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His beautiful hands were all but gone, just two lumps poking up from what had been his stomach, with a few ridges where knuckles had once been. I covered them with my own anyway. Somehow I didn’t mind anymore, didn’t find them alien or horrifying or gross. They were just part of him, part of Jules. That was enough.
I closed my eyes, mainly to shut out the ring of staring faces. And as soon as I did, that feeling of connection strengthened. Maybe it was just my imagination working overtime, but I could swear I felt it: his anger, his confusion, his almost desperate desire to move, to gasp for air he didn’t need, to see—
But mostly, I felt his fear.
It was cold, overwhelming, debilitating, almost as much as what was happening to his body. The spell was cruel; it didn’t bother to trap the mind. Maybe Augustine hadn’t thought it necessary. After all, a human or fey would be dead by now.
But Jules was neither of those things.
And so he was left to drive himself mad on an endless loop of speculation: what if there was no way to reverse this? What if he was trapped like this forever? Hope gone, looks gone, just this piteous and pitied thing, unable to move, to speak, to do anything but scream into a darkness that would never end, and never answer back—
My hands tightened over his, and the torrent suddenly stopped. And then increased, a hundredfold, a wall of babbling, half-mad terror hitting me all at once. I gasped, and opened my eyes to find myself bent over him, sick and dizzy and quietly sobbing, my tears splashing down onto the ruined chest . . .
And changing.
Like a drop of rain falling into a lake, the eddies rippled outward, disturbing the flawless flow of the skin, revealing small blemishes in the instant they passed over: a hair, a freckle, a scar. I let go of his hands in surprise, and the skin retained the imprint of my hands for a second. And it, too, looked different, with the knuckles clearly visible in the instant before that eerie nonflesh washed over them again, erasing them as smoothly as footprints in the tide.
It was so quick it made me wonder if I’d imagined it. But no. I scowled at the too-perfect flesh, because I had seen it, if only for an instant. I had seen Jules, inside the body bag his flesh was busy crafting for him.
And somehow I had to find a way to get him out.
I vaguely registered Marco pulling everyone back to the lounge—the witches, the Circle, everyone except for the vampires. This wasn’t for outsiders, if they couldn’t help. This was about family.
Someone dimmed the lights; I don’t know why. Maybe to give the gawkers less to stare at; maybe because it just felt like the right thing to do. And vampire eyes didn’t need the light. Mine didn’t, either, with a diffuse beam leaking through from the lounge, illuminating Jules like a spotlight.
It was enough. It was more than enough. I pressed my hands against him, both of them, palms flat and fingers outstretched, gripping hard enough to make indentations in his skin.
And then I swiped down, revealing pink nipples, hard abs, a concave stomach, and the brief indentation of a naval. It looked like a plasterer had taken a trowel to a wall, scraping away the surface to reveal what lay beneath. And what lay beneath was Jules.
He was still in there, somewhere.
But a second later, the healthy skin had been washed away, replaced by the pale, poreless perfection I had already come to hate.
Someone put a hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged it off. And tried again, but it was the same. Wherever my hands rested, and for a small space around them, the skin looked normal, and the body was whole, straight, perfect. But as soon as I took them away, or tried to move onto another spot, it was as if whatever magic was there simply vanished.
And I didn’t know how to make it stay.
“No,” I said, helplessly. “No!”
“Cassie. Come away.”
I looked up to see Marco staring at me, dark eyes troubled. “Come away? I’m trying to help him!”
“I know. But there’s nothing you can do. We . . . we’ll call someone—”
“Who?” I demanded. “We already tried Augustine, and if the maker and a senior war mage can’t remove it, do you really think—”
“What I think is that you’re exhausting yourself for nothing. You need—”
“Nothing?” I stared at him. “Don’t you see it?”
“Don’t I see what?”
I looked back down, at where my balled fists were resting on the pink and perfect skin of Jules’ stomach. It looked like some kind of modern art installation, where a white painted mannequin is punched only to reveal part of a living person beneath. Only Marco didn’t see that person. Marco, I realized blankly, didn’t see anything.
I blinked at him, confused. I’d thought maybe I’d inherited some of Roger’s skill, that maybe that was why . . . but was I imagining things? Was this necromancy or just wishful thinking? Or something else entirely?
“Come on, girl,” he told me gently. “You’ve got raccoon eyes. You need rest—”
