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“Possibly,” Jianyu agreed.
“He must be cloaked in some kind of magic. I can’t sense him,” Viola said, frowning. There was no sign of any additional heartbeat. “We need to find him.” But she couldn’t bring herself to leave Ruby or Theo alone with this monstrous thing.
“You stay. Help them,” Jianyu said, as though reading the direction of her thoughts. “I will find Jack.”
“The opium—”
“Will not kill me. And I do not need my affinity to deal with Jack Grew,” Jianyu reminded her with a steely expression. He plunged into the fog, leaving Viola to help Theo and Ruby on her own.
Viola stepped toward them, drawing Theo’s attention. When he saw her, relief briefly flashed across his face, but then the creature swiped at him, drawing his focus back.
Theo swung the candelabra again, but the brass base barely left a mark on the rocklike hide of the beast. “I can’t get her free. It’s like fighting a ghost.”
In the beast’s grip, Ruby had gone limp and was no longer struggling to get away. Her skin was turning an ashen gray, and her eyes had fluttered shut. The creature was crushing her. Even now, her affinity already beginning to go numb from the opium, Viola could sense Ruby’s heartbeat slowing.
Only a few minutes before, Viola had felt herself cracking in two because she had believed that Ruby had been lost to her. She realized now how very wrong she had been. This was something far worse. Viola would see Ruby married a hundred times over before she’d accept her death.
“We have to hurry, or it will kill her,” Viola said. “Can you draw its attention toward you?” She was already reaching for Libitina, sending up the desperate prayer of a sinner to her god. “If you keep it busy, I will carve her out.”
False magic for false magic. Please let this work.
Theo looked doubtful, but he did what she said and doubled around the creature before launching another attack from its other side. Swinging the heavy base of the candelabra once more, he sliced through the fog that formed its legs, again and again, until the creature turned on him.
It was all the entrance Viola needed. In a flash, she lunged for the billowing body of the thing, plunging her blade into the fog that formed its arm as she focused her intentions through the dagger and sliced downward. The blade tore through the smoke, ripping it apart as easily as if the creature had been made of paper. As the dismembered arm evaporated into nothing, Viola barely had time to try to catch Ruby and break her fall as she tumbled free.
The creature itself went suddenly still before exploding into a burst of flame and dark smoke. Viola braced herself over Ruby to protect the still unconscious girl from the icy blast. She murmured another desperate prayer as she touched Ruby’s too-pale cheek.
“Please,” she whispered, urging Ruby to wake up. She tapped Ruby’s cheek gently.
Ruby gasped, drawing air back into her lungs, and opened her eyes. Immediately she jerked away from Viola as though she were still struggling against the creature that had held her. It was only when Viola backed up, her hands raised in surrender, that Ruby finally calmed herself enough to truly see who had hold of her.
“Viola?” Confusion flashed through her expression, but then her eyes fluttered shut again.
Theo had already come over to where Viola was cradling Ruby on the cold marble floor of the altar. “Is she—”
“She’ll be okay,” Viola said before Theo could so much as speak the words. “But we must go,” Viola told him. “This smoke, it’s too much.…”
Her affinity felt so far from her now that she could no longer feel Ruby’s heartbeat. Nor could she sense anything or anyone else. The cold flames were still climbing, the strange murky smoke still billowing. She had no idea whether Jianyu had found Jack and managed to stop him.
“We need to get her into the air,” Viola told Theo. And then she would return and put a stop to this madness alongside Jianyu.
Theo helped to lift Ruby, supporting her with his arm around her waist, as Viola stood.
“Theo?” Ruby was waking now, coming back to herself. She blinked, then saw Viola standing there. “Viola? You came back.…”
“Come,” Viola commanded, looking away. It was too painful to see the warmth there in Ruby’s bottle-green eyes, too painful to hope. “We must go. While we still can.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” a voice said.
Jack Grew stepped from the smoke as another enormous creature began forming itself from the smoke that billowed behind him.
Theo ran for Jack, but he didn’t notice the beast forming from smoke and fog until it was too late and he was already caught up in the monster’s clutches.
Jack was murmuring something, some strange gibberish as the whites of his eyes began to go black as the night. It looked as though light and life had flooded out, leaving only emptiness.
Malocchio. As dangerous as the devil, and Viola knew that no cornicello would protect them from this perversion. This dark, adulterated magic had no place in this world.
Viola kept her blade raised and ready—it seemed enough to keep the deadly fog away—keeping one eye on the large figure as it formed behind Jack and another on the creature who held tight to Theo. She could not risk throwing her only weapon, but if she could get past Jack, she could slice through the demon and free Theo by destroying it. If she could only slow Jack’s heart, it would have been easy enough. She would not even regret it, taking his life here on the altar consecrated to god. But her affinity was dead to her by now, an effect of the opium that was thick and sweetly cloying in the smoke around them.
