I feel it leave them—not just the magic, but the thing it made of them. The light pouring off me goes so bright that Mara throws an arm over her eyes inside the dome. I keep mine shut and let it take me. It feels strange, and better than anything, like every nerve I own is lighting up at once.
It isn’t dark magic that floods in. There’s none of that left here to take. It’s what it left behind when it bled out and left them hollow: the despair. All of theirs at once, every soul in the Glen. They were abandoned, used up, thrown away by everyone who should have protected them—Aya, Amir, and then my own mother. Dark magic was the only thing that could make them feel anything. I feel their remorse for what it made them do, and under it, their grief. It’s mine now, all of it.
It fills me until I’m screaming. It’s too much, the despair and the power under it both, and it doesn’t stop. It keeps coming, more than any one body was ever meant to hold, until the light finally dims.
My knees give out, and I drop onto the floor. I stay there on my hands and knees, and for a long moment I don’t know where I am or what I just did. There’s just this power in me now, more than I’ve ever held, and it feels like a part of me already.
My vision comes back, and I look around the room.
The floor is covered in bodies, hundreds of them, fallen across the marble and the broken glass—but they aren’t creatures anymore. They’re witches and warlocks now, just people, out cold, their skin whole and their faces slack, the wrongness gone out of them. There’s not a monster left in the room.I turned them back.
I drag myself to my feet. The shields drop, and Mara’s through hers before it finishes falling, crashing into me, herarms locking around my neck. Josiah and Kade reach me right behind her. I hold her against me, my face in her neck, and just breathe.
“Are they all dead?” I ask into her hair.
Kade turns a slow circle over the bodies. “No,” she says. “They’re not.”
Then she turns toward the far corner, where Hella and Ellie pressed themselves against the shelves. “Hella?—“
Ellie’s standing there alone, holding Hella’s empty cloak against her chest.
Ellie sucks in a breath, then breaks down.
I pull back from Mara and turn to her. Ellie’s shoulders are shaking, her hands twisted in the cloth.
“Hella said it had to be done,” she gets out between sobs. “She said it was the only way.” She clutches the cloak tighter and presses her face into it. “She sacrificed herself to shield me.”
I already understand, because I felt it as it happened. The others had their own magic underneath the rot, what they were born with—when I pulled the dark out of them, they just dropped. But Hella had run on it too long. It was the only thing holding her up, and there was nothing underneath to catch her when it went. She spent the last of it shielding Ellie, and then she was gone.
“Well.” Kade’s voice cracks. She’s staring at the empty cloak in Ellie’s arms, the fight gone out of her. “I don’t know what the fuck she did that for.”
She doesn’t look away from it.
“I knew her a long time ago,” she says, not to any of us. “Back when we were in the same coven, before I was ever turned. When she still laughed at things.” She pulls in a breath, and it shakes. “Then the whole coven started turning to dark magic, every one of them falling in behind Aya Bailey. I didn’t agree with any ofit, so I left. Told myself everyone I knew there was already gone. Guess Hella wasn’t. Not all the way.”
Josiah steps to her and puts a hand on her shoulder. Kade shrugs it off hard, and when she wipes the back of her wrist across her eyes, she does it fast, like if she’s quick enough none of us will have seen.
“Kade—“
“If there’s anything I want to do right now, more than anything,” she says, glaring at Ellie, “it’s get you the fuck out of this Glen before you get any ideas.”
“You can’t leave us now, Aaron.” Ellie lifts her wet face to me. “Please.”
“I never agreed to stay here,” I say.
Ellie doesn’t argue. She looks around at her people, all of them out cold on the floor, and says nothing else.
“I have to get my mate out of here.” I look down at my hands, at the faint light still moving under my skin. “I don’t know what just happened to me.”
“We know.” Josiah’s watching me with a look I’ve never seen on him before—not his usual amusement, something closer to awe. “You just siphoned magic from hundreds of witches and warlocks. Thousands, maybe.” He shakes his head. “I can only imagine what you’re holding now.”
I look down at my hands again and wince. I can feel it all settling in—every power I pulled out of them, more than I know what to do with.
I find Mara. She’s staring up at me, her ears flat, her whiskers trembling, her tail lashing—the look she gets right before she breaks.
“I have to get my mate out of here,” I say again. “And I have to find Eric.”
“Oh.” Josiah straightens. “I know exactly where Eric is. I don’t need a location spell.”
