Page 10 of Sonnets and Serpents (Casters and Crowns #2)

There was nothing more humiliating than a rage transformation. Others couldn’t understand the complete loss of control. The loss of his hold on everything in life. On himself.

Eliza shrieked, a wordless cry of sheer panic.

Silas drew a little satisfaction from the way she looked ready to faint, but there wasn’t room for much beyond the shame.

As a gray adder, he twisted in angry circles on the ground, waiting for his emotion to simmer down enough for him to reclaim control.

The world was immense, seen from the floor with everything looming.

Even the princess couldn’t be called a mouse from this vantage point, though she certainly cowered like one.

“Help!” Eliza screamed, forgoing any attempt at library etiquette. Her voice was muffled in his senses, more vibration than clear speech, but she screeched loud enough to vibrate every letter against his scales. “Help!”

For a moment, Silas entertained the idea of lunging at her. He was more than two and a half feet long, half her height, and he had more speed than the average viper. He could have sent her fleeing right across the ocean.

But then he would never know what she’d chained around his wrist.

Several librarians rushed over just as Silas managed enough control to turn human again. He dragged in labored breaths, his chest heavy, and he remained kneeling on the ground, one hand clutching the shelf next to him, simply trying to stay person rather than snake.

While, in his mind, he relived the worst day of his life.

It wasn’t a university library; it was his father’s study. Shelves of books for display, not for use, owned by a man who wanted to appear knowledgeable yet never listened to a voice besides his own.

Lord Bennett was praising the king, praising the court, lifting Loegria up as a perfect paradise. It was one of his favorite recitations, and Silas had heard it a million times. Every other time, he’d gritted his teeth and swallowed his counterarguments.

But that day, he snapped.

Maybe it was having Gill there. Silas had grown numb to hearing his father praise the country and laws that would have killed him for being an Affiliate, but hearing praise for the branding of his best friend was too much.

When they were at school and people came after Gill for being a Caster, Silas always stepped in the middle.

Maybe he was finally brave enough to do that at home.

Reasons didn’t matter. What mattered was that he argued with his father, and he lost his temper. He lost his control.

As a snake, the world not only loomed large but also bled its color. Silas’s viper eyes couldn’t perceive warm tones the way his human eyes could, washing the world in melancholy shades of gray, green, and blue. At times, that was enchanting—an entirely new view of the familiar.

But he would always remember the view of his father through snake’s eyes.

All warmth had drained from his skin, leaving behind a sickly green pallor.

The black of his hair was too gray, blending with the streaks creeping across his temples and beard, aging him in a single moment.

His dark eyes, narrowed on Silas, had lost their depth. They were flat, emotionless.

The surreal image lingered even as Silas returned to human form.

The most lingering part was realizing that it wasn’t a lack of color draining the warmth from his father’s eyes. It was an inward decision, made in a bare moment without entertaining other options.

Lord Bennett chose to believe all his country’s superstitions about shapeshifters.

He drew his sword.

And when he slashed it toward Silas’s throat, Silas couldn’t say what his father’s vision looked like in terms of warmth and colors, but whatever he saw, it wasn’t his son.

The university library filtered through Silas’s waking nightmare, prompted by Tulip’s approach.

The python slithered against his leg, pausing to lift her head and flick her tongue, as if telling him to snap out of it.

Silas reached out an unsteady hand, brushing Tulip’s patterned brown scales, and within him, his magic slowly settled.

He pressed his other hand to the long, thin scar below his jaw.

The only reason he was still alive was because Gill had stepped in. His best friend had used magic to stop Silas’s bleeding and to make Lord Bennett forget seeing the transformation. But even without the memory, nothing between Silas and his father had ever been the same.

Since that day, he’d never been his father’s son.

“He—he’s a sh—he’s a shapeshifter!” Eliza cried, barely choking out words past her obvious terror. She pointed at Silas in condemnation.

Silas glared up at a spoiled princess.

The three librarians looked helplessly between the two of them. Seeing no real emergency, the others retreated, leaving only the one who spoke broken Loegrian—although he did not address Eliza. He addressed Silas in Pravish.

“Mr. Bennett, is this girl harassing you? Did she harm you?”

