Beloved Beast

Chapter Twenty-Seven

A flash of anger lit up her green eyes, making them appear, in essence, like transparent gemstones. "Pity, for you will not find another willing woman – not with a face like yours."

It doesn't feel wrong when you kiss me. You are not your scars any more than I am my blindness. You don't sound like a monster to me.

Thinking of Elle and her sweet nothings served to mollify his rage, but in the same breath, it deepened the pain and understanding that she was gone.

Sera hissed hotly beneath her breath, muttering something unintelligible before exclaiming in a grating voice full of jealousy and ire, "Mayhap I should take her body for keeping! Would you find me more appealing, then?" Wagging a spindly finger at him, she gave a snide, harsh laugh. "You are deceiving yourself if you think that damaged sightless girl could want you. Without functioning eyes, she will never know your hideous face, she –" Sera gasped, drawing up to her remarkable height despite her bowed shoulders, an idea taking shape in the widening of her sunken eyes.

Don stiffened, every muscle tightening as unease coiled through him like a deadly serpent.

She ambled away from him, saying partially to herself. "Why hadn't I thought of it before?"

"Seraphine..." Don growled low in warning, sensing her thoughts taking an incredulous, unforeseen dive into the unthinkable.

She couldn't. There was no way. It was impossible.

Don felt it then... an unhinging of the air. A pulsing vibration. A displaced stirring that had his heart answering in alarming leaps.

Sera splayed her fingers wide and he could just feel the formidable energy pooling from her fingertips, tips that had blackened. It dispersed like a charged static as gooseflesh rippled across his unnerved skin; the hairs at his nape standing erect. The walls around him quivered, spitting dust and film as the emerald of her eyes flared otherworldly in the encroaching gloom. An unnatural gust struck him, blasting his face, ripping at his cloak. Shadows slithered across the mottled stone and gathered around the gaunt mage in the room, thickening to a dark, impenetrable mass that all but hummed with menacing force.

In the shadowy center, Don could just see the black flooding her eyes, absorbing all of that illuminated green as she began to chant a hushed incantation that didn't quite reach him, the words muffled by the blood pounding fiercely in his ears.

He was eerily familiar with that fathomless stare, for the last time he had gazed into those vacant, obsidian depths, he had become an unsightly creature that could not age.

"Sera, no!" With a guttural growl, Don lunged for her, but had barely taken two steps when an invisible fist slammed into his chest, dislodging the breath from his lungs, its violent momentum flattening him to the floor.

As quickly as it had materialized, it ended. Within the space of a few rapping heartbeats, Sera regained awareness, the strange wind withdrew, her indistinct words ceasing forthwith. The heaviness in the room evaporated, retreating to unearth a deceiving calm.

Sera swayed on her feet and then staggered as the black receded from her eyes and fingertips. Then, knees buckling, she crumpled to the floor in a heap of depleted bones.

Heedless of the hood resting upon his tense shoulders, Don sucked in a ragged breath, demanding in a harsh tone replete with apprehension and disbelief. "What the fuck have you done?"

Familiar green eyes, ebbing in their vitality, alighted upon his scarred visage. Hair nearly white tumbled around her shriveled face as exhaustion and pain seeped into her slackening limbs.