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“Melody!” Drake shouts.

{{Shield yourself!}} Carver begs.

It’s too late, though.

Electricity rattles my bones as the lightning drives fully through my body. My back slams into the wooden floor, and the weight of Coraline crashing down on me steals my next breath. The momentum of her fall drives the dagger fully into her heart.

She bursts into dust on top of me, gritty ash coating my skin, but that’s the least of my concerns.

Lightning strikes me again.

My blood warms.

Heats.

Burns.

The scars on my back scream in protest. It feels as though I’m on fire. I pinch my eyes shut, knowing this pain all too well. This time, Melody might actually kill me, but something rises inside me in defiance.

Rage, sorrow, fucking fury.

Hasn’t it been enough? The loss, the fucking torture, the rape, the fights, the loneliness.

Now this?

Haven’t you taken enough, Vaeloria? The thought screams through my mind as zaps of electric power infiltrate my body, much denser than the first time I was struck.

That yawning void where my magic should be awakens, slowly rising, like a beast unfurling from hibernation. Something pulls taut in my chest, like a band stretched tight, though I don’t know over what. It doesn’t matter, because life stirs within the depths of the void inside me that’s always been empty.

{Finally,} it hisses.

The voice. The thing inside me, it’s ravenous. Clawing at my insides, begging to be unleashed. If only I knew how to let it out, if only I⁠—

I gasp as something hot and furious shoots up from my core, rushing to the surface like a bull preparing to ram into its enemy. It’s so powerful it stops my heart. I know, suspended in that moment of who I am and who I will be, that it could eat me alive.

Devour me whole.

I don’t know what it is or how to stop it.

I don’t know if I want to.

A metallic taste floods my mouth.

Staggering to my feet, coated in the remnants of Coraline’s ash, I find my footing, even as Melody’s magic scalds my skin.

Goddess, it hurts.

The thing inside me charges, colliding with the barrier between it and me, breaking through the surface with a ragged gasp. My back arches, head falling back, and a scream tears from somewhere deep inside me. The presence, warm and buzzing, pours over my body like a second skin—no, that’s not right. It’s like my skin finally fits, like it and I were meant to be one in the same all along.

One moment, Melody’s electricity is having its way with me, and the next, the thing seizes it, and all at once the pain dissipates, the zaps and stings, the angry heat of the stormcraft, it’s all contained in a fist.

Captured by the thing living within me.

The voice releases a pleased sigh, but it escapes my lips.

The fist unclenches, but it’s my palm the lightning spins and dances upon.

“What the fuck?” Melody snarls, hurling another strike at me.