Page 146

It’s not even a choice. Her power forces my body to obey. I bend forward at the waist, my arms stretching out in front of me. I press my palms into the cold concrete.

“Now crawl over and kiss my feet.”

This is a nightmare,I think as I move across the ground to her.

Finally I understand her motives for healing me. If I were still injured, I would be incapable of doing these degrading acts. Lia obviously knows there’s more than one way to hurt someone.

I press a kiss to the top of her foot, every fiber of me rejecting this moment. Lia yanks her leg back, out of my reach, and kicks my face, sending me sprawling backward.

I taste blood in my mouth as my head cracks against the concrete.

“Thank me for hurting you.”

I can hear the glee in her voice. This evil motherfucker.

“Thank you for hurting me.” The words are pried from my throat.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Lia smile, her eyes narrowed. “Get up.”

My legs position themselves under me, and I rise.

“That’s better,” she says, assessing me.

I try to lunge at her, but that same insidious magic moves through me, seizing up my muscles before I can do more than lean forward. She doesn’t even notice.

She glances to the corner of the room, where the clay monster waits in the shadows.

“Creature, come here.”

I tense as I watch it approach. On its forehead, that same archaic word I saw the night of the spell circle. I couldn’t remember it’s name or meaning then, because I thought it was Aramaic. But it’s not. There’s another language that shares the same alphabet as Aramaic—Hebrew.

The Hebrew word I’m looking at isemet.

Truth.

It was one of a few hundred words I learned of Hebrew before my first life was cut short. The sight of it now pricks my skin. This is ancient magic at play.

When the creature gets to her, Lia reaches out and touches its cheek tenderly. “Though I have many bonds,” she says, “I don’t have a familiar. My creature here is the closest thing that comes to one.”

It’s literally a glorified pot.

She continues to creepily stroke its skin. “Selene, you are not to defend yourself against it.”

I’m not to—what? My gaze sharpens, moving between the two figures.

“Creature, hurt her.”

The fuck?

The massive monster strides toward me, and I stumble back, calling on my magic.

To my shock, it comes to me. But the moment I try to direct it at the monster, my magic halts, bound by Lia’s command.

Shit.

The creature grabs me by the throat and throws me across the room. I crash into a stack of cardboard boxes shoved near one of the walls, and I grunt at the impact, the boxes rattling as whatever’s inside them is shaken.

I can’t defend myself, I think as I scramble off the boxes as the monster heads toward me once more. That was the command. But it’s not immutable. There arealwaysworkarounds. I should know—I spent years figuring out my own when it came to functioning with memory loss.