls, and squeaky tile floors. Another set of double doors.

An operating room—a medical table fitted with some kind of metal restraints and the stirrups of a gynecological exam table. A huge ring light on a long swivel arm. Monitors and a rat's nest of leads. A rolling cart of instruments.

I smell fae and a shifter. Their blood sings, calls to me. The taste I got wasn't enough, just a tease—I feel my body using the blood to heal the injuries from my attempt at the ward.

Panic bubbles up in me. I struggle, fight against the glamour bonds.

"Please, don't. Please. Please." I look around but see only faceless forms—wearing medical masks and eye protection, which reflect the light, obscuring their features.

"Don't do this. Please. Please!"

The ancient fae female guides me to the table, and the cushion of air vanishes so I settle onto the table with a thump.

The icy bands uncoil, but before I can so much as twitch a finger, they seize my wrists and ankles—the old woman is focused on me, hands lifted, fingers splayed as she manipulates the glamour so the bonds spread my legs apart, fitting my feet into the stirrups.

A fae Enforcer steps forward and fastens something cold around my ankle—a shackle. Another around my knee, forcing my thigh up and out. The other leg. My arms are bound similarly at my sides, so tightly I cannot move them. I fight and struggle and plead, but the metal is so thick even my vampiric strength cannot budge it.

"Please!" I scream. "Don't! DON'T !"

I delve within, abandoning the futile pleading. I have to fight.

I need my prana.

Desperation ignites, setting my muscles afire. I seize the marble of my magic and exert my will upon it— OPEN…OPEN…OPEN!

Voices mutter.

Something touches my sex, and I can't help screaming, thrashing within the bonds, to no avail.

"NO! NO!" I screech, again and again, until I feel my throat bleed.

Heat.

Pressure.

Movement.

The thing—I can't see what it is and refuse to look—is inside me.

Panic and desperation collide, merge, and become nuclear.

NO!

Am I screaming out loud? I can't tell. The marble of my power flares brighter, blinding my inner sight.

I bear down with my will, with my desperation.

I feel it—the moment of death.

I smell it.

I feel it die, the life in my womb.

I have been given nothing for the pain—it would not have worked anyway. So I feel everything they do to me, every second of the forced abortion. I hear a vicious snarl ripping the air—my own.

"HOLD HER!" A voice shouts.

"She's partitioned, sir," a voice snaps. "She can't do a damned thing."

"Well, she's trying."

"How long?"

"We have to prep her for sterilization, sir."

The pain overloads my system—too much pain. The ward, the bloodmate madness, the fury at all I've been through—and now grief, like a razor to my soul, shearing through the fabric of my self.

I hadn't even come to terms with being pregnant, really. I had too much else to deal with.

But now? Now that I've felt the life inside me die?

The grief consumes me. It's a fire, white-hot and devouring everything in sight.

The pain? It becomes grief.

Fury? Grief.

I hear movement, but I'm blinded by the flare of my prana-marble—it's brighter than the sun. Feel something touch my belly.

They're going to remove my uterus.

"We have to blood her, sir. Our instruments can't pierce her skin in this state."

I feel the rage like a living thing. Desperation. Panic. But mostly rage.

You will not.

You will fucking not.

The rage distills and becomes a concentrate. Sharp. Harder than any metal. It becomes a thing, an object I can grip, a weapon I can wield.

I hear a scream, guttural, animal, primal—coming from me.

I stab at the sun-bright heart of my prana with everything I have, screaming, slamming the force of my will and my hate and my grief into the surging, flaring light.

Something shatters.

Heat, then. And light. So much light—blinding is not the word. There is no word.

Not heat, either. Pure energy. Prana, compressed and distilled and fermented.

I explode.

I feel it burst out of me, and time seems to slow to a sluggish crawl. I remember Mom's words from the video, about how she vented. How you have to hold on, keeping a grip on your magic so it doesn't all vent out of you.

I wrap my mental hands around the core of my prana and cling to it, screaming. I cannot stop the explosion even as I feel the white-hot death surging out of me. This is not a vent burst. This is something else.

I feel death. Smell flesh scorch into ash.

I feel the loss within me, and even if I could stop this detonation, I wouldn't.

They killed my child. I wasn't ready to be a mother—I'm barely more than a child myself. But they had no right.

The white light dims gradually and I can see shapes, now, like afterimages from staring at the sun. Around me, a hollow sphere of stone, bare rock melted away by the force of my explosion.

I'm naked on the ground. There are no bodies. No gore. Just… nothing.

But I smell blood. Fae blood—and I'm so hungry. Bloodlust boils in my veins, and my body takes on a life of its own. I am a passenger in my body.

