Page 199 of The Primal of Blood and Bone (Blood and Ash #6)

The flesh peeled away from my father’s face, his throat. His armor shattered as Delano slipped from his arms, crumpling to the floor. Exposed muscle ripped and splintered. His spine snapped. Bone crunched and turned to ash.

“I promised both of you,” Kolis hissed. “That I would kill everyone you held dear in front of you.”

Valyn Da’Neer didn’t make a sound as he held my gaze.

He didn’t scream.

He didn’t groan.

My flesh went taut. My insides cold.

The last thing he did was move his eyes from mine to Kolis. The last words he spoke sounded wet and broken. “He will kill you.”

Kolis laughed.

He laughed as my father fell beside Delano in an unrecognizable heap of blood and bone.

A buzz hit my blood, and the corners of my vision darkened. The air around me charged as I stared at my father. He was gone. His last words a threat.

Delano was also gone. My last words spoken to him a taunt.

Hisa and countless others were gone .

I couldn’t sense Poppy.

And I knew they would all still breathe if I had not remained here.

Something dark and needy, hungry , unraveled inside me.

“What is it about this bloodline that’s so stupidly arrogant?” Kolis questioned, his voice strengthening and becoming less garbled. “I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.”

“What,” I said, the air chilling around me until I could see my breath, “did you do to her?”

“What did I do to your precious Poppy?” His laugh crawled over my prickling skin. “Your pretty flower?”

The distaste in his tone, the loathing… I twitched.

“She thought she could kill me.” Kolis’s laugh turned my stomach. “That I would still be in love with her.”

My fingers spasmed.

“A thousand years entombed is a long time,” he growled. “I was conscious for quite a bit of it. Had a lot of time to think. Had even more for whatever I felt for that bitch to wither and die.”

What had I said? Kolis had not behaved like a man in love when he controlled Poppy. Energy ramped up inside me. No one had listened to me. And I’d been right. Everyone, including the true Primal of Life, had been wrong.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I drained her—”

I threw my hand out as I turned to him. Dark-gray-and-crimson-streaked eather erupted from my palm. The bolt of essence flew across the chamber.

There was a flicker of surprise as Kolis waved his arm. The bolt collapsed an inch from his chest. “Parlor tricks,” he laughed. “Adorable.”

I fully turned.

His eyes flared with crimson, but it was a dull pulse.

The essence swelled in me. In my mind, I saw what could not be seen by those with the essence of life in them.

I saw marks of death.

The torn arteries that still hadn’t healed.

The fluttering essence weakened by the use of eather.

The sluggish beat of his heart and the inch-long wound there, where I knew Poppy had planted the Ancient bone.

She had wounded him deeply. Maybe even Attes.

Perhaps even whoever had intervened and fell, causing the ground to tremble.

At the moment, the only thing that mattered was what that meant.

“You’re weak,” I said. “I can sense it.” My head cocked. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

“I see the slut gave you some powers—”

I shot across the Hall. Kolis started to rise, mist seeping out of him. I prowled forward, the bodies sliding out of the way as the eather slipping through my veins took hold. My flesh hardened as Primal mist spilled out of me, thicker and moving faster than what surrounded him.

Kolis’s eyes narrowed. “What the fuck?”

I launched into the air and through the stinging, churning mist. It tore at my skin and burned, but the pain didn’t stop me as my nails sharpened and strengthened. It couldn’t stop me.

He didn’t have the power to do so.

Not right now.

Crashing into Kolis, I thrust my hand into his ruined stomach and slammed him into the wall. He grunted as the impact cracked the gold-veined marble.

Kolis stared at where my hand was now buried below his sternum and then lifted his gaze to mine.

“My Queen ,” I spoke, my voice filling with shadows and smoke, “gave me more than just parlor tricks.”

Tearing out ropey tissue, I gripped a fistful of his hair and pulled him back from the wall. My head snapped down, lips peeling back. I sank my fangs deep into his throat and didn’t release them.

Pain erupted in my chest as he slammed his fist through it. Skin tore. Muscles snapped. Bones broke. I held on as I drank, pushing downward.

We hit the floor, cracking the stone. Still, I held on, drinking fast and hard, easing the burn of pain as my gaze landed on what had become of my father. My vision changed, contracting and lengthening until I only saw him through a thin slit.

