yet his confusion rolls over me like a wave as he stares at the bone.
You’ll know, I’d told him. If you ever have to use it, gods forbid, you’ll know how.
And with a sickening understanding, he does.
Bastian puts the end of the bloodied bone in his mouth, clenches his teeth down on it, and snaps it roughly in half, splintering the bone and nearly taking one of his own teeth with it.
Elias’s scream is followed by a series of snaps as his arm contorts so grotesquely that the bones protrude from his skin. He roars, dropping to his knees as Bastian spits the bone out, gagging on the blood that coats his lips and tongue.
The breaths Elias takes are through gritted teeth, seething and desperate. Lost to the heat and power of the magic, Bastian shakily draws another bone from his satchel, but buckles before he can use it, the soul magic raging against his body.
Elias’s hazy eyes turn white as milk as he jerks his uninjured hand out, and once again I’m being pulled against my will. He drags me across the jungle floor until his hand is around my neck, squeezing as he pins me down and stabs his blade into the meat of my thigh.
“Make another move,” he seethes between angry breaths, spitting with each word, “and I’ll kill her.”
I can’t conceal my anguish as Elias grinds the blade deeper into my thigh for emphasis, then yanks it back out. From either Bastian’s pain or my own, my vision blinks white. I feel every inch of the cold steel in my body.
Hands trembling, I clutch for Elias as though I’m falling.
And gods do I want to fall. To give in. But I didn’t put myself through this pain to have him not fall with me.
He stabs through my thigh again and roughly jerks the blade back out. But this time as he bends to do it, I grab a fistful of his hair with one hand, summon every inch of will left in me, and hoist myself up enough to punch the poison-soaked needles between my fingers deep into his throat.
Elias jerks back, bulging eyes going bloodshot as the cloudy haze fades from them. Pressing shaking fingers to his neck, he gags as they brush against the needle. A tiny, terrified sound slips through his lips. “What did you do to me?” The shakiness of his hands turns to a full tremble, though he tries hard to steady his hold on his blade. “What did you do?”
I laugh, half delirious as my fingers warm in the small puddle of blood forming around my open wound. It won’t take long for me to bleed out like this; I can only hope the poison is fast acting. “Poison’s a bitch, isn’t it?”
Fat beads of blood bubble at his neck and roll down the length of it. Squinting through the haze threatening to eat my vision, I smile when the blood isn’t red, but inky black.
Elias screams and clenches both hands around his dagger, and I know exactly what he plans to do with it. But before he can stab me again, a knife spears through his stomach. Bastian drops his hand from the pommel, panting. His eyes are beginning to roll up to his skull from aftershocks of the soul magic his body was not made to use. The poison eats through him as well, and the cloud over my vision blossoms. My own breath sharpens as my eyes mirror his, rolling back into my skull.
When he seizes, so do I.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I wake to the scent of sandalwood and the chatter of concerned whispers.
For a moment I contemplate keeping my eyes shut tight so that I might return to the heavy siren call of sleep. But when I recognize one of the low voices as Bastian’s, my attention can’t help but stir; his voice is more ragged than usual. The longer I listen to it, the more the puzzle pieces in my head snap together until I remember the poison. The sword. My thigh. And another person dead by my hand.
“Amora?” Nelly’s airy voice beckons. “Your Majesty, can you hear me? I think she’s waking up.” There’s a clatter of footsteps against the wood, and the air around me constricts. Slowly, although I wish I didn’t have to, I open my eyes and take in the circle of anxious faces staring back at me—Vataea, Shanty, Ferrick, Casem, Ilia, and Nelly. My brows furrow when I notice a face is