Faster than lightning I streak across the open space and smash through a door, sending it flying off its hinges and slicing through a trio of enforcers like a thrown axe. Torsos separate. A purple orb ripples toward me and I taste the viscous magic of it. I dodge and tumble forward, shuttling across the bare stone floor like a four-legged spider.

Blood fills my mouth—fae blood, sweet and light and potent, surging through my body. Power floods me.

Before I can taste the soul within the blood, I hurl the body away—it's not dead, whoever it is, and I care not. A flood of troops, fae, shifters, and vampires, stomp toward me.

I howl a challenge, a snarling roar that ripples my throat and tears at the air. Blood coats the walls and my hands and my mouth—prana boils within me. I slash my hand in horizontal cutting movement and a blade of concentrated air, cold at the edges and hot at the center, razors through the immortal warriors. Bodies topple in pieces.

I scramble past them, catching up a shifter's upper half and tearing at his throat, tasting his blood: cedar and smoke from a campfire.

I feel his power, his animal.

For a moment, I swear I could almost see his animal—a lion, shaggy mane and scarred pelt.

Then his blood is gone, and I hurl the corpse aside, or what remains of it. I'm not supposed to be able to drink shifter blood, I remember hearing. My higher mind is aware of this, in a distant, cerebral way. Materially, it's irrelevant. I drank shifter blood, and it's as good as any other.

I hear voices shouting orders, hear footsteps. I lighten myself; my fae side casts a glamour and now I'm crawling along the ceiling like a spider in the dark. Lights flash, a klaxon blares. Boots stomp and shadows shift, and a phalanx of warriors trots beneath me, wielding hastaxi and shocksticks and short swords and handguns. I wait till they're beneath me and then drop down among them.

Shouts echo and overlap. Guns bang, deafening in the small space. A sword slices along my arm, releasing a freshet of blood that only enrages my bloodlust-maddened vampire further.

I do not feel guilt for the limbs that are ripped away, heads torn free and sent rolling like bowling balls. They're all guilty. They all murdered the nascent life inside me.

They die.

I do not even try to rein in the slaughter.

In moments, they're all dead. I don't even know how many—arms and legs and torsos and heads are strewn everywhere like gory confetti. My mortal self would have vomited.

My vampire simply falls upon the nearest bleeding fae and drinks her fill.

I hear the footsteps and smell the life and blood. I whirl to see shielded Enforcers three abreast, shields interlocked, rounding the corner.

I hiss, and crouch, waiting. I feel the blood coating my arms, my legs, my breasts. There is no sexuality in this bloodlust frenzy, only killing rage, murderous fury.

A hastaxi orb belches toward me, and I dodge it easily…right into the line of fire as the security guards open fire with their handguns.

Impacts shock me, twisting me in place. Blood spurts and streams from my arms, my chest, my legs.

I feel nothing—only the all-consuming fury.

I scramble along the walls and the ceiling, moving so fast the world blurs, and then I'm among them. Shocks hit my system, but I shake it off, screaming, howling like a mad banshee, snarling like the wounded predator I am. I snatch a shockstick away and jab it into a throat, an eyeball. Break it over a skull. Rip a throat out with my bare fingers, collapse a chest with my foot. Gunshots echo and I feel the impacts but no pain. A hastaxi orb sizzles the air and nearly obliterates me, but I manage to avoid it yet again, watching as it devours fae and a shifter and walls and rock. A shield smashes into me, and I smell so much blood, taste it—I'm glutted with blood. Prana boils in me like magma pent up beneath a cap in a volcano—I taste it in the air. So much. I pull it into myself, yank it out of the air, tasting a tangle of souls, scenting a kaleidoscope of lives in half-instant glimpses.

I hear words and orders being shouted, but the words are meaningless.

Another shock—electric, and now I feel it. A gunshot. Series of gunshots.

I smell death. So much death.

It's a blur, then. Pain seeps in at the edges, a dull pulse, a constant aching throb eating at the edge of the raving bloodlust and savage murderous fury.

A massive impact sends me flying. I hit the floor and roll fifteen feet like a rag doll. Shouts surround me. I can't move.

Something colder than ice snaps around my wrists— no, no, no .

Mage cuffs.

I feel the parasitic magic seize me, and then red hazes my vision—blood. Pain replaces everything else. Another crushing blow rolls me, and then another. I can't see anything for the blood hazing my vision, only figures.

Feet kicking. Hands punching.

Swords slashing, stabbing.

Magic burns the air, bitter and acrid—the blows that finally stop me.

I pull at my prana, and the mage-cuff magic bites, savagely ripping at me, causing such unendurable agony that I nearly pass out.

Another smashing blow hurls me against a solid rock wall, which crumbles as I hit.

Darkness swallows me, then.