by May Dawson
I looked up through the window, trying to see where the bullet had come from. The windows of the building looked blankly back at me. Someone could have shot Tyson from a lot of places up there. Someone could shoot at us again from a lot of places.
“We’ve got to get out of the line of fire,” I said. “Can you get up?”
He groaned as he pushed himself to his hands and knees. Blood was pouring out of the wound fast. He staggered, and when I wrapped my arm around his waist, he leaned into me.
Together, the two of us hobbled into the bathroom, where there was no line of sight from a window into the apartment. As soon as he sank to the tile floor, I ran back through the house to the door. I hadn’t used my magic much since I came to the academy, and maybe I was rusty, but I ran my hand over the door and hoped for the best.
I murmured, “Sigillum.” Magic sparked under my fingertips, a glow of light that flashed in the dim apartment.
Then I ran back to the bathroom, tripping to my knees beside Tyson in my rush.
“Hang in there,” I told him, before pulling the knife out of my boot and slicing up his shirt. It was already drenched in blood, and his blood was slick across the tile floor, soaking through the knees of my jeans.
He’d bleed out if I didn’t have magic.
“Maddie, I’m done for,” he said. His voice came out a rasp. “We both know that. If you fight your way out of here now, you can make whoever did this pay—”
“Shut up and stop distracting me,” I said, because I could talk to Ty that way. Hopefully, he knew I was gruff because later on, I’d be able to curl up against his side and he’d toy with my hair. Then, this nightmare scene playing out in front of me now would fade into memory.
The bullet was still in there somewhere. First things first, I had to stop him from bleeding out. I put my hand across the wound, felt it pumping his warm blood against my palm. “Plaga clautadur.”
The blood flow seemed to lessen. Or maybe that was my wishful thinking. I closed my eyes, pouring all my magic into him, and magic seemed to warm the air between his body and my hand.
“Pretty sure that punctured a lung,” he said with effort, and he drew a ragged, wet breath that made my heart lurch.
“Hold on,” I said. I pressed my fingers into his ragged flesh, imagining the path of the bullet as it worked its way back out.
It took so long I thought it wasn’t working, and then something hard bumped against my fingertips. I almost gasped in relief, then I dug my fingers into the wound to pull out the bullet casing. I stuffed it into my pocket for later, leaving blood smears across my jeans. It was evidence to track down whoever did this to Ty.
Of course, we might not need evidence. I expected them to come through that door in a minute and take another crack at killing us.
I muttered the words of a healing spell in Latin. My fingers burned with energy so hot that it ached as his muscles and organs knit together under my touch. His wound healed faster than I ever healed anyone before, and I had to pull my fingertips away abruptly as his wound began to knit together.
New skin creeped rapidly across the wound, then formed together, looking like a scar, then faded entirely.
I couldn’t stop my magic from pouring out now. It couldn’t be restrained from flowing into Tyson. But just like the last time I did this, I felt myself growing wobbly. My vision faded black around the edges.
Ty turned over onto his side, and his face was the one thing I saw through my suddenly narrow vision. He was still covered in his blood, pale from its loss, but he looked up at me in wonder.
“Best girlfriend ever,” he said weakly, and I had to smile even as I swayed.
Then I fell on top of him, the world fading out, and he caught me in his arms, even though my mind kept falling.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Silas
When I stepped through the door in the woods, I hoped to find Frederick and Isabelle, manning the night watch once again.
Instead, Sebastian Wright looked up at me as I emerged naked and shivering from the cold on the other side. He didn’t even try to hide his smile as I reached for the robe that usually hung on the chair, only to find it empty.
“I doubt Mistress Keen wants to see me naked,” I grouched, stomping past the maps and chalkboards to the wardrobe in the corner. I found a robe inside and threw it on, knotting in tightly in the front.
“You might be surprised,” Sebastian said. “It’s not as if she gets much action otherwise.”
Sebastian had been in the orphanage with me, an arrival the same month, the month of S in the baby name book. We’d lost Samantha Yule, the girl between us, to the flu when we were eight.
“Do you know why she wants to see me?” I headed across the room to the tall silver coffee pot in the corner, but when I lifted it, it was too light in my hand.
I turned to Sebastian in exasperation, just as he raised his steaming mug in a toast. Despite his small, cheerful torments, his voice was serious when he said, “Things are getting bad, Silas.”
“They’re always bad.” I moved in front of the fire, holding out my hands. No matter the reason, I couldn’t go in front of Keen when I was shaking. At least Sebastian hadn’t doused the fire just to be an ass.
“Worse,” he said. “We’ve got just this rip and the outpost at Girsk now. They’re trying to close all the rips, Sy.”
“They’ve always been trying to close them. Is our government suddenly effective? Because that would be terrifying.” The government thought they could end the instability caused by the Rips by sealing them all from the inside, the way Avalon had. Keen and her rebels believed that the only way to heal the universe was to heal it all.
