The Alchemists of Loom (Loom Saga #1)(54)
It shredded his insides, filling him with blood. His lungs began to decay, becoming necrotic in mere moments due to magical exhaustion. The world shuddered. He wouldn’t be able to hold his breath for another second.
She slammed him against the wall. A scream tried to escape his throat, but all that was there was blood. It poured down her shoulder in the darkness. Arianna pushed herself against him. She clutched his waist, her feet planted.
“Do it.”
He was too happy to oblige.
Cvareh yanked on the back of her hood, catching hair with it. Her head twisted backward and pulled her face into a grimace, exposing the one part of her body that wasn’t covered in layers of fabric. Magic faltered within him, struggling and failing to heal his ailing lungs.
He sunk his teeth into her eagerly. He fought to keep himself from tearing out strips of her neck in his zeal for her power. Cedar and honeysuckle flooded his mouth, mixing with the smoky musk of his blood spewed on her shoulder.
It was pure power. It was the essence of life. More than anything, it was her.
He invaded her through her magic, pillaging and rummaging through every dark corner. He could smell the tang of regret harrowing her behind every shadowed awning of her memories. He could hear the echoes of longing crying out through the lonely hallways of her daily consciousness. He could feel the heat from the flames that consumed her waking moments whole, a pyre in the lighthouse of her wayward morality that burned for one thing alone: vengeance.
She was an enigma, a strange creature of contrasts. And, for the briefest moments when he imbibed off her living flesh and blood, she was his.
Arianna pulled herself from him, and he barely relinquished. Drunk off her power, his mind swam, clouded. Her hand flew up to her shoulder, smearing the blood from where his lungs had failed and come up golden, covering her wound until it healed. Their eyes met and he felt the same urge as he had last time—the want to drown in her.
She lowered her hand, her stare wavering but not breaking. Her eyes challenged him to say something, to move for her again, to do anything. She threatened the same in kind. He could read every twitch of her muscles. She wanted to level the score, to put him in as vulnerable a position as he had just had her.
What was equally terrifying and thrilling was in that moment, he would have let her.
21. Arianna
There was nothing like this feeling. She had experienced much in her twenty-two years of life. But the sensation of someone stripping her down to an essence that even she couldn’t describe was incomparable to any other situation she had found herself in.
Arianna had devoted herself to person and cause. She had wholly and completely loved as a friend, as a lover. But this was something entirely different.
And utterly terrifying.
Once more she was caught bare before him and she hadn’t even scratched his surface. Her hands twisted in his clothing, ill-fitting and basic as it was. She wanted to rip it off and push him down. She wanted to sink her teeth into him and show him that their world moved on her terms.
It had only been seconds since they ascended through the empty window of the guard tower. But time falling back into place had made it seem like an eternity. The nagging sensation of things moving once more brought her attention back to the present. The sound of footsteps nearing reminded her of where and who she was, what she was doing.
She was Arianna. She was the White Wraith. And she had a job to do.
Her fingers relinquished him, quickly working to unstrap his body from hers. The cabling retreated into its spool with a thought. She kept her eyes from his until the effects of the imbibing wore off both of them. She had no interest in making herself vulnerable again before him. He had already made her feel that way without even knowing it.
The only way arrogance and confidence are similar is that both can get you killed, Arianna. The words echoed back through her mind from a woman long dead. This man, this Dragon—he was nothing like her Eva. Arianna refused to accept it.
Arianna pulled out a token. On it was an alchemical rune. Florence said the range wouldn’t be terribly far, but exactly how far “terribly” was, she couldn’t quite say. Ari pressed her thumb into the rune and pushed her magic through it, willing heat. It shattered under her fingertips and, at exactly the same moment, an explosion cut chaos into the quiet night.
The bomb on their skiff drew the attention of the exterior guards and Arianna bounded through the interior door of the tower. A long tunnel connected the outer wall with the guard tower, one of four. Through the window slits on either side, Arianna got her first glimpse of the floating prison. Concrete and steel fitted together to construct a grim image of desolation. Every cell had an open barred wall facing a narrow walk that spiraled around the entirety of the prison—the only way up or down.
On the edge of the walk, facing the inner tower, were painted the numbers of each cell. Arianna quickly made a note of the highest and lowest. Once she knew that, she could calculate approximately where any cell was using basic estimations of height and spacing. The largest variable remained finding what numbers she needed.
The door at the end of the suspended, tunneled bridge opened. A circled Revo leveled a gun with a golden barrel at them, his vermilion eyes nearly glowing in the darkness. She didn’t even miss a step. She kept charging down the stretch head on.
His wrist tensed and Ari slammed herself against the right wall. Cvareh moved in lockstep, pressing himself on the opposite wall as she had hounded him to do—when in doubt, she went right, he left. The gunshot was louder than an engine’s piston firing and she was certain her ears were bleeding, though her magic worked immediately to repair the damage.