Page 114 of The Diamond in the Rough

Garraway’s eyes widened, and he let out a gasp, sinking to his knees.

But he didn’t die.

Instead, he swept his arm to the side, and it was Mulrooney who dropped with a dull thud, his eyes wide and shocked.

“Boss!” The cry came from Gennaro.

Garraway bared his teeth at me in a kind of rictus grin. “Well, well, well,” he breathed. “Turns out your mother was right about you.”

I didn’t bother asking what she’d been right about.

The cold intensified as Garraway waved his hands, the gestures clearly deliberate and rehearsed. Part of a spell.

I really, really wished I’d done more to train myself to use my magic—not justnotuse it, but toactuallyuse it. To focus and direct and shape.

I wasn’t upset that Mulrooney was dead. He’d made his choices.

I was upset that Garraway wasn’t.

Because I wasn’t sure if I could muster that much magical energy again, and now he was expecting it. Or, at least, was expectingsomethingfrom me.

I wasn’t sure if it would be better if he over- or under-estimated my capacity—if the first, he might be more cautious, and if the second, I might surprise him.

Either way, though, there were three of them—still living, anyway—and one of me, and I’d refused to learn necromancy from Archie in order to get closer to balanced odds.

I wondered if I’d take him up on the offer if I made it through this alive. Right now, the idea was pretty tempting.

Breathing was getting harder, my bones colder from the inside out, and I could tell that if I didn’t do somethingnow, I wasn’t going to have any magic left to do anything at all. Including breathe.

That’s the thing about magic.

Once you have it as a part of you, whether from birth or from Arcanavirus, it’spartof you, and the only way to totally strip it from you is to strip away your life, too. If Garraway tookallmy magic, it would kill me.

And I wasn’t going to let him do that without a fight.

Besides, if I used up more of it, that would be less he could take from me, and I took at least some perverse satisfaction in the thought that even if I couldn’t stop him or save myself, I could at least keep him from getting as much as he wanted.

But I had to do something soon, before I no longer had the strength.

I let myself go limp, slumping closer to the filthy floor, trying to give the impression that I was losing energy more rapidly than I was—or, at least, that I had less left than I actually did.

I heard the shift in Garraway’s voice, heard the slight shuffle as either Gennaro or Edson took a step, although whether toward or away from me, I couldn’t tell. They all thought Garraway was winning.

He was.

But I wasn’t done yet.

I debated whether taking out Gennaro would be more productive than trying to get through Garraway’s defenses. If I killed Gennaro, I would take out one of Garraway’s followers, but Garraway himself would still be at full strength. More than, maybe, if he had the ability to use the magic he was taking from me right away.

I was pretty sure I didn’t have enough left in me tokillGarraway, but I might—justmight—have the ability to throw him just enough that he’d have to stop what he was doing. To, in essence, do to him what he was trying to do to me.

I couldn’t totally drain him. Not even close. And I wouldn’t consume his magic the way he was consuming mine—death magic would let me drain hislife, not his power. But life is power, and power is life. If I could weaken him enough, he’d have to conserve energy to defend himself and stay alive, and that might be enough to keep him from draining me completely.

It wasn’t really a choice.

I scraped up everything I could from inside myself, my insides feeling raw and weak, the cold from Garraway’smagic freezing in my marrow. I pooled it in the pit of my stomach, folding myself around it, trying to use the meat and bone of my body to protect it as much as I could until I’d put every little scrap I could into it.

And then Ipushed.