“Even on our side, people are tired of the war. Tired of losing people.” Sebastian paused in front of the chalkboard, absently twirling a stick of white chalk between his fingertips, which were always ink- and paint-stained. His dreamy, mischievous nature had caught him more than a few beatings when we were growing up, both at the orphanage and the academy after. I’d tried to channel his personality on the other side.
“Everyone who fights in a war is always sick of it,” I said. “It’s only civilians who think war sounds like a fine way to spend a soldier’s life.”
He shook his head, as if I was oversimplifying. “Well. You should go talk to Keen.”
“I will. You know, Frederick usually has something in his flask to give me the courage to face her and her knitting needles,” I teased. “Where is he?”
Sebastian hesitated, and my stomach dropped.
“Where is he?” I repeated, my tone suddenly grim.
“He’s not dead,” Sebastian rushed to assure me. But in our world, that wasn’t much of a positive.
“Prison, then.”
“According to our intel, they already moved him to the work camp at Elegiah.”
“Isabelle?” I asked, my mind spinning. “How’s Belly holding up?”
Sebastian glanced away, shaking his head. So she was gone too, then.
“Shit.” I crouched to the ground, bracing my elbows on my knees before my legs could give out. “We’ve got to help them. Is Keen working up a rescue plan?”
Sebastian didn’t answer.
I straightened slowly, trying to push away the images my imagination helpfully brought to mind—Frederick being tortured, Isabelle wasting away, growing as thin and pinched as we’d been at the orphanage, then worse.
“I’ll talk to Keen,” I said, my voice coming from far away. My friends must trust I’d come for them. What was the point of being one of the most powerful magicians of my generation if I didn’t’ save my friends?
As I headed down the hall, I glanced through an open door through an empty room to the windows. The moon shone outside, scattering silver light across the trees. It was the same moon I’d left behind in the shifter’s world. It was the same moon that shone on Elegiah.
Keen’s door was open. I stopped at the doorframe, waiting to be invited. Her
knitting needles clacked together ceaselessly, and her head was bowed above her desk, reading the papers that flipped on their own, levitated by her magic. She took her sweet time acknowledging me, though she knew I was there.
When she looked up, she said, “You must wonder why I summoned you.”
We weren’t doing greetings.
“Rescue mission?” I suggested lightly, aching for that to be my purpose here. “I can bring our rebels back and make it home in time for PT in the morning.”
“Home?” she asked, her eyebrows arching. “No, Silas. We need you on that side.”
“And we need Isabelle and Frederick on this one,” I said.
“I need you to stop worrying about your friendships and start worrying about the fate of the world,” she snapped. “Let me manage our situation here. I’ve just got you over there. One goddamn arrogant kid to save the universe.”
It wasn’t like her to lose her temper. She was terrifying without ever raising her voice, but the fact that current events had even Keen coming undone made fear worm its way into my heart. I stuck my hands into the pockets of my robe. “I’m not really a kid anymore. Can’t argue the rest.”
She fixed me with a stern look. “Let me worry about Isabelle and Frederick and the others.”
“The others?”
She shook her head, rejecting my question. “You worry about the rips. We’ve intercepted a new prophecy, and you’ve got a new mission.”
New mission? First Isabelle and Fred were in trouble and I couldn’t even help, and now I had a new mission?
But she was studying me, so I waited, my face dispassionate.
She went on, “There’s a coven that’s come to our attention. They call themselves the Day, and they’re on the verge of changing the tide of the battle. They think they’ll cure the werewolves, then kill them or convert them.”
“Cute plan.”
“They want Maddie Northsea.”
“Of course they do. So I have to protect her?” Was she in danger now, while I was here?
“No, Silas,” she said. “You have to infiltrate the Day. They’re on the verge of discovering the Rips, and when they do, they’ll try to use them.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“They’re about to bring the apocalypse upon us all,” she said. “And only you can stop it, so I hope you are going to live up to your reputation, The Incredible Silas Zip.”
“It sounds less incredible when you say it,” I said, even though my mind was racing.
“It sounds less incredible when you know you tagged yourself that way when you were just a child,” she shot back.
I spread my hands out as I shrugged. “I grew into it, more-or-less.”
“For the fate of the universe, I hope you did,” she said. “Lord help us all. Well, sit down. We’ve got a lot of information to get through before you return to the academy.”
“Do you really believe the prophecy?” I asked, taking the seat opposite hers.
“Don’t you?” she asked. “Or are you at the academy for fun now? Because you didn’t get enough academy here in our world?”
I’d complained quite a bit about this assignment, but I certainly hadn’t complained to Keen’s face. I’d been elated when we were rescued from the orphanage, leaving behind that long room where we slept, with Sam’s empty bed, the close air and scent of boiled cabbage and tooth decay. Then I’d realized nine years of the rebels’ academy were hardly a rescue.
I shrugged. “It didn’t come true. But I believe in Northsea and myself. We’ll find a way to stop the rips.”
“And then you’ll come home and rescue your friends.”
“Yes,” I said, without hesitating.
Even though when I thought of leaving Maddie behind, it seemed like my heart would be torn apart. But I’d survive. Most importantly, so would my friends… on both sides of the Rip.
