You are all mine.
Exos
I’m really fucking tired of being knocked out and manipulated by other entities in my head. I glowered at my reflection, talking to the foreign essence maintaining residence in my skull.
“Yes, that helps,” Cyrus drawled, sounding bored.
“You’re not the one with black magic in your damn mind,” I reminded him, my voice a low growl of annoyance.
We’d tried several old spirit methods, most of which involved Cyrus sending blasts of elemental energy into my brain. By the time we finished that, my neural cavities resembled the aftermath of tunneling pixies in the Earth Fae mines.
I swallowed another gulp of my spritemead and slammed the mug down on the counter. “Again.”
“Are you saying that because you’re drunk off the mead, or are you a closet masochist?” Cyrus’s icy gaze sparkled with challenge, his goading meant to distract me from the pain he was about to unleash on my spirit.
“Don’t flirt with me. Just do—fuck!” Lights flashed behind my eyes, sending me to my knees. Oh, if I ever found out who put this nasty piece of darkness in my head, I would enjoy killing them. Over and over and over again.
I massaged my temples and tried futilely to help Cyrus. He used my power to bolster his own, causing me to cringe as he detonated a particularly harsh attack inside my being.
The inky thing roared back at him, clinging to me with sludgy claws that made me gag.
“Almost there,” Cyrus said, totally full of shit. I could feel how thick the thing in my skull was, and he hadn’t even sawed through half of it.
Cyrus yanked out so sharply that I gasped.
“I have it,” he said.
“No, you fucking don’t,” I rasped, hating him almost as much as that muck in my head. “It’s still there, id—”
A spiritual punch to the black wall left me winded, and a second had me curling into the fetal position. I wanted to demand him to stop, but he seemed hell-bent on whatever method he’d enlisted and he was drawing on so much of my energy that I couldn’t block him even if I wanted to.
My vision swam, the walls of our home blurring.
But I felt the crack splintering through my mind.
A whine came from inside, escaping through my throat, as Cyrus mentally beat the darkness to a pulp. Until it sputtered and sizzled and died in a pool of inky fluid that he sucked out of my spirit and sent to the floor beside me.
“Dark Fae magic,” he growled, spitting on the dying substance. “Whoever did this is playing with forbidden arts.”
Of a land none of our kind ever ventured into, I thought, unable to speak above my panting breaths.
“No wonder it felt like a fucking vampire,” Cyrus continued, his disgust evident. “Because that thing was created by one. And I think that thing in the death fields may have been a Dark Fae, or the spirit of one.”
What he said made sense.
Except I didn’t understand why.
Until suddenly I did.
Because my memories were finally free.
I sat up despite the ache in my skull and forced my mouth to function. “Mortus.” It came out croaky.
“He took you?”
I nodded, then shook my head, and then nodded again, trying to clear my throat.
“Yes, that clears everything up, brother. Thank you.” Cyrus, the perpetual smart-ass, handed me my spritemead. “Drink that. You make more sense while drunk.”