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No,I gasped.Fuck no.
The magic stopped pouring from my hands—and I screamed, my body bowed over Ark's corpse. This scream came from deep in my soul, and trembled with my own power and rage.
Fine,I snarled.I’ll do it. Just heal him. Please.
"Steady," Dev breathed against the nape of my neck, his hands tightening on my wrists. A blanket of soothing shadows wrapped around my soul, but it could do nothing to stop my body lifting off the ground, arching in pain. My eyes bulged out of my skull, smoke burning its way through my pores. "Avie!"
"Present," I gasped with a twisted laugh, but how much longer would that be true? The magic made me a bitch in my own body, and if I hadn't hallucinated the whole interaction, I'd agreed to be its puppet queen.
My eyes rolled back into my head at the next rush of pain, and when I gasped, flames coated my tongue. In a spark of delirious clarity, I realised the infernal relics were made ofhellfire,a purer, hotter version of the infernal family's black flames. And I'd taken enough of it into myself to level the entirety of London.
"Avie!" Dev yelled, but I heard him through water, garbled and distant.
My eyes were wide open, but I saw nothing but fire.
"Stop,stop!That's enough. Avie, it's enough, you can stop."
I felt through a numb haze as my knees lifted off the grass, felt wind whip at my hair and batter my tattered clothes. Two more ribs snapped, my body caving in on itself. Itwasn'tenough. Ark was dead, and cold, and there was no life in his body. It would never be enough.
I couldn't do it again. I couldn't sit at my mate's bedside and listen to every second tick on the clock, staring, watching, waiting for any sign of life. I couldn't do it again.
Shadows tightened around me, and this time they cinched around my physical body as well as my soul. These shadows were sharper, vicious; they bit into my wounds, making my breath hitch and my screams stutter.
The magic coursing through me faltered, and in a rush, fragmented images flashed through my head, all of Arkan. A sword puncturing his stomach; him pulling it out with a strange smugness in his flat expression. A whip coiling around his neck, choking off his air until he suffocated—and sat back up with rage and murder in his eyes. An axe hacking off his arm at the elbow, the limb crashing to the stone floor of an ancient fortress, and Ark bending to retrieve it.
I jerked out of the dizzying flash of images, my throat swollen and burning.2
Why are you doing this?I demanded of the magic, even my mental voice raw.Haven't you hurt me enough?
The images flashed again, over and over, sword, whip, dismemberment—wait.
There's no blood.Ark had been stabbed with a sword, and his arm had been hacked messily off, and he hadn't bled at all.
This is weird as fuck,I gasped, exhausted deep in my psyche.I've had enough.The magic surged strangely, like a gentle wave instead of the burning storm it had been before, almost like … it was agreeing?
You've had enough, too? Huh. Then let's … let's get out of here and go find somewhere soft and comfy for a nap.
I was ready to check myself into a facility, because I could haveswornthe magic let out a sigh of relief. But it wasmagic—the magic that pretty much killed me twice today, and only failed to kill me because my mates were stubborn.
Shit, my mates! My wraith!
Heal him,I ordered again, panic surging back through my chest, draining my energy and strength even more.
Those images of Ark being hurt and unbothered flashed through my mind again. There was a strange tone to the images this time. I could have sworn the relics' magic called me a dumbass.
Shadows bit into my shoulders, startling me back to awareness. Ah, shit, we were still in the fair, and Eidolon was probably still trying to murder us for shits and giggles.
I groaned, fighting my eyelids as they forced open—and scowling at the thin tendrils of shadow that had opened them against my will. Bastards.
"Just so you know," I rasped, my voice little more than a hoarse breath, "me and the magic both want naptime."
"Go," Dev rumbled. "I've got her; they need your power."
I made a grumpy sound. I didn't want to go.Orgive up my power. It was my new bestie.3
The shadows released my eyelids, brushing a loving caress down my cheek and—I knew that touch! I knew those shadows!
I snapped my burned, flaky hand out4and grabbed the man kneeling in front of me.
