a leaf tossed about inside the storm: You are destruction. Become what you are. I heard him hiss and felt him leave me, and then there was nothing but the howling storm with me at its center.
THE STORM RAGED for an eternity and for no time at all. Adrift, lost, and alone, I weathered it because there was no other option. Lightening fractured the sky. The seas boiled. This wasn’t death. Death wouldn’t be tumultuous, of that I was certain. Closing my eyes, shutting down, I hid inside myself where the ravaging storm couldn’t penetrate.
I CURLED my toes in the white sand, ignoring the painful bite of heat. The sun beat down, lashing my skin, but it didn’t seem to matter. Not really. Out across the azure seas, the storm raged on. Lightning twitched and bucked through dark mushrooming clouds, but it was distant, someone else’s battle. Here, where I stood, all was calm. I tilted my head up and welcomed the heat.
“Where are we?” Akil asked.
I turned my head, expecting him to be behind me, but I was alone. He was close though. I knew it the same way I knew I wasn’t really standing on a beach. Shielding my eyes, I scanned the endless stretch of blazing white sand. Nothing. Not a blade of grass or a bird in the sky. The washed-out blue sky funneled to the silvery, flawless sand.
“This is a phantom place,” Akil said.
“I come here when I have nowhere else to go.” When Damien beat me to within an inch of my life, when the pain smothered me like the sunlight pouring over me now, when my humanity failed. “What’s happening?”
He sighed, and although I was alone, I felt his breath on my neck and his fingers in my hair. “I failed to protect you from yourself.”
“I don’t understand.” Lightning licked across the distant sky, but no thunder followed.
“I believed the infusion would be enough to prevent this. I did not want to believe what the collapse of the veil would do to you.”
Yes, I remembered. On the street, the veil fell, and the netherworld flooded through. The power burned me. So much power… “The power of two worlds.”
“Yes. Half bloods are conduits. Torn between worlds. Belonging to neither. When the veil fell, you were exposed. I cannot stop what you will become. Only half bloods have the strength to stop half-bloods.”
“Stefan?”
“I do not know his fate.”
“Will I survive?”
“Yes.”
I sensed he wanted to say more but was afraid to ask. “Is this surviving?”
“Yes.”
His whispers touched my cheek. I pressed my hand against my face, imagining it was his. “Val was right, wasn’t he? I’ve lost.”
“No, you are here. This place keeps you safe. This sanctuary protects the heart of you.”
I smiled. Ironic, that the place I’d created to escape my owner had become the place I’d use to cling onto my humanity. I could thank Damien for that.
“Do you want to go back?” Akil’s words lapped at my mind the way the silken waves lapped at the diamond shore.
The storm heaved out at sea. Black clouds frothed. Death stalked that storm. I feared that, perhaps, I was the storm. Akil chuckled, and I wrapped my arms around me, inexplicably cold despite the sun.
“You are destruction,” he said. “You are the storm. You witness the destruction of your demon. If you do not go back, everything Val foresaw will come to pass. It already happens. You have a choice. Embrace what you are, take ownership of your control, be all you can be. Or stay here, weather the storm, ride it out, and hope when it passes, there will be something worth returning to.”
The pain on the street had been too much. My humanity had peeled apart. I was here because I’d let go. My demon owned me now. “I’m not sure I’m strong enough to go back.”
“You will not know until you are tested.”
Fear chilled me to the bone. I knew I was capable of horrible things. I felt the lust for destruction, the desire for more. It was seductive, tempting, a madness. If I went back, there was an equal chance I’d embrace the dark, not the light.
* * *
DEMONS. Many. Everywhere. I tasted their acidic burn on my lips and breathed their potent scents up my nostrils and down my throat. Elements licked at my demon flesh, probing, seeking, exploring. I saw through demon eyes, absorbed through demon skin. I stood inside the storm as it raged through the back street. The