Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 116263 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116263 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
“I hate that for you.”
I could feel her warring, the way she rocked on the mattress and began to hug her knees to her chest.
“You can tell me, if you want.” My spirit stretched toward hers, and I was consumed again with the need to touch her.
I’d never experienced it before.
Nothing like it.
This need that burned like a fire inside me.
Pulling me toward her like a gravity I couldn’t resist.
Her mouth pinched at the side, and her words began to rush, shallower and shallower as they gushed from where she’d kept them hidden. “I didn’t even want to have sex with him, but he totally begged me. He said he loved me and couldn’t live without me. I believed him, Aria. I was such an idiot to believe him.”
A sob hitched in her throat, and she looked away, as if she couldn’t stand to let me see her pain. “He told his friends I was terrible. He even posted it on his Snapchat story with a video of me walking away from his house that night with the caption ‘Who not to fuck.’”
She sucked in a breath. “The next day, everyone kept saying all these awful things to me every time they passed me in the halls. Offering to teach me since I had no idea what I was doing. That they’d be happy to pass me around since Tyler was done with me. Everyone was laughing, whispering behind my back. Even my friends.”
Tears glistened in her eyes when she glanced back, and she chewed at the edge of her thumbnail while she sat there trembling. “I finally went to his house and confronted him. He laughed like I was stupid and denied ever telling me that he loved me. He said I had made it up. Told me I was pathetic. Told me that I made him sick.”
Tears streaked down her cheeks. She frantically wiped at them, her tone going hoarse when she began to whisper, “I didn’t want to feel that way anymore, you know? So I went into my mom’s medicine cabinet, and I took a bottle of her sleeping pills. I swallowed all of them with a bottle of vodka. My mom found me on the bathroom floor. I just kept thinking that maybe it would be better if . . .”
She trailed off, leaving the thought unsaid but heard.
In an instant, I was on my knees at the side of her bed, unable to stop myself.
The impulse was too great.
Overpowering.
I took her face in my hands. The air punched from my lungs when the familiar cold streaked through my veins, though the spot where I touched her burned.
A chill raced down my spine, and darkness flashed at the edges of my sight.
A barren plane. Vapors and mist. Shadows rose and lifted and swirled through the wiry elms. The night thick, the sky low. Evil prowled across the lifeless ground.
Fear thundered my heart into mayhem, and confusion rushed through my brain.
What is happening? What is happening?
My eyes squeezed closed as I fought against the terror of the unknown, and my hands were shaking so violently I was barely able to hold on to her.
Jenny trembled beneath me just as savagely.
At the touch, an onslaught of images invaded my mind.
An insecure little girl sitting alone beneath a window in an empty room, her blond hair in pigtails, a doll clutched to her chest.
Parents who were too busy to notice.
The same loneliness I’d felt radiating from her earlier poured from her spirit, and a voice that was not her own whispered in her ear, “You’re pathetic. Worthless. You’ll always be alone. No one will ever love you.”
It grew louder, more menacing.
“You little slut. Bitch. Whore. You’re disgusting, begging for attention. Pathetic. How could you ever show your face again?”
Jenny’s eyes were wide and confused, though she didn’t try to break free of my hold.
Awareness swept through my consciousness. The instinctual call to bind the wickedness the way I did in Faydor.
Somewhere inside me, I knew it was impossible. I couldn’t bind a Kruen while awake—or even hear it, for that matter.
But I did.
I heard it just as distinctly as if I were tracking it across Faydor.
I saw it then.
A shadow that took shape deep in the recesses of her mind.
A Kruen.
God, how was this happening? Panic battered against the instinct that compelled me to bind.
I shoved the panic down and fought for her, let the energy gather inside me until it was a vibrating orb, though rather than projecting it with my mind the way I did in Faydor, I pushed it out through my hands.
I fought with all of me to separate the black spirit from hers.
The Kruen reared and flailed in an attempt to deflect my attack.
I missed the first time, and energy crackled, and I focused harder, digging around inside myself to find the strength. To fight harder. I reached out with all the strength I possessed to cast out the light within me.