Free Cursefell by C.V. Dreesman Page B

are, do you?  That doesn't seem fair, does it Diana?"
     "Don't.  Don't do this," my mother whispered with a hoarse desperation.  "Please."
     "Thera, we are cousins, distant but bound by old blood.  You are special though.  For your blood runs from the Source.  Your blood carries the lineage of the first gorgon."
     "Gorgon?" I didn't understand, but somewhere deep within my psyche there was a faint tickle as if in recognition.
     "Run Thera!"
     My mother's voice rang out as she swung her hands at the brute holding the knife beside her.  The solid smack from her blow reverberated off his temple, ringing in my ears.  My mother flashed a crazy eyed gaze Isabel's way.  It was the look I had seen on my father's face once or twice before.
     "No!" Isabel shouted.  At first I thought she yelled it at my mother, but later I would come to realize it was meant for the hawkish, slender companion of the man my mother had felled with her fists.
     But it came too late.  The man with the peppered beard that looked like it was overdue to be washed and groomed, grabbed my mother.  Her defiant look slid from fury to pain as the knife he had taken sunk into the soft skin below her ribs.  Brackish dark fluid, brilliant in its richness, flowed free.  My mother screamed.  So did I.
     I'm not sure what I was screaming or at whom.  I just knew I wouldn't be left without a single parent.  I would not.  It broke something locked inside me, a gate holding back all the secrets a person walls away from their waking self.  All that tainting toxicity that forms a part of everyone, and for me, something else that had been coiled there my entire life.
     An emerald green haze filmed around the edges of my sight in an instant.  A cold flame burned about my eyes.  This time there was no tickle running up my back, just an electric pulse fused within the spine.  Isabel faced me with those nightmarish hands reaching for my throat.
     The man my mother had struck rose up with his curious bladed knife poised to throw at me.  As our gazes met his eyes widened in surprise.  The man's motion slowed so noticeably that I could hear every bone creak and every sinew stretch beneath his skin.  He struggled to move as an ashen sheen began to displace the bronzed skin, the dark clothes he wore faded into gray even as his movements froze in place.
     I flicked a look at the other intruder.  The one who had harmed my mother.  His slender arm tried to shield his sight, but it was too late.  Why did he do that?  A demented chuckle answered inside my head while he too ceased to move.  His body was swept up under my gaze, his flesh transformed to stone.
     The distraction from those two men cost me in my struggle with Isabel.  I reached up instinctively to tear away the hands that closed firmly in a circle around my neck.  Isabel was supernaturally strong, but as she squeezed, my neck began to harden.  I could feel the skin changing, hundreds or perhaps thousands of tiny nerves pinching and flaring out, but changing into what exactly I could not say.
     Even with the defenses my body was independently making, Isabel was still slowly choking me into unconsciousness.  Her eyes refused to look at me, tightly shut against my gaze.
     "It's sad to see how weak your line has become.  Well, we can't choose our parents can we?" she sounded genuinely disappointed as she continued, "I expected more from the descendent of Medusa."
     Medusa.  The very word she thought to use to taunt and break the last reserves giving me strength of spirit snapped the final chain restricting an inner power.  My head became a beacon demanding that foreign reserve of strength crawl into its cavernous housing.  My hair stood up and out as if charged by a static shot.  Blonde strands wrapped around each other, undulating in hypnotic rhythms until the strands of