“You have a weakness.” The mageheld’s dry hack of a laugh ended with a gurgle. Ashley’s mouth worked unevenly, then she spit out clots of blood. The mageheld had to work hard to animate dead tissue—difficult enough—but he also had to control the inevitable panic of being confined in a body that Maddy had all but paralyzed.
She drew herself up despite the crushing pain that blossomed behind her eyes. Heat concentrated around her while the cold in her chest sharpened. She reached into her jeans’ pocket and palmed the ruby she kept with her at all times. This particular gem had come from a ring that had once belonged to Rasmus Kessler. She kept it as a reminder that her own kind could be worse enemies than any demon.
Heated air condensed around her, seared her lungs, and ate away at her concentration. Blisters popped up on her arms. Though her focus shredded, she nevertheless diffused enough of the fiery burn to make Ashley growl in frustrated protest.
“That’s it.” She was done trying to keep the indwelling mageheld alive long enough to get someone here to sever him. Maddy, closer than Kynan, returned the mageheld’s earlier favor and grabbed Ashley around the throat with one hand. She doubled her magical restraints.
“Winters.” Was that actual fear from Kynan Aijan? “Get away. Now.” He roared, and the cries of his dead sworn filled the undercurrents of the sound. “Now!” Kynan crackled with power that leapt between them like supercharged static electricity.
She retreated because in dozens of similar situations, she’d trusted Kynan with her life. More blood slid from Ashley’s mouth as the mageheld continued to gesture with the body’s remaining hand. Some of the old ways were highly effective.
Her head pounded, and when she looked down, there was blood on the floor by her feet. Another dozen vermillion drops appeared, coming faster and larger. She flicked the backs of two fingers at a tickle under her nose and came away with a bloody hand. More drops splattered on the floor.
Kynan’s sworn shouted so loud her ears hurt. He shifted to one of his nonhuman forms, and, as he whirled to her, one vicious kick sent Ashley backward, still constrained by Maddy’s magic.
The mageheld’s gestures ceased. By the time the body landed several feet away, a river of fire roared through her. Too late. Too late. He’d completed his magical attack. She screamed, she was sure of it, but she heard nothing. She existed in an ocean of agony. Forever. She couldn’t see, taste, or feel. She was being torn apart inside, reconfigured, her magic reshaped by some external force.
When the pain receded, she was on her hands and knees dry-heaving. Reality clicked into place. Something was wrong, so wrong.
“Maddy?”
“No.” She pressed a hand to her middle in disbelief and horror, as if she could touch what was no longer there. “No.” She made it to her knees, hands pressed over her chest. “No.”
Her oath to Nikodemus was gone.
The world stopped. Time ticked away, and in the interstices of her breathing, there was silence. Her eyes connected with Kynan’s, and horror writhed between them. There were always consequences for a broken oath of fealty. Always. She took a breath. She saw him mouth the word no.
Agony ripped through her, worse than before. Her mind barely functioning, she tried to fight the blowback, but death came on relentlessly. Kynan shoved her to the floor, a hand covering the back of her head. He said, “You will not die.”
She wasn’t sure whether he spoke out loud or in her head. The fire raging in her died to embers, but that was because her body had shut down. Her heart wasn’t beating, her lungs no longer took in air. He must have spoken out loud, she thought in her dying moments, because she hadn’t given him permission for the link that would have made psychic communication possible.
He tipped her head back and made eye contact with her, and, dying, she fell into blinding, unimaginable power, into the bonds between them, deafened by the shouts of his sworn. Her heart beat once. The last time?
You fucking stay alive, witch.
That was Kynan, in her head uninvited, a clear and unambiguous violation of the rules. Speech was beyond her, though she tried until she convulsed. From afar, she watched Kynan with his palm curved over her forehead. Her hair spilled over his other hand.
You will not die.
Something in her changed, loosened, stretched toward Kynan with the inevitability of quicksilver rushing to join with more. He burned through her, alive, alive, he was alive in her, so bright and sweet. Viciously, violently, triumphantly present.
Somewhere in the room she heard a jackal’s barking laugh.
locked in
Her lungs refused to draw in air. The boundaries of her body dissolved, and there was Kynan, so alive and vibrant she couldn’t get her mind around why she’d never felt this before.
Complete.
She assessed her condition in the cold and silent elongation of time. Still alive, and she didn’t hurt anymore. Warmth flowed into her from Kynan, coating her with a shimmering light that turned the world faintly gold.
At peace.
Reality returned, and it was not pleasant.
She’d survived a broken oath of fealty, and she had no idea how or why.
Mine.
Dread slithered up her spine when she realized what Kynan had done to save her life. To her. To them. Disaster. This was disaster. She took a breath. A frantic gasp.
Done.
“Get up, Winters. You hear me?” She couldn’t see, she wasn’t even sure where her body was in space, but that was Kynan’s voice, and she wasn’t dead. “You fucking get up right now, or you’ll wish I’d let you die.”
Their bonds were closed. Not just one or two of them, but all three.
She rolled over, seeking energy from the ruby she’d palmed. Her skin burned from the effort, and the center of her chest spasmed until a scream rose from her. When she looked up, her gaze connected with Ashley’s dead eyes. She didn’t dare maintain the connection. Not in her condition.
Across the room, the mageheld laughed that jackal’s bark. “I cured your weakness.”
Maddy and Kynan stared at each other. Why did he look as horrified as she felt? The answer floored her. He hadn’t meant for the bonds to close. He couldn’t have, not with that ashen response. She struggled to stand and couldn’t. Her legs wouldn’t support her weight.