Despite everything, Silas almost managed a smile, the librarian’s concern helping him regain his composure.

“I’m fine,” he said in Pravish.

He belonged to campus and was such a frequent visitor at the library, most of the workers knew him by name. Eliza was the stranger.

“He’s an animal!” Eliza gasped out again, her skin deathly pale.

“Please calm,” the librarian said in accented Loegrian.

“Affiliate,” Silas corrected, finally standing.

He narrowed his eyes on the princess. “Animal Affiliate. Not animal. Not shapeshifter. But I don’t suppose there’s any purpose in educating you on proper terms when you’re the most selfish, unmannered creature I’ve ever encountered. Now tell me what you’ve done to me.”

Eliza tried to run, but she hit some kind of unseen barrier.

An invisible cord yanked her back a step at the same time it pulled on Silas’s arm.

In horror, she stared down at her own bracelet, identical to Silas’s.

Apparently she’d purchased some kind of Cast in an attempt to control him, tangling with magic she didn’t understand.

Silas regarded her coldly. “You were so eager to seek me out, Highness. To gloat. To attack. Now you realize being royalty doesn’t make you the biggest threat in the room.

” He tilted his head, and with his emotions still churning, a faint scale pattern rippled across his skin, evident in the way his cheeks itched.

“What’s the matter? Are you afraid I’ll bite? ”

Through the worst misunderstanding imaginable, Eliza had bound herself to a living deception, to a creature who wasn’t even human. Just a snake in human clothing.

She grabbed the librarian’s arm. “Help me, please!”

But the librarian only gave her a disapproving frown.

Then he said something about campus rules and Animal Affiliates while Silas just watched with cold eyes.

Cold, dark eyes. Eliza remembered how they’d turned solid red with just a slit for a pupil.

She’d thought he was selfish and uncaring, but it was so much worse.

He was a monster.

Eliza’s limbs shook, and she tried to lock her knees, tried to put on a brave face when she didn’t feel it because she knew the adage about fear and animals. The python finally slithered away, but that gave no comfort, because the remaining snake was far, far worse.

Silas reassured the librarian, the two of them exchanging quick, casual words in Pravish, and with a final glance, the other man moved off.

Leaving Eliza at the mercy of a demon.

She thought of torches in the dark, of a man transforming into an eagle and tearing through innocent people with deadly talons. She thought of his gleeful, unhinged grin.

“Will you kill me?” The question squeaked from her without permission, and her voice broke. She gripped a bookshelf to remain standing.

If anything, Silas looked even angrier. For an instant, his eyes flashed red again, like a window catching a glaze from the setting sun.

“No, Your Highness,” he said. “I’m an academic, not a rampant murderer.”

Did he really believe that? Maybe he was a skillful liar, or maybe the creature side of him wasn’t even in his control.

Maybe it overtook his consciousness like a nightmare, wreaking havoc he didn’t remember come morning.

Was that how shapeshifters managed to stay hidden so well? Hiding even from themselves?

Eliza knew something about losing control, and she could feel herself on the precipice of that now, hanging above a steep drop she wouldn’t know how to survive—because worse than any reckless action or angry outburst was the feeling of drowning.

The feeling she’d kept at bay thus far by focusing on her search for Henry.

The storm inside rumbled with growing thunder.

Don’t fall, she begged silently.

She wished she’d never met magic of any kind, shapeshifter or Caster. She wished she’d never been cursed. She wished she could be back in that ballroom on her seventeenth birthday, cradled in Henry’s arms.

Though it betrayed her desperation, she pried at the bracelet with everything she had, cutting bloodless lines into her fingers, breaking a nail. But the band around her wrist did not budge.

All she’d managed to accomplish was binding herself to a shapeshifter, offering herself up as prey to be consumed at any time. Henry was still lost. She’d chased her whims and wound up here. Useless. Foolish.

She’d failed.

Thinking the words was like a blow to her spine, cracking what remained of her foundation. Her knees hit the polished library floor.

Curling against a shelf, she buried her face in her arms in a poor attempt to hide, and her shoulders shook as she tried and failed to suppress everything spilling from inside.

The shapeshifter might kill her now, not because she was easy prey but just to silence her.

She didn’t care. There was nothing left to care about.