I lick my cracked lips, and then my eyes flutter shut.
With my vision snuffed out like a candle, the sounds around me are more pronounced. I hear every heartbeat, every breath, every crackle of the fireplace and lanterns. Past that, I hear it when Medley hisses out a quiet signal of pain, and the sound joins the clinking of Toreon’s chains.
“Good,” he says quietly, and I focus on his voice, trying to drown out the rest of the noises around me. “Now, if you’re what he thinks you are, then you can do this. And Sable, so you know, he’s never wrong.” That declaration makes chills scatter over my skin like insects fleeing from an overturned log.
“You’re an Annulus. Scythes are bound to your kind. All you have to do is let it know you have need of it, and it will come.”
I inwardly roll my eyes, because I doubt it’s quite that easy.
“Don’t fight your instincts, Sable,” Toreon chastises, like he could hear my inner doubts. “Call to it. You can do this.”
I can do this, I echo in my mind, trying to force confidence in me and hoping that will be enough to jumpstart whatever this Annulus thing means.
Keeping my eyes closed, I focus as hard as I can, but as the seconds tick by, a feather falling for each one, my frustration and anger rises. “It’s not working!” I hiss.
A voice tsks. “Such a terrible temper you have,” he says, and my anger spikes even more at the voice’s intrusion.
“Get out of my head!” I order, but unfortunately, I do it out loud.
“What?” Toreon questions, but I barely hear him over the other voice.
The presence pauses. “You’re with another male? Is this some kind of game to you, Snarls? Get me worked up and worried and, when that doesn’t pan out, go for jealousy?”
“Go away!” I snap, and this time, I make sure to keep the argument in my head.
“We’ve been over this. You’re calling to me. It’s you who needs to go away.”
“I’m trying to call my scythe, and you’re distracting me.”
He pauses. “A scythe?”
“Yes!”
Another pause. “And what will you do with this scythe?”
“Well, right now, I wish I had it so I could swing it at your damn head! Then I’d use it to pummel every stone around me and follow that up by decapitating a psychotic demon.”
Something hard and heavy smacks against my right palm, and my eyes fly open with a surprised yelp, only to land on the very real, very long scythe that has now appeared in my hand.
Holy crap, it worked.
8
My eyes trail up the wooden staff of my scythe, all the way to the curved silver blade at the top. It’s ridiculously sharp and heavier than I would’ve thought, though, for some strange reason, it feels familiar in my grip.
I open my mouth in shock, but a noise behind me makes me whirl around, and I see Medley’s eyes changing from black to gray, with an empty spot on the bottom of her left wing where a good chunk of feathers are now missing.
“You did it,” she drawls, and then she promptly slumps against the floor, her fall only cushioned by her plush wings as she rolls into unconsciousness.
“Shoot,” I exclaim, hurrying over to the bars. “Medley?” I call, but she doesn’t respond. The steady rise and fall of her chest lets me know that she’s okay, and I can only guess that with the end of the compulsion and her own darkness surging forward, her mind may have crashed.
A slow clap behind me makes me turn to look at Toreon. “Well done, Annulus,” he says in a partially mocking tone that rubs me the wrong way.
“I don’t know what Annulus even means, but thanks for your help,” I say tersely, and then I walk to the end of my cage.
Without hesitation, I pull back the scythe like a baseball bat and then hit it against the bars as hard as I can. My entire body is jarred like one of those cartoons where the animal runs into a brick wall. A flare of gray light electrifies at the spot of the cage where I hit, and I’m forced to squeeze my eyes shut from the intense glare.
When the light dies away and my brain stops rattling in my skull, I peek through slitted lids and see that the cage...is completely untouched. No damage whatsoever, not even a nick in the metal bars.