Page 47 of Feeding Beauty (The Lost Girls #5)

Then they're running toward the village, their guards forming a protective circle as they race to help with the rescue efforts. My mother turns back once, our eyes meeting across the smoke and distance. She mouths " I love you, " before disappearing into the chaos.

I stare after them for a heartbeat, until an agonized screech turns my attention up again.

Mal’s shape is breaking apart. Wings glitching between forms, scales splitting to show pulsing veins of raw, unstable magic. Her mouth opens wider than it should, spilling fire in crooked spirals. Her eyes burn black-red, unfocused, furious, blind with hate.

Talon tears into her again, claws raking down her spine, teeth sinking deep into her wing joint. Mal shrieks, and the sound vibrates through the stones beneath my feet.

She crashes to the ground.

Hard.

A crater blooms beneath her ruined body, dust and fire curling around her like smoke from a pyre. Her wings flap once, then fall still. Her chest heaves with breath she shouldn’t have left.

I break into a run toward the collision. My heart pretzels up into knots and sweat breaks out across my body. Is she dead? If she is, I’ll be stuck with this curse forever. The prospect turns me cold.

As I approach the crater, Mal’s head turns.

Her gaze slides past, fixing on the figures rushing up behind me.

My friends have come. A rush of air precedes Talon landing on the ground.

Scratches carve jagged paths across his chest, raw and bleeding, but his stance is iron.

Red rivulets drip from his hairline and well along his cheekbones.

The shine of raw wounds that make me ache to reach for him, but he’s still upright.

Mal’s lips curl, blood staining her teeth. “Little brother.”

Kai doesn’t move. He watches her with the kind of horror only family can feel. “Mal, what are you doing? You have to let this go. You can come home now.” Wetness rims his eyes.

Mal turns her disfigured, half-bloated face to the side and spits.

“I have no home. And I’ll make sure everyone knows my pain.

You and your friends will suffer, they will know the pain I’ve endured for years.

I won’t rest until you all bleed and break.

” She looks at Snow, Rap, Cinder, and Ariel, as if memorizing their faces.

Already envisioning how she’ll make them pay.

Kai’s throat works but no words come out.

Mal laughs. It’s a broken sound. Then she lunges—not at Kai. At Cinder.

“No!” Kai shouts.

On instinct the curse rips free, a beast unleashed that wraps Mal in pink light. It hits her, stopping her in place, but I realize my mistake too late.

“Aura, no!” Talon yells.

My power ricochets off her, slamming her back a step but slamming into me twice as hard. The curse turns on me with the full brunt of a deadly beast. The cavernous emptiness inside me tears wider, edges burning and infected, a wound that eats deeper with every breath.

It’s like at Poison Apple all over again, except worse. I’ve grown stronger, and my power strikes deeper.

My muscles lock, clench, tremble. My hunger gnashes at my insides. I…need. I need so bad.

“You think to hurt me?” Mal says with affronted disbelief.

“Why, you little slut, you are too hungry to do anything else but feed .” The word is sonorous, loaded with magic as she pointedly looks between me and Talon.

Then she laughs, a horrible sound that cements the pain and emptiness writhing inside me.

Her eyes glow red with malice and magic. Energy crackles around her, building fast, savage. She’s working up toward something catastrophic.

Talon’s hand flashes to Snow’s belt, pulling free one of her daggers with a practiced twist. In the same breath, the blade drives clean and hard through Mal’s chest.

Her laugh dies in a ragged choke.

Shock slams into me. It happened so fast. Too fast. My brain can’t catch up to what it means, but my knees buckle until I stagger.

My hope shrivels into a tiny black ball that decays as quickly as Mal’s life.

Blood bubbles from her lips as she looks down at the dagger buried in her heart before turning to Kai. “Little…brother…”

Kai doesn’t flinch, though his face crumples with anguish. “This has to end, Mal.” His voice breaks. “It ends with us.”

Cinder seizes his arm, anchoring him as his whole body trembles beneath her grip.

Mal’s hand spasms, clawing weakly at the air. Her gaze snags on me with all the hate and blame I’ve embodied for her since I was a baby.

Her body gives out, folding in on itself, hitting the earth with a dull, final thud. Her body crumpled like a goddamn afterthought. The grass around her drinks up her blood.

I stare.

My heart slams against my chest, but I can’t tell if it’s grief or fury or fear.

“Aura, I had to,” Talon says from somewhere far away. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

The words don’t land. They drift around me, muffled, as if the air itself has swallowed them up. My fingers are numb, my legs heavy, and yet my heart hammers so hard it makes my vision pulse white at the edges. I can’t move. Can’t breathe.

That was it. That was my chance. My tiny, shimmering thread of hope.

She said she could undo it.

She was going to . If she lived, she would have been imprisoned, and I would have found a way to bring her around.

Even if it took years, there was a chance.

A chance I’d be free. Talon and I could at least be together by choice, not because of this fucked up arrangement that forces me to be with everyone except him.

But now she’s dead.

The curse—the one she draped over my crib like a noose—is carved into my bones forever.

I’m never going to touch him without consequence. I’m never going to stop feeding. I’ll always have to fuck to survive. Always have to tiptoe the edge of murder just to stay sane.

Nothing’s changed.

My throat tightens, glass lodged there, cutting deeper with every breath. My hands curl into fists, nails biting crescent moons into my palms, trying to hold myself together with sheer force of will.

The ache in my chest spreads outward, crawling in sharp fractures through my ribs, my spine, down into my stomach where it twists into a knife’s edge.

Everything inside me pulls tight, raw, frayed.

I’m so tired. I’ve fought so hard to be someone new.

To be who I want to be, only to come home exactly as I left.

But I’ll survive this too. Because I have to.

I’ll feed again. I’ll keep going.

“You have to feed,” Talon says, closer than before.

He stands next to me. Like always. Steady, unshaken. Ready to hold me through the worst of it. Ready to catch me when I break.

Not literally of course.

The emptiness inside me yawns wider, a canyon with no bottom. Cramps wrench my stomach, and my jaw aches from holding back the scream clawing up my throat. Every inch of skin pulls taut, ready to rip under the pressure. I’m not sure if it’s the curse chewing away at me or my own certain fate.

“Aura, now,” he adds quietly but firmly.

A numbness spreads through me. I must be in shock.

I nod, knowing he’s right. I know this drill. The hunger already threatens to pull me to my knees. It’s in my teeth, my throat, my chest—gnawing, gnawing, gnawing. I can bear it. I’ve borne worse.

The ground trembles under my feet. Grass blades lift, shimmer.From Mal’s corpse, something red and wrong slithers out, a living scream.

Power.

Dark. Furious. Wild.

It snakes out of her open mouth, her chest, her eyes—streaks of red lightning flaring outward in veins against the green grass. Not aimless.

It’s coming for me.

It slams through my bones, splintering me from the inside out.