cynical look on his face worried me. His expression really appeared as if he'd lost a few screws and now he was just downright insane.
"I know you can't talk right now. Not without me, that is," he pointed out and lifted his fingers to show multiple black strings connected to the piercing black needles embedded in me. "So fucking tired of playing the same safe tunes. You should have died with Jax on the icy mountain but no. That waste of a doppelganger didn't do his job and who paid the price? ME!"
He spread his fingers out and I screamed because it felt like I was being ripped apart. He laughed in glee at my suffering before he raised his hands up and my feet forced me to rise even with the agonizing pain that would have crippled me if I had control.
My mind already struggled to stay awake, nausea and dizziness from the pain making me weak, but Elijah shook his head before I was in his face.
"No, no, no! You sleep, you fail." His words were like pins and needles in my brain, pricking and leaving me no choice but to follow his words. "You stay awake. The show isn't done yet. You have to cause damage. Lots of damage," he stated with pride before he laughed and moved back to spin around happily.
"I'm the winner. I caught her! To think I waited for those assholes to tell me what to do. I should be a ruler. King of the lands or, in this new life, the one who owns Witchling Academy. Not Bri or Jax. No, no, no. They may be the founders, but they won't succeed in graduating! They won't take what was always supposed to be mine!"
Everything made no sense to me as he laughed and cheered, skipping around while he moved his hands around like he was conducting, which only left me screaming in even more pain. It felt like my limbs were being torn, like my brain was being scraped with a rack, and it wasn't long until my voice gave out.
"This is brilliant! The best plan I've had! Your boyfriends are trapped in the little glass box and after they’ve watched your death, they'll soon join you! I'll kill all those you love, and anyone connected to you. That way, you won't come to this world again. No more reincarnations. No more dealing with everything being stolen from me. That double tried to take you away from your fate. To be your best friend so he could shield you from me. But I fixed that. I meddled in his life until it all came crashing down and he was bitter. He didn't know what I'd done. How badly I'd interfered. From the beginning of the semester I paved the path to this very moment and now we're here! Here!"
Allow the darkness. Let darkness prevail to light.
The chill of numbness was reaching my neck, and I feared the worst as I struggled to breathe. My eyes moved to the glass box, widening as I saw that the guys were now fighting off a bunch of people. Jax must have sensed me, his head turning my way as his orbs grew wider and suddenly bled to black, but I looked at him with desperate eyes.
Don't, Jax. Don't lose control. I'll be okay. We'll be okay.
Suddenly my vision was cloaked with the very darkness that fought to consume me, but this time, I felt like I was in a void.
No sight. No feeling. No scent.
I had to be moving. Or at least, I could imagine I wasn't frozen in stone, but how would I really know when I was a mummy of darkness?
I should have been consumed by fear, but I wasn't. There were no emotions to endure or experience. Nothing to look forward to in the brink of defeat.
Everything was just...nothing.
I waited and waited, and suddenly what may have been seconds felt like hours. Hours turning to years and years to centuries.
The thought of it all made me wonder if this was how it felt to be drifting in darkness. To lose track of time because there was nothing to foresee or to remember. Was hope even a thing when there was an objective you'd merely forgotten? How do you move forward when the past was unwritten, and the present was lost by the future?
Nothing seemed to make sense, but deep down, a single word echoed around me.
Freedom.
The single word had no meaning at