My life had never been pleasant, but if I’d learned one thing at our academy, it was that my comfort didn’t matter. I was put in this world to be useful, not happy.
“Tell me what I’ve got to do,” I said.
Chapter Thirty
Maddie
“Maddie, wake up.” Ty’s voice seemed to come from a long way away. I was so tired and warm that I wanted to roll over in bed and ignore him. “Come on, kiddo. I’m freaking out…”
His words tugged on me, and I started to surface just in time to remember five a.m. wake-ups, physical training, and Rafe’s flashing dark eyes.
I jerked up to a sitting position, almost slamming into Ty, who fell back on his ass to avoid having his nose broken.
“PT?” I asked, my voice harsh from sleep.
“Oh no,” he said. “Good news. We aren’t late for PT. We’ve been kidnapped by witches and they’re probably going to try to kill us soon.”
The room seemed to revolve around me, and I rubbed my aching temple with one hand as the last events before I blacked out came back to me. “I passed out from using magic…”
“From saving my life,” he filled in helpfully. “By ignoring my many requests…”
“To let you die,” I completed the sentence.
He leaned in close to me, until his forehead met mine, his hand slipping up to cup the back of my head. My breath hitched as his nearness.
“Which you should have done because I don’t care about anything on this planet as much as I care about you, Maddie,” he said softly.
I’d meant to continue our joking run-on sentence, but there was no quick quip to follow that.
“Well, you’d better start caring,” I murmured. “I happen to need you in my life, Ty.”
It was too true, and so I hurried to make a glib remark to cover my real feeling. “And if you were gone, I’d be lonely in here.”
I gestured around the cell we were in. Three walls were cinder block, windowless. There were chains suspended from exposed wooden beams in the ceiling and more chains were attached to metal loops set into the cold concrete floor.
“Since the two of us are together, I imagine we’ll make short work of escaping,” he said.
The fourth wall was prison bars.
Our captors were certainly witches, because there was no door.
“Oh, certainly,” I said.
On the other side of the bars, there was a plain gray door that led out of the cinder block room. I looked up, but there were no lights above us, just the metal hooks that the chains were hung from. The fluorescent lights were in cages outside our cell.
I reached for my pendant, but didn’t find the chain around my neck. My fingers curled frantically across the bare skin of my throat. The pendant was gone. Panic raced through my chest. We were on our own.
Something glinted around my wrist, though, and I frowned as I raised my new bracelet in front of my face. “Do you have one of these, Ty?”
He glanced down at his arms, which were unadorned except for tattoos and blood splatter. “I feel left out.”
I rubbed my thumb across the gold cuff, and I could’ve sworn I felt the spark of magic within the cool metal.
There was still dried blood all over Ty’s chest—he must have taken off the shreds of his t-shirt—and soaked through his jeans.
“You look like an actual trainwreck,” I said. “What happened?”
I didn’t want to think about what happened to us next. I knew what the witches intended: a born shifter female like me had powerful magic they could bleed to power their spells.
They’d probably bleed Ty, too, since he was available. But they didn’t have a reason to keep him around for long.
“Three men came through the door and I tried to fight them, but I was still so weak… I couldn’t even shift. Then they used some kind of spell on me, knocked me out.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Maddie.”
His voice was full of regret, bordering on self-loathing.
“Oh, don’t do that,” I said, touching his face. There was a smear of blood on his cheekbone, dried now. “We’re
together. We’re still in the fight. You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
His lips pursed to one side, a bit of that usual Tyson mischief sparking in his eyes. “Should we be sorry we’re missing curfew?”
I groaned. “I had so many texts from Rafe asking about our timeline and reminding me to be punctual. As if I’ve ever not been punctual.”
Ty made a see-saw motion with his hand. “Weeell…”
I frowned at him. Rude. “We have a very good reason to be delayed this time.”
“Remember the time you were late for breakfast because you and Jensen stopped to have sex in the shower?”
“You weren’t supposed to know about that.”
“Just because we can’t scent you when you’re in the shower doesn’t mean we don’t know. Especially when you two break open multiple shampoo bottles and yank down the shower rod…”
“Okay, maybe I’m not always completely punctual,” I said, in order to halt this trip down memory lane.
“Remember when you were late to Myths because you were trying to read between classes?”
“Technically I’d been trying to read in class, and it just kind of spiraled from there…” I wouldn’t have been so foolish as to try that in Myths, which had a harsh female instructor who I mostly respected and slightly feared.
Nor had I particularly enjoyed that our desks were only available if we arrived before our classes began. I’d spent the class standing beside her desk, keenly aware of the amusement of my classmates.
Although the embarrassment of that had heated my face for most of the hour, that was nothing compared to facing Rafe’s irritation afterward.
There was a sound at the door. The easy teasing between the two of us fell away, replaced by tense expectation on Tyson’s face. He half-rose, as if he’d shield me.
He could hardly protect me now. These men always tried to, but maybe now Ty would accept we were equals—that I was not, in fact, his kiddo even though I’d liked the way he said it at first—before the two of us likely met a grisly end.
