Firstborn: The Complete Series by Isla Frost

Author:Isla Frost [Frost, Isla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JFP Press
Published: 2022-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

There was a cost to my new magic. A steep one.

A lesson I learned with a vengeance a few hours later.

And that was not even counting the inevitable reckoning when Ellbereth and her followers made their next move.

For every ability and sense I’d had enhanced by the influx of life force, the withdrawal was tenfold worse. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t actually blind, but it hurt so much to open my eyes I might as well have been. And I couldn’t keep anything in my stomach, not even water.

Over those long, crawling minutes, I would have done almost anything to make the pain go away. But I drew the line at killing Ameline’s pygmy griffin, and I was in no shape to drag myself out to the forest to find other prey.

I gained a sudden empathy for anyone who’d ever battled with an addiction. Grandmother had told me there were all types of addiction in the Before, and I’d seen firsthand they hadn’t gone away. Only the substances had changed.

But mine was the first I’d heard of that required sucking the life force from someone.

Well, unless you counted vampires anyway, and as far as I knew, they were still fictitious.

I groaned. Then stopped because even that hurt.

That was the first hour.

The second hour was better. Like being thrown into a pit of fire ants is better than being eaten from the inside out by subcutaneous beetles.

I wondered if the Malus experienced the same withdrawal symptoms. If that was the reason behind its insatiable appetite for life energy. Could all that destruction—the devouring of entire worlds if the walkers were to be believed—really be caused by something so basic?

If the withdrawal became worse the more life force you took or the longer you avoided enduring it, could the Malus die of shock if we starved it?

Could I?

But no, the walkers had already tried that.

Sometime around the sixth hour, my brain was functioning well enough that I came to a few realizations.

That night after Cricklewood’s visit in my makeshift prison cell, I’d thought I’d felt sick over what I’d done to the flum, but at least some of my nausea must have been because its modest energy had quickly worn off and my body had gone into withdrawal. It had been far, far more mild than this. So the severity of the withdrawal must depend on the amount of life force I’d pulled into myself.

Except what about Kyrrha, the walker woman who’d performed my ritual? The woman my professors blamed me for killing. She was vastly more powerful than the flum, which meant the blood exchange must have made it work differently, her blood in my veins offsetting the withdrawal somehow.

Or—for all I knew—I’d never taken her energy.

Or I had, but it had mostly worn off before I woke. Bryn told me my ritual had lasted the longest of all the students, and I’d been locked in that chamber for three days. Maybe that was why I’d woken feeling good but without the potency of the wolf monster’s energy.

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