Rhazek’s fingers are still laced with mine, his palm burning against my skin. “Sable.”
“I’m here,” I say.
“That is precisely my concern.”
“Then be concerned quietly.”
Corin makes a strained sound from the perimeter. “As the only person here attempting to keep the yard from becoming a crater, I would like to register that I, too, am concerned, though apparently my concerns have been demoted to decorative.”
The ward post beside him gives a sharp metallic groan. He grips it with both hands, boots planted wide in the scorchedgrass, his stronger aura flaring around his shoulders like a cloak made of winter light. The iron anchors hammered into the earth vibrate in sequence, one after another, ringing through the morning air. Frost steams off the broken ground. The trees beyond the yard shiver though no wind touches them.
The stabilization phase tightens.
Rhazek’s power rises first because of course it does, huge and ancient and infernal, a molten pressure with teeth. It wants to surge around me, over me, past me, not from malice but from habit. Everything in him has learned to arrive like a storm and solve danger by becoming the largest violence in the room.
I do not let it.
I pull.
The infernal current snaps toward me.
Rhazek inhales sharply, his hand tightening around mine for a fraction of a second before he forces his grip to loosen. I feel the effort. It travels through the bond like a muscle unclenching after centuries of being braced for impact.
“Do not take too much,” he says, voice low.
“I’m not taking,” I answer, keeping my gaze locked on his. “I’m drawing.”
“That distinction is not comforting.”
“It isn’t meant to be.”
The current hits my veins like liquid fire.
My back arches, but I do not step away. Heat races through my palms, wrists, elbows, shoulders, and chest, filling every hidden channel the bond has carved through me. It should burn. It does burn, but not like injury. It burns like the first lungful of air after nearly drowning, like blood returning to a numb hand, vicious and bright and alive enough to hurt.
I taste smoke and iron. I smell scorched frost, Rhazek’s skin, the copper of my blood dried in the grooves beneath us. Myhearing narrows until the whole world is breath, pulse, iron, flame.
Corin curses. “Steady!”
“I am,” I grit out.
“You are glowing.”
“I gathered.”
“No, Sable, you are very much glowing.”
Rhazek’s eyes burn red-gold as he studies me, and the terror on his face is worse than the heat. He is letting me do this, but every ancient instinct in him is clawing at the inside of its cage. His shoulders are rigid. The tendons in his throat stand out. His power moves through me because I invited it, because I reached for it, because this time the ritual recognizes my choice before it recognizes his fear.
The trapped corruption shard reacts.
Above the circle, the air folds.
Darkness gathers into a shape with too many edges and no honest body. It descends from nothing, a shadow form suspended over our joined hands, long and thin, its center pulsing dark red like a diseased heart. It is not Maltherion whole. It is not even a mind. But it remembers appetite. It remembers command. It remembers how to turn love into leverage.
The stink of it spills down over us, rotted roses and wet ash, and my stomach clenches.
Rhazek’s free hand lifts, flame already forming around his fingers.
