Liliana - Possesses jace

  Something rose from the floor by Jace’s side, something wispy and insubstantial, a fume on the air that clung only vaguely to a humanoid shape. It reached out, not with a hand, but with its head, on a neck that stretched ever thinner, impossibly thin. A mouth that wasn’t brushed against the young man’s skin, and his body quivered with a shudder that had nothing to do with the pain of his wound.

  “Don’t fight it,” Liliana had said, yet how could he not? Its touch was unnatural, a blight as it flowed through flesh to caress him from within.

  At his strongest, Jace could have resisted easily, kept the phantasmal thing from infecting him. But as the pain flared in his wound, as his blood spilled across the floor, Jace struggled to gather his thoughts, to muster what power he had remaining … and failed.

  He felt it pour, liquid and cold, through his body, across bones and muscles. His every limb went numb, and the world grew subtly distorted, as though a gossamer veil had somehow unfurled between his mind and his eyes.

  “What did you do to me?” Jace demanded. He was startled to find that it hurt less to speak than it had moments ago—but also that a full second had passed after he thought the question before his lips and tongue formed the words.

  “You’re possessed,” Liliana told him in much the same tone of voice she might have used to tell him he had something in his teeth.

  “I—what?”

  “Relax, Jace. I’ve told him to obey your thoughts. You’re still in control of your own body.”

  “Why would you …?”

  “How do you feel?”

  Jace took a moment. The torment had indeed lessened, though he still winced at the feel of the inches of wood currently inside him. “A little … better,” he admitted.

  Liliana nodded. “He’ll keep you insulated from the worst of the pain, try to hold your body together so that walking doesn’t cause any further damage. You won’t be able to go far, but we should be able to get outside, wave down a carriage.”


***

Agents of Artifice, Chapter 23