Alejandro turned around, revealing a sharp looking knife in his hand which he pointed at me. “Press your probes to her heart.”
I shook my head and he strode forward, slashing the blade across the girl’s cheek and making her scream against her gag as her blood splashed to the floor.
“I will make you watch me slice her apart piece by piece if you hesitate another moment, Diego,” he said with a sick look in his eyes that made me sure he meant that. And I was so afraid of that happening that I stumbled forward, holding out my arm.
Alejandro smiled cruelly as he took hold of my wrist and placed the tips of my probes to her heart. I immediately felt it, that deep source of power within this creature. This Fae. And my pulse began to slow as some instinct burned in me to take it. I was hungry. So, so hungry for this power that it made me ache inside.
“That’s it,” Alejandro purred, gripping my wrist tighter as my probes cut into her flesh and she screamed against her gag.
But the second I saw blood, I shook off the feeling of that instinct, fighting it away and trying to draw my hand back.
“No, I don’t want to,” I begged as the girl groaned in agony. “I don’t want to hurt her.”
Tears slid down my cheeks as Alejandro’s grip became bruising and in the next second, he’d slashed the blade across her throat and hot, wet blood splattered me, making me blink in complete shock.
“She’s dead regardless,” he hissed. “Take her power or I will cut your throat next.” He drew my probes tight against her flesh once more as she started to choke on her own blood and I squeezed my eyes shut as my probes cut into her skin, driving in deeper and deeper.
I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to.
“That’s it,” Alejandro purred excitedly. “Do you feel the connection to her power? She is not the most powerful Fae, but when you are stronger you may wish to replace her magic with that of another. You cannot accumulate power from multiple Fae, Diego, but you may exchange it when you are ready to claim the Element of a more gifted Fae.”
I resisted for as long as I could but then a strange whispering started up in my head, the soft caress of a woman’s voice. “Take it, Diego. The Fae have wronged you. Take it and join us.”
There was something so alluring about the voice that I couldn’t help but listen to it. My probes sank into the muscle of her heart and I gasped as magic rushed up my arm, pouring into me in wave after wave. I trembled at the feel of it tumbling into my veins and winding around my own heart, burying in deep and taking root there.
For a second I forgot all else as I drowned in the amazing feeling of all that power filling me up, but as the rush of it settled within me, my eyes cracked open and I found the girl dead, staring lifelessly at me with so much accusation in her eyes that it broke something in me.
I yanked my hand away, shifting it back to normal and backing up as the horror of what I’d done fell on me.
There was so much blood, I could smell it everywhere, and it was all I could do not to retch as my spine hit the door.
Alejandro moved to open it with a satisfied smile on his lips and I stumbled out onto the grass, scrambling away from him as I sucked down lungfuls of cool air. And suddenly something else was rearing up in me, dark shadows pooling through my skin as they wound their way inside of me and connected me to the darkness of their nature by this violent act and the power of some deity seemed to tug on the strings of my heart, taking hold of me as surely as if she was a part of me. And as she spoke to me again, I knew this was the Shadow Princess my family had told me of. “You are one of us now.”
I was pulled out of the memory, shock jarring my heart as I processed the horrors I’d just witnessed, but I barely had any time to recover before I was cast back into Diego’s memories and saw him walking up to the gates of Zodiac Academy beside his uncle, a darkness about him that he’d lacked as a kid.
“Repeat your instructions back to me,” my uncle commanded and I nodded as he cast a silencing bubble around us. It was one of the few basic spells he could manage along with locks and the rough hold he had over his stolen Elements.
“I’ll learn everything I can about harnessing Fae magic and feed all the information back to you and Mamá,” I said, nerves warring in me over this task. What if I was caught the second I walked in there? I’d be killed and there was no chance my mamá, mi padre or Alejandro would try and save me. The moment I walked through the gates of Zodiac Academy, I was on my own. And yet…I didn’t care. Since mi abuela had died, all I’d wanted was to get away from my family, and the only dream I’d had my whole life was being a part of the Fae world. So I’d agreed to this loco plan because it was a chance at seeing the Fae world from the inside. She’d knitted me the hat I wore now which connected me to the web of souls and had added extra protective spells which helped keep the shadows from crawling too deep into my mind. It was the only thing that made me feel like myself, so I rarely took it off. When I did, I could hear the Shadow Princess whispering in my head and I was afraid of how easy it was to fall under her command.