Kynan’s blood-bound promise to Nikodemus was broken.
He said, “Fuck.”
“Oh, please, no. This cannot be,” she whispered. “No.”
The world slowed. Her restraints on Ashley ruptured, and the woman sped toward them while the mageheld’s intent gathered and slithered around her mind. Maddy staggered to her feet. Miraculously, Kynan was fine. Absolutely fine, when a broken promise to Nikodemus ought to be fatal.
But then Kynan slowly collapsed to his knees. Their link attenuated and became thinner, thinner, nearly nothing. Time snapped back to normal.
The warmth of him blinked away and became a river of torment. Her heart went into overdrive. She threw up a block and stopped the mageheld’s progress toward them. It wasn’t much, but it would do for now.
Kynan was dying before her eyes. She had no way to contact Nikodemus and tell him to stop this, that the broken promise wasn’t his doing. She launched herself toward Kynan, low to the floor so she landed on her shins and slid toward him as he toppled over. He caught himself by jamming his hands on the floor. He landed half on her lap, and she threw her arms around him, drawing him close.
Ashley’s laughter lifted the hair on the back of her neck. Beyond furious, she slammed the body into a wall and immobilized it again. Some of that power came through Kynan. No. No, please don’t let her have hastened his death. She was mortally afraid she had. What if she had? Because, already, the rush of his power was fading.
She forced a link with Kynan, and their bonds lit up. This new, terrible, disastrous connection between them made it easier to hook into his magic. He continued to slip away. The magic that sustained his physical f
orm was breaking down, and she couldn’t think of how to stop what was happening to him, only that she had to find a way.
Fighting panic, she pressed a hand to Kynan’s chest to ground herself while she pushed herself into him. He was dead weight on her lap. Kynan and his sworn were dying in agony.
The backlash cascaded through him with or without her acceptance of failure. She drew on the ruby for focus and used the boost to repair what damage she could, and it wasn’t enough. She pushed more of herself into him, a dangerous amount, unsafe, but anything less would be pointless. He would have died for her earlier. He’d risked this—everything—to save her from the consequences of her broken oath of fealty. She would not do less for him.
She siphoned off the magic that was killing him and took it into herself. Not enough. Not fast enough. For the first time, she opened herself to their bonds—they too were vanishing—and used them to bleed away damage that would leave nothing sentient in its wake if it remained in Kynan. She extended herself farther, demanding the same of his sworn. She used them ruthlessly, anything that would keep him alive even if it meant accepting the magic rushing into her through the bonds. Power pushed through her, accompanied by whispered threats of death and murder. The death Kynan had once intended for her. More damage repaired. Damage prevented.
The flood of magic drowned her. Lightning cracked, blinding her and lifting the hair on the back of her arms and neck. She continued to press her hand to Kynan’s chest, willing his heart to beat. If he died, his body would deconstruct and strand his life force in an unending, ungrounded death. She choked back a sob because he was still here, his sworn were still here, and he wasn’t dying as fast as he had been.
Outside of the storm around her and Kynan, a voice rasped, “Take him.”
Maddy turned her head in the direction of the sound. Her vision flickered, and she saw Ashley glowing with colors she could not name. Words emerged from the dead woman’s mouth. “No one will know what you’ve done. No one will know how you got free of him. All his power could be yours, witch. You’d be immortal, taking that one for yourself.”
“Shut up.”
“Let him go.” Ashley’s eyes burned violet-red. “His time here is done.”
Still drawing away the killing magic, she smeared her palm through the blood spatters on the floor. One push of magic into her exhale, and the blood turned to sand and flew toward Ashley’s face. She set fire to each and every particle. Embers danced in the air, and a sandstorm of tiny pellets of glass whirled around Ashley’s head.
When it was over, the woman’s face was nothing but sinew and bone.
“Fuck you,” Maddy said. She pulled Kynan closer and willed him to live. “Fuck you.”
An eternity later, he stirred, and his eyes opened. His eyes were whirlwinds of gray-flecked white. “Damn you,” she whispered, low and fierce. “Fight this.” He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t fading away, but he needed not to be diverting energy into maintaining a physical form. She slapped his chest and said the only thing she could think of that might help. “Indwell, you ass.”
His sworn shrieked, a cacophony of delight. Color leeched from her vision, and she fought a wicked vertigo.
Ashley, unable to see without eyes, gestured and drew magic that heated the air, hotter, hotter, too hot. Before much longer, too hot for a human to survive. Maddy’s lungs burned. She diverted what magic she dared. Frost rolled from her fingertips, and just when she thought it wasn’t enough, flakes of snow drifted from the ceiling, condensed; turned to rain, then steam; and finally evaporated as it hit the rising layer of heated air. Enough to lower the temperature to survivable levels.
Quiet. Too quiet.
His sworn howled with despair, and her heart joined them in the madness of their loss.
Ashley swayed, still gesturing, still drawing magic, blind, teeth parted in a rictus grin of triumph. Maddy struck at her again, sending the body into a spin that ended with the mageheld slamming into another wall.
She fell back, palms pressed to the floor behind her. Kynan was gone. For a hellishly long instant, she believed she’d failed.
Kynan’s sworn cried out again, one voice.
We are whole.
They’d not held this much pure energy since the days when humans had worshiped them as a god. For the first time since they’d created the bonds, they were in control of their power and of the witch they’d wanted—strong, alluring, beloved—from the moment they’d plucked memories of her