39. Scythe

Chapter 39

Scythe

Ten years ago

S moke and flames rise like demons from hell around me. My power burns like cold fire to keep my lungs breathing and my eyes seeing my parents tied to our plastic dining chairs in front of me. I'd kept my wolf mum unconscious out of respect for Savage. She was his mum, even if she was evil. But Dad doesn't deserve a quiet death. He deserves to feel every last flame from where he's tied up to the metal chair in front of me.

Something rises out of the black smoke. Something leathery and hunched. I stare at it in horror.

"No!" I cry before inhaling a lungful of ash.

Dad looks over his shoulder, cranes his neck to see where I'm looking. He coughs, and then I realise it's not a cough, but laughter.

"It's started, hasn't it?" he wheezes. "Your land psychosis has finally started. It's all downhill from here, son. All fucking downhill."

"You're wrong." I'm not looking at my dad but the gruesome thing bear-crawling the perimeter of the room, malicious black eyes fixed on me like a hunting predator. I stand my ground and meet it eye to eye.

"I might be the one to die today," my dad rasps, "but the road you're taking now is just a longer, more painful version. A slow death." Dad coughs and laughs again. "It'll be slow, and it ends with you, and a rope around your throat."

" No ." But his words are coals inside the base of me. Coals that smoulder and burn like this house.

"I'm going to watch you die," I say firmly despite the pain lashing down my throat, burning my eyes, my skin. It turns my velvet voice into something harsher. Scarier. "And I'm going to enjoy it."

The house groans, a dying man's final protest to the darkness. Something collapses in my room, probably my bookshelf.

He would never hurt my mother or Savage again. He would never hurt me again.

I wait until my father's screams begin and the flames light up his body like a dying star. This is fate, not dealt by the Wild Goddess, but by me . I turn my back on his burning corpse and make my way out of the house, towards my baby brother. Towards our future.

But that demon also follows me out, crawling after me with strange, ugly movements. I feel his gaze on me. I feel his hunger for darkness. For chaos.

Later that night, in the bathroom of the ramshackle motel I purchased for the night with my saved money, Savage and I stare at the new celestial marks on our necks. A skull and five beams of light that glow with the ancient power of stars lightyears away.

"Don't mark his perfect skin," my father used to say. "No bruises. No fingernails."

This…mating mark, is the first thing that has been allowed to mar my skin. It was granted to me by the Wild Goddess and is a message from her.

I could claim myself. I have that power now.

"Tomorrow, we buy a tattoo gun," I tell my brother. "And you'll learn how to use it."

His face lights up. "I can do that! But…" His adorable face turns sheepish. "Do we have the money?"

I gaze into the distance as the phone numbers of all my father's contacts run in a list in my head. Both the ones marked for death, and the ones marked for life. "Yes. And we'll never run out again. I have big plans, Sav, and he never realised it, but Dad showed me exactly what to do."

"And when we find our regina, she'll help us too!" Savage rubs his hands eagerly before leaping out of the bathroom with a dramatic pirouette. I'd read about the seven stages of grief and this seems on track.

But I'm not worried about Savage grieving his mother. Once he knew the horrible truth, he'd marked her as an enemy for life. I am worried about the mark on my neck and the other things it means. My father had been rex to a marine beast, and they had been doomed from the very beginning.

If what I know is correct, it's going to be a slow, torturous ride to the end for me. That is unavoidable, and I accept that. But there is a lot I'm going to do before I meet my end, and I'm going to take as many people as possible with me to hell.