The chord is still draining out of me. I can't get the grimoire shut fast enough to stand on my own; the four disciplines leave me the way blood leaves a wound, and the cold rushes into the empty places, and my knees want the floor. Spite is the only thing holding my feet under me. Spite is running low.
But I'm not empty. Not all the way. A grimoire never runs all the way dry. I just get slivers where the men get storms, a strand where they get the whole cloth. I reach for one anyway. I reach for all four of them, one after another, as fast as I can find the door to each, because a sliver is still something, and something might be enough.
It isn't. Not once. Not for any of them.
Atlas first, because Atlas is always first into anything that wants killing. His storm is everywhere, charge prickling over my skin from clear across the chamber, ozone thick in the air, lightning crawling the walls in white veins that throw the carved spellwork into stark relief, a hundred years of Bolingbroke hands inked into the stone, watching. I reach for the storm in myself, the thin thread of it I've got, meaning to throw whatever charge I can find between him and the hands coming for him. I get as far as a prickle racing up my own arms, gooseflesh and nothing more, a spark with nowhere to go—and then the warden's mark on the back of his hand flares to a brand and turns his own magic against him, and whatever I was building dies half-built, wasted, gone before it was ever anything.
"No—" He goes down to one knee, fist in his own hair like he can hold the lightning in by force. The storm coughs out. "Get your hands—get yourfuckinghands off me?—"
Two of them have him before he's up.
"Atlas—" His name tears out of me and there's nothing under it, no power, no reach, just the word.
Ren is bleeding, not from a wound but fromuse.He's pushed the blood-sense past where it's safe again, the way I've begged him not to, and he's paying for it with the only thing he has left to give. His brown skin goes ashen. The thread that runs warm between us thins to a thread of cold.
I try blood-sense next, some thin sliver of Sanguis, meaning to hold the thread open between us with my own hands since his can't do it anymore. I get one heartbeat—his, faint, staggering, the copper taste flooding my tongue for half a second like something almost caught—and then a warden steps between us and the taste just stops, cut clean, like a door shutting on a room I'd only just found my way into.
"Everly." Quiet, the way he is even now, even gray and swaying on his feet. His hand opens toward me across thechamber, and I feel his magic reach for mine in the dark the way it always does, the way I've come to need like breathing. "I've got you. I've?—"
A warden steps into the space between us and the reach juststops,severed the same way mine was, and his hand stays open on nothing. Twice now. Two threads cut in the same handful of seconds, and I'm still standing here with my own hands empty.
Felix has a door. Felix always has a door, some branch, some future where the room goes another way and he's already standing in it. I feel him working the odds—something flickering at the edges of my sight first, the way chaos always announces itself before anything else—and then the air goes light and giddy around him, the deck of futures fanning out, that slight bright thinness to the room settling over everything, like the pressure has just dropped and the next thing that happens could still go either way. He's looking for the version of this where we walk out the way we walked in.
I reach for chaos too, my own thin thread of it, some sliver of Tumult that might turn up one more card before his run out. Nothing comes. Whatever's left in me is scraped down to the bone, and the discipline that answers slowest to a generalist doesn't answer at all tonight—not one flicker, not one frame, just my own eyes straining at nothing.
I watch the moment he doesn't find it either.
The air goes flat. It happens in less than a second, the brightness drops out and the room feels like a room again, heavy and close and exactly as bad as it is. It's only now, watching his hand go still, that I actually see what's in it. His deck hasn't been only tarot in months, not since the cards themselves started running thin on him, dry of the shapes he needed. He folded in an ordinary playing deck to fill the gaps. Then, when even that ran short, he started inking cards of his own, plain black stock, his own cramped white symbols standing in for whatever theother two couldn't say. I don't know when he started. I never asked. I never looked closely enough to notice until right now, in the worst possible second, that what's fanned across his palm is three different kinds of card.
He's dealt from all three tonight. Every time before this, somewhere in that fan has been the card he wanted.
Not this time. The light goes out of his eyes—not the spark, the spark stays, the spark is for the rest of us—but underneath, there's nothing. His hand stills on the cards.
"Huh," he says, soft, conversational, to no one. "Long odds." His smile climbs to its usual height and stops. "Worse than I told you."
He never told me anything. He never does. He just exhales and lets them take his wrists, and the cards spill out of his fingers across the stone: a tarot card facedown in the mess, a playing card beside it faceup on some black-suited king, one of his own inked cards skidding to a stop against my boot with a symbol on it I never learned to read. Three decks. Not one right answer between them.
And Callum.
Callum doesn't gutter and doesn't bleed and doesn't run out of doors. Callum getsheld.The constructs come up out of the floor—the dark, the binding shapes—and I understand with a lurch in my gut that I'm watching his own family's work close around him. The Bolingbroke legacy. The magic his bloodline made. The great cold inheritance his mother spent his whole childhood teaching him to serve. It knows him. It wasbuiltto know him.
I reach for shadow last, the only discipline I haven't tried, some sliver of Mors cold enough to buy him the half-second I bought Nell. I get as far as a chill at my own fingertips, one small cold thing with nowhere to go, before the constructs close around him whole. A sliver was never going to out-cold ahundred years of purpose-built dark. I know that even as I try. I try anyway.
He fights it. For one second he fights it, jaw set, shadow lashing out of him in a black arc—and the dark folds around him like it's glad to have him home, the whole chamber a few degrees colder for it, and holds. His face, when it locks down, is the coldest thing in a cold room.
He turns it toward the stairs, toward the woman he knows is coming, and says one word like a verdict.
"Mother."
Four times. Four times I found the door to something in myself and pushed, and four times it wasn't enough, and I don't have a fifth reach left in me for whatever's coming for me next. That's the part that will sit in me longest, longer than the fear does: not that I couldn't save them, but that I tried, in full view of all of it, and failed each one of them one at a time where I could watch it happen.
She isn't there to hear it yet. That's almost the worst part.
Five of us came down. I count us the way I count everything when the truth is too big to pick up.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Helena.
