What Lies Between ✔

Moths to a Flame

Warning: Graphic and potentially disturbing violence and gore in this chapter

14

Hydra

The passed hours had been filled with failure.

I was beginning to believe that luck was not in my favor.

Fighting to clear my foggy vision, I groaned painfully. I could feel an uncomfortable wetness around my torso. I tried to roll my weighty body over to see what it was, but a flash of burning pain shot through my side, ceasing my movement. I gasped, clutching the painful area and gritting my teeth against the scorch of the movement.

With the pain came memory. I was in such a predicament because of the Seraphim boy.

I gave a feral snarl. Just where the hell had that dagger come from? This wound he had granted me would take weeks upon weeks to fully heal and leave me with an ugly, jagged scar, and that was only if I could survive the infection. It would take a good amount of my energy to heal the unbearable injury. Every ounce I had was going into fighting the purity of the silver that was keeping my flesh ripped and bleeding. I was losing all of it – all my power.

Having now had my vision cleared from the arrival of pain, I did my best to examine my surroundings from the ground where I laid curled into a pathetic looking ball on my side. I looked up. White stone wall... barred window looking out into a strange, colorless world... cobwebs in the corners of the walls. Then I looked down to inspect the wetness beneath me.

My blood.

A pool of slowly expanding red was inching out away from me, creating little rivers in the crevices of the stone-tiled floor. I was losing every last bit of the life energy I had been building up. The life energy I had to obtain by actually drinking from vile human veins.

"I'll fucking annihilate him!" I wailed, imagining my fists punching Thorne Seraphim's face over and over again until his skull had sunken in to become a bloody shell. My voice echoed off the walls as if to mock me.

I wanted to end him, but the truth – the awful, grisly truth – was that this wound was going to leave me permanently damaged. The purity of the silver would not rest until it spread throughout my body, burning my Demon blood away. I wouldn't be able to battle Father, claim the Underworld as my own, defeat the Gods. I might not even survive the next hour, the way the viscous red blood was pouring out of me. My goals were all being pulled asunder. The devastation of that realization was just too much to take, so I skittered away from the thought. Instead I mused about my revenge.

It was entirely that boy's fault, and he was going to pay.

He would have been dead already. I would have no doubt killed him if it weren't for the cursed blade he had plunged into me. Then I would have picked off his friends one by one, starting with that bitchy feline who had struck me.

That reminded me that I needed to take inventory of my other wounds. If I had anymore that needed extreme healing, I was doomed. My energy would run out and my existence would collapse in on itself. I nearly shuddered at the thought.

I stayed very still, trying to calm my ragged breathing. The dagger wound was undoubtedly serious and potentially fatal. Trying to refrain from using too much energy, I began to scan my body using my aura. My skull had sustained a minor fracture where the bitch had kicked me.It was healing flawlessly, so no worries there. My ribs had been bruised awfully by that bastard striking them repeatedly, but they had already mostly healed. The damage that the pompous Seeker had inflicted on me with his heated energy was minimal, and the scratches I had received from the exploding tree were nowhere to be found, as expected.