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Excerpt from Chapter 1
OUTCAST
“You are so drugged up you can’t even stand.”
Efflyn’s shove sent Riasg stumbling out the door to fall onto his backside. The drugs weaving through his veins doubled his vision as if he could see time again, witnessing Efflyn’s push and an offered hand to help his rise. But when he blinked, she stood above him in her regal dress with perfect face set in a sneer. Seeing him watching, she spat on his chest.
“You were powerful once. Is this what you want for yourself?” She swept an arm over his prone figure where he lay crumbled in the mud in clothes where the additional grime hardly mattered.
“You pushed me.” Riasg ignored the fact he slurred. He called power to clean the filth from his clothes. None came. Panic cut through the drugs feeding his high.
Efflyn looked down at him as if he were as low as a human. “I hardly needed to. You no longer have a place with us. Do not return.”
The triple weave of his vision showed the door closing to him thrice. He could not be barred forever. Riasg clawed his way to the door and used its bulk as support so he could rise to his shaking legs. The silver latch did not budge. Riasg tried again, shaking the door with wild strength.
Doras Mór was the only home he had. Words of power, potent curses, and nonsense flowed from his lips. It had no effect. Because with ola thrumming through his veins, he had no more power than a human. Without power, he could not break into the cnoc sìthe.
Emotions flooded his system and boosted the drugs he’d taken. Numbness swept over and through him. Riasg sank to the ground as if falling into a summer field. The world he hated disappeared into a golden haze.
When he woke, the door to Doras Mór was gone. Riasg rolled to his side as his stomach cramped. Heaving, he spat drool and bile into the thick mud as his body sought to rid itself of what he’d taken. Ola created an emotional bliss while killing his body. But everything in this world was killing him anyway. Who cared if he made it go a little faster as well as a lot more pleasant?
Riasg lay in the mud realizing the answer to that question. Efflyn cared. Not so much about him exactly, but because their kind were rare enough. Especially one such as he who actually wielded some power, or did. Before he’d polluted himself. Riasg shifted again to glance at where the door to the faery hill should have been. He saw only grass and didn’t know if it was the drugs blocking his sight or that he was barred.
“Sod it.”
Riasg rolled to his stomach and used a trembling arm to push himself to his knees. That set him heaving again. Spitting saliva that tasted like acid mixed with gasoline, Riasg used his growing anger to push himself upright. The world tilted like it was glued to a kid’s seesaw. Cold sweat peppered Riasg’s upper lip and the back of his hands as he curled them into a fist. If he waited, it would pass. Or he’d fall unconscious again.
Stomach twisting like a nest of snakes, he waited for fate to determine his next few moments. In a rush of warmth, the sickening grip eased. Riasg released a wavering breath, relieved to feel better and possibly happy to be alive. Body spasming so that he staggered as he walked, Riasg struggled away from the grassy hillside toward the path that led to the valley.
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