Luna. Chapter 89

(Lyra's POV)

I came to on the floor of Asher's room, my head throbbing. The laughter had stopped, but the wrongness in the air was suffocating.

Asher was still sitting on the bed, but his posture had changed. He was slumped forward now, like a marionette with cut strings.

"Asher?" I crawled toward him.

He looked up at me, and for a moment his eyes were normal. Brown and scared and completely my little boy.

"Mama," he whispered. "The angry man is inside me. I can't make him leave."

"It's okay, baby. We're going to fix this."

"He's so loud. And he wants to hurt people. He wants to hurt you."

I reached for him, but before I could touch him, his expression changed again. The silver returned to his eyes, and his mouth twisted into a smile that belonged on no child's face.

"Too late," he said in that layered voice. "Too late, too late, too late."

He lunged forward with supernatural speed, his small hands reaching for my throat. I managed to dodge, but barely.

"Asher, fight this! I know you're in there!"

"He can't hear you anymore." The thing controlling him laughed. "He's trapped now, just like I was trapped. But unlike me, he won't last decades. Children break so much faster."

Horror washed over me. This thing wasn't just possessing my son. It was destroying him from the inside.

"What do you want?"

"Everything you have. Your power, your pain, your life force. All of it flowing through this perfect little vessel."

Asher's head tilted at an unnatural angle, studying me like I was an interesting specimen.

"But first," he continued in that horrible voice, "I want you to know what it feels like to lose everything that matters."

He moved faster than humanly possible, crossing the room in a blink. His small teeth sank into my arm before I could react, and pain shot through me like fire.

But then, suddenly, he collapsed.

Asher crumpled to the floor like someone had severed his power source, his eyes rolling back in his head.

"No!" I gathered him into my arms, checking for a pulse. It was there, but weak and irregular.

From somewhere in the room, I heard a whisper that seemed to come from the walls themselves:

"You can't save him. You can't save anyone. You are nothing, and you will lose everything."

The voice faded, leaving only silence and the sound of my own ragged breathing.

But I could still feel it out there, watching, waiting.

And I knew this was far from over.