Never Keep (Sins of the Zodiac, #1)

by Caroline Peckham

I heard the laughter of all the Fae who had dismissed me, and it awoke something so brutal and cold inside me that I fell into the darkest spaces between the fractured pieces of my soul. All of it brewed and boiled and burst from me at once and a roar of refusal left me, rejecting my fate as a girl who was nothing. Power spewed from me in an unimaginable wave, that darkness inside me spilling onto the outside and eating through the Reaper’s binds at once until they were dust. I rose to my feet, blood soaking down my thighs, stomach and arms from his strikes and my upper lip peeled back in a sneer. “Wh-what are you?” he stammered, backing up, raising his hands but no power came for me. He was too afraid to cast against me again, and I revelled in the high I got from that. “Your death,” I whispered, shifting my eyes into that of my Leopard’s before sending a blast of water out around the room, plunging us into the dark. But without that thick presence clogging the air, the being returned to that strange coiling liquid above us, I could see and the Reaper could not. And I prepared to punish the devil who had hurt me.