The rage turned to an icy fire in my veins. Dual pain ripped through my back, right at my shoulder blades. This wasn’t Kolis. No, it was my bones—vertebrae expanding and shifting, breaking through my skin, unfurling.

Tearing through the flesh of Kolis’s throat, I jerked my head back and rose, lifting him from the floor.

Kolis’s brows lowered, and his eyes narrowed. “What the…?” His gaze shifted behind me, and his expression smoothed out, his lips parting. “Impossible.”

My vision rapidly expanded and returned to normal as I spat a mouthful of blood into his face. “What did you do to her?”

I twisted, throwing Kolis with a shout of rage. His body smacked into the floor, shattering several tiles.

He hit the ground and rolled. I didn’t give him a chance to recover. I was on him instantly, grabbing him.

“What did you do to her?” I shouted as I dragged him from the floor, twisted at the waist, and tossed him between the pillars and out the window, shattering the glass.

Blood poured down my chest, mine and his, as I prowled forward. My feet left the floor as I shadowstepped outside.

Sunlight broke through the remaining clouds, and I saw a shadow on the ground before me.

Twin arcs that swept high as another quake ripped through the ground.

Something exploded, drawing my gaze. Beyond the Rise, a smoke plume rose from the city as the sound of distant screams were swept away in the roar of the wind.

I scanned the bloodstained ground, and the bodies littered about.

So many. Most mortals—servants who had done as…

Kolis wasn’t here.

The eather rose—

A shock of pale-blond hair matted in crimson stopped me. Arms and legs broken into unnatural angles.

It wasn’t Delano.

But…

My chest seized. I turned sharply, willing myself back to the Great Hall, returning to them.

Hisa and Lizeth.

Delano and my father.

Kieran.

I staggered, then my legs gave out. My knees hit the ground.

Delano was gone.

So was Hisa.

Lizeth.

My father.

My fucking father.

None of this was supposed to happen. My mind raced back over the years. I was supposed to free my brother. I was supposed to take the Maiden. I was supposed to end the Blood Crown. Poppy wasn’t supposed to stop me from following her—from preventing this.

None of this was supposed to happen.

My trembling hands balled into fists as I pressed them against my bloody chest. My heart. I couldn’t feel it beating. I hadn’t felt it since Kolis arrived in the Great Hall.

Poppy .

She was hurt. She had to be.

I had to get to her.

I tried to focus on her, but like before, I couldn’t find her mark.

I couldn’t—

I jerked my left hand from my chest and opened it. Blood covered my palm. Heart thumping, I wiped at it with my other hand, over and over—

Bone.

All I saw was flesh fading into silver bone. I couldn’t see the imprint. I couldn’t feel her.

The roar of rage and eather built and built as the crimson-streaked mist poured out of me and spilled into the air.

I couldn’t sense Poppy.

My head kicked back, and a scream tore through me. The sound burst forth, turning into pure ruin the moment it hit the air. I slammed my fists into the stone.

Marble and gold exploded as patches of my flesh faded along my arms, replaced by the gleam of bone.

Inky black vines burst from the holes beneath my hands, slipping past my fists and rapidly spreading across the bloody floor. Thinner branches broke off, slipping over the bodies as I turned my head to Kieran.

With another shout that shook the walls and shattered what glass remained, I sent him from the Great Hall.

The doors slammed shut, leaving me alone with them .

The vines unfurled across the floor, gently wrapping them, moving over the others as a black bird landed on the floor before me.

Then another and another. Ravens poured in through the dome as the vines climbed the walls, overlapping one another as they stretched over the windows and sealed the doors.

Pain—soul-deep pain—entrenched itself deep inside me, and there was this snapping motion. A coming undone as…something shifted inside me. All the desperation and sorrow carved ruin into my bones. Panic and rage collapsed into ashes of wrath.

I tipped forward, unused muscles along my shoulder blades twitching as wings slammed down on either side of me—wings with silver feathers tinged in dark gray and threaded with crimson.

The fluttering of smaller wings came, flapping wildly as snow began to fall. I suddenly understood Aydun’s words about our union because something was rising from within me. It was a thing —a powerful thing that had always been there. Waiting. Watching. Caged. And it was cold. Unending.

And it tasted of ruin and wrath.

It promised death and destruction. And I would unleash it, from the west to the east, laying waste to all in between.