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I flinched when the needle lined up with my friend's neck, but then her body went limp again, and the panic was over. It was hard to be upset about that much.
“What did she say?” Jack rasped, wide-eyed as he ran a hand down his face. Sariel was holding back Johnny, who looked five seconds from tearing out all of our throats as we hovered around Marilyn.
“She said she couldn’t feel her magic,” I whispered.
Jack let out a pained sound right as my stomach was twisted in knots at the thought, nausea tickling the back of my throat.
A witch's magic was sacred. To have it stripped from them was reserved for only the worst offenders because it was a punishment worse than death. Jack had ranted for an hour one evening about how it was one of the most inhumane punishments available to them.
“Fucking Francesca,” he hissed, lip curling back in a sneer as he rounded the table to check on our friend. His face was pale as he looked her over, jaw working like he was only barely keeping himself contained.
“What did she mean?” Johnny demanded, then repeated himself more aggressively when nobody jumped to explain.
“Francesca likely had her cut off from her magic. It’s… a very cruel fate.”
Dr. Vasille was the brave soul to speak up as Jack's fingertips hovered over Marilyn, brow furrowed in concentration. Slowly, color began returning to his face, and a red hue filled his cheeks. I could only imagine it was the rage he clearly had about this form of torture that they’d used on her—if her hysterical cries were to be believed, that was.
“Theywhat?” I flinched at the amount of growl in Johnny's voice.
Jack cleared his throat. “It’s impossible to tell until she wakes up and is able to try connecting with her magic. There's no point in speculating for now. Maybe she was just too disoriented to cast any.”
While that sounded reasonable, I got the feeling he was just making an excuse to keep Johnny from exploding when the wolf hurried to the sleeping witch's side.
Oh, Marilyn.
Sariel rubbed a hand down my back as I mourned for her.
We all cleared out for the evening except for Johnny, heading to our separate homes. Jack joined us since he was right across the street.
“If they really took her magic, she may never recover,” he whispered. “She didn’t deserve that. They should have just killed her instead.”
At Sariel’s noise of disagreement, Jack shook his head, looking at us with unusually sad eyes. “You’ll see what I mean when she wakes up. If she makes it through this, it’ll be because of him. I can’t imagine how she’ll do it, though.”
“Marilyn is more resilient than you’re giving her credit for,” my mate reprimanded gently.
The witch shrugged. “I hope you’re right.”
The very next day, Dr. Vasille was eager to announce that the fallen-blood cure had passed the trial stage with flying colors. Other than a handful of adverse reactions, everyone else who had been experiencing symptoms of madness reported that they were gone.
“Of course, there may be long-term consequences that we can’t see yet,” she explained to Sariel, Auren, and me. “Fertility problems being the main concern, but there are a few others.”
She went on to list off a few more that made my mind boggle, scribbling notes down as she spoke. “Anyway, I think we could distribute it to the masses—if we can produce enough, that is.”
Her gaze darted to me, and I smiled at her. “I’ll donate as much as I can to get us going.”
Auren nodded at my agreement, looking happier than he had in days. “We’ll start with the ones in the compound who haven’t gotten it yet, then put out the word online,” he said, obviously plotting out the best course of action moving forward.
I got comfortable in the chair nearby, extended my arm for Dr. Vasille to start drawing from me, and watched him go off with a small smile before looking toward Marilyn and Johnny. This time, he was curled around her, both of them, sleeping through the quiet meeting.
They’re going to be fine,Sariel told me, sounding so confident, I almost believed him.
There was a prick of pain in my arm, and I winced.I think they have a long road ahead of them if she was really cut off.
Marilyn loved her magic. She’d spent her evenings and sometimes even her mornings meditating to connect with it, not to mention all the training to keep her abilities sharp. Being a normal human would be devastating to her, though maybe it would help for her to have Reese around. Our resident human was nothing if not an inspiration.
It didn’t even take a week before all of the fallen-blood wolves were vaccinated. Dr. Vasille showed a handful of us how to administer them when it became clear things could be going faster than they were, and we’d managed to get every wolf treated.
Marilyn had woken up amidst it all and had another breakdown, though this one was much less frantic. Johnny held her as she cried, and we’d quietly cleared the clinic; when Jack came out and let us know that she was, in fact, cut off from her magic, I felt it like a physical blow.
