ChapterTwenty-Nine
My mind felt violated,like someone had dug through it with a shovel, and when they were done, they’d put everything back in the wrong place.
The memory of five-year-old me with my dad teaching me how to ride a bike felt like it had happened just hours ago.
My eyes blinked, and I suddenly felt like I’d just walked into the studio apartment in Manhattan, and I knew that it was the one for me.
A second later, I was in Dominic’s arms, breathing in his scent, touching his skin, so happy I could explode.
Then, I was back home again, looking out at the fields full of flowers at sunrise, crying in silence, wondering what was wrong with me. Why the plants didn’t speak to me. Why I had no desire to speak to them. The pain was the same now as it had been then. I felt all of it, and it took my breath away all over again.
I raised my head, terrified by my own mind, and the blue light illuminating the dark brought me back to the present. I was not back home or in Manhattan or in bed with Dominic.
I was kidnapped by high fae, screwed over by the ODP or Sandra or whoever, and that redhead had messed with my mind. He’d been inside my mind, had watched my memories like a collection of movies, and I could do nothing at all to stop him.
Weak. Unfit. Tiny.
And now Dominic was out there somewhere, possibly in the same situation as me, having his mind turned upside down by fae magic.
The desperation and the anger was a dangerous mixture, but to my surprise, my magic responded to them better than to anything else. It shot out of my fingers over and over again, and I held my breath for seconds at a time while it did, just so I didn’t have to focus on anything else.
The high fae were no longer there. The laptop was gone, too. Only the two guards standing behind me remained.
Now was my chance. I didn’t care how I did it—I had to get out of this place. I had to find Dominic. I had to make sure he was alive.
So, I kept trying, teeth gritted, my mind swarmed with strange memories I had no business remembering right now, but I did. And all of them were bad.
Like the time when all the kids in my class had laughed at eight-year-old me for failing the simple assignment of making a rose open its petals. Or every time I’d tried to get close to girls my age, to make friends, only to be mocked and laughed at by every single one of them. All the pranks they’d pulled on me through the years. The way my brothers had tried to stand up for me, and then eventually gave up, when all their friends started turning on them, too.
All the times my parents had stayed up at odd hours working with me, trying to awaken something in me that didn’t exist. Or it existed—it just didn’t work the way it was supposed to work. Every time I’d had to see the disappointed looks in their eyes, hear their unspoken words. I’d done nothing but failed every time I’d tried to do something, and this time, it was no different. I thought I could take on the world, find my calling in a place that wasn’t supposed to care about what species you were or the color of your eyes.
I was dead wrong.
I’d run from myself for so long, and now I was tripping on my own feet.
It was enough. My magic might have not worked the way it was supposed to, but it was still mine. Maybe it wasn’t as strong as other pixies because I couldn’t harness it through growing plants, but I loved it. And no matter how many times I failed, I wasn’t going to stop trying, the whole world be damned.
The weight of the spell holding my hands back lifted just an inch.
I drew in a deep breath, eyes open wide. It worked. All that anger, all that shame, all that fear had coaxed my magic in a way I never knew how to do before. Was that why my own mind had made me remember all those bad memories that had left me feeling small and worthless? Because it knew that my magic would respond to it?
I couldn't stop a smile from spreading on my face if I tried.
Footsteps. My hand moved up, and I didn’t feel the pain at all. Holding my fingers together to make my hand as small as possible, I lifted it up. The metal of the cuff slid right down my skin.
“What the hell are you smiling about?”
The guard had stopped on my right side, thick brows narrowed as he looked down on me.
I grinned. “This.”
I let out a final blow of my magic to break the spell holding me completely, and I stood up. The cuffs that had been around my wrists hit the floor with a loud thump.
The guard reached for the gun in his holster, shock registering in his face a split second before I pulled up my leg and kicked him right in the balls. He bent over, and I grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around, just as his friend from the other side of the room shot his gun.
Adrenaline made the blood in my veins rush so fast, I didn’t even feel if that bullet caught me. No time to stop and check. I grabbed the hips of the guard, still grunting in pain, and my hand closed around the grip of the large gun. I pulled it out while the other kept shooting, but his friend’s body shielded me.
Not for long.