I was Kidnapped for Revenge by a Ruthless Alpha-Chapter 212: Let Me Go

~Odette~

I winced as I walked forward through the heat of my own magic, teeth clenched, tears cutting clean lines through the soot on my face. My mother’s face was contorted, but beneath the hollow eyes, beneath them, she could see something. A flicker. My mother’s familiar pink eyes.

Mom.

I didn’t have much time to react. I had to move quick.

I’d known he was coming. I’d positioned myself between Onyx and Ezelreth. And told Onyx to stand back through the bond.

’Not this time.’ and inner voice called to me from within. I couldn’t lose my lover in this life the way I had lost him in my last.

My soul wouldn’t allow it. The trauma and pain were a drilled into it. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

He laughed hard and maniacally and then suddenly moved first.

I felt the amusement in his laugh.

This pissed me off.

I released it, all of it. All of the pent up fear and anger. The loss and death surrounding me my whole life. I just let it erupt. Let it consume me for a moment.

The debris exploded outward in every direction but back at me, chunks of splintered wood and rock scattering wide across the ridge. One caught him in the shoulder and he stumbled. I didn’t give him time to straighten. I pulled the wind high, cold air that lived above in the sky, building pressure from three different directions simultaneously until it struck him like a wall, a contained implosion of force that drove him skidding back several steps.

Ezelreth raised his chin. The darkness peeled back from my mother’s face, and he smiled.

The mocking look in his face made me angrier. I shouldn’t give in to his taunting’s, but I couldn’t stop myself. I rose into the air. My hair whipping around me, I summoned lightning. The sky above me cracked open in response, a white-violet bolt that came down with the sound of tearing fabric and struck the ridge directly where Ezelreth stood.

My mother’s voice shrieked. Whatever damage I did to Ezelreth, I was also doing to my mother.

I knew this, I had trained for this, but even still, I wasn’t prepared for this. How could anyone be prepared to possibly destroy their own mother?

The shockwave hit me even in the air, rattling my teeth. The air reeked of charred earth and melted flesh.

Burned. Smoking.

I descended slowly, wind holding me like a baby.

I was shaking, but I refused to let it show. I couldn’t show fear. Not now.

"You cannot maintain that" he said. He was amused by my struggles and limitations.

He was right. Oh, how I hated he was right.

It made me want to punch that smug look off my mother’s face.

"I know," I growled.

My mother’s body stood twenty feet away, watching me.

"You’ve been trying to fight me without fighting her," he said. "You understand that’s not a strategy. That’s just prolonged surrender."

I didn’t answer with words.

Instead...

I sealed the air between us.

The sky overhead was battling just as they were on the ground. White and black clashed against each other, like it was replaying the battle for the gods themselves.

My move was invisible, I shoved my hands out and a sudden rippling force of air pressure, hit Ezelreth and drove my mother’s body back three staggering steps.

Ezelreth laughed, his laughter came out of my mother’s mouth at the wrong pitch, too low, scraping along vocal cords should not have been able to reach.

"You’re holding back for her!" he sneered. "Every time you pull your strike, every time you recalibrate for her survival, you get closer to losing. She is the cage you built around your own hands."

He wasn’t even dodging.

I pulled back and drove an open palm into my mother’s chest, releasing a burst of psychic energy through her, sending a shockwave up through the earth. The tactic worked: My mother’s body arched backward in a rigid bow and I scrambled back to my feet.

Ezelreth made a move, he used the kinetic energy and slammed my force back at me. My ribs cracked. I knew instantly, I’d fractured them. Then the world went sideways. I felt it before I knew what was happening and I was airborne, spinning, before I could process that I was moving. I hit a tree falling into a blood soaked mud puddle and the tree came down on top of me, burying me under broken tree limbs and splinters branches. Cutting open gnashes all over my body.

I was out of it in under three seconds. Rock and wood were flying in every direction, blood running from under my eye, jaw set.

"You won’t win against me, MoonChild, surrender and I’ll make your death painless, and I’ll free your mother from her fleshy prison."

"I’ve been in her for six months. I’ve grown into her. The pathways are mine as much as hers. You would have to kill her to get me out by force, and we both know you won’t."

I was panting. Beads of sweat and drops of blood clung to my skin. The Darkness was still surrounding us.

"You won’t," Ezelreth repeated. "Because you are still..."

My mother’s face changed.

It was not a subtle thing.

The voice that came out of my mother’s throat was wrecked and thin and entirely her’s, scraped raw from months of a god living inside it.

It was really her.

Not Ezelreth in her skin.

No my mother had come to the surface.

My heart dropped and sobs threatened to suffocate me if I didn’t let them out.

Her hand came up shaking and found my face. Her thumb traced the line of my jaw, the blood still drying on my cheek, and the touch was so familiar that my throat burned and tears danced behind my eyes.

"Baby," My mother said, in a voice like gravel and torn silk. "Stop pulling your hits."

My jaw moved. No sound came out.

"I know what you’re doing." My mother’s grip tightened on my face "I have been awake in here. I have watched you. Every strike you’ve pulled." Her eyes, fully pink and round now, burning with the effort of staying that way. "You are fighting him with one hand because the other hand is holding onto me."

"Mother..."

"Let me go." Her voice cracked on the last word and held. "Let go of me and burn that bastard for eternity."