Alias: The Doyen Series book 1

(29) THE KILL

PICTURE: The tunnels. 

I bite my cheek too, too hard to hold back the scream forming deep inside my chest. It scratches, claws, gnaws its way up my esophagus and into my mouth. I have to hold my breath to keep it in. I taste blood, no doubt from the sharp teeth I have implanted into my lips.

I am trying my best to not scream, to not shout, to not let out a sound, to not give this satanic demon what he wants.

"How are you going to kill me now, girl?" he taunts me, his lips turned up in a crooked snarl. I can barely see him because he insurmountable pain has my vision blurred around the edges.

My arm hangs limp at my side—worthless.

"You are the most pathetic thing I've ever seen," Kai continues to talk. There isn't a moment that passed that he isn't talking. "My family, the witches, everyone in the Quarter has waited nineteen years for you. Nineteen years and you can't even heal yourself. How pathetic," he laughs a tight, tedious laugh.

His laugh alone makes me want to jump off a bridge with a brick around my neck. It sounds like an evil genius' laugh off a cheaply made film. And if I were not in so much pain at the moment, I may have found it comical.

Kai stops laughing suddenly and stares at me. In the blink of an eye, he has me in his grip.

I am too weak,

too broken,

too spent to pull away.

I try to bring my powers to the forefront—to incinerate him on the spot—but my gifts have failed me. I cannot will them to work.

I am powerless.

Come on. COME ON! I yell at myself.

The sickening sound of tearing flesh draws me out of my internal dilemma.

The grotesque aroma of fresh blood fills my senses.

That's when I realize that Kai's sharp, pearly teeth are locked on my neck.

He is jerking me like a doll made of paper closer to his stone-cold body.

"Aisling! Stop him!" Braydon cries behind me, horrified.

If I could, don't you think I would have?

I feel my body wearing down, becoming anemic from the many pints of blood that have surely dispensed from my 110-pound body.

My eyes close.

My body is transported to a place unlike anywhere I'd ever been before.

I no longer feel the pain—from my arm nor from the leech attached to my throat.

This is what it feels like to die.

And it's weird.

There's no flashing of light, no images flashing through my mind, nothing spectacular.

I'm just dying.

Kai unlatches from my throat with a suctioning POP! The second he stops feeding from me, the pain is back in full force.

If I had a Lego block for every time I thought I was dead, I could build a plane and fly off to my Lego island and live happily ever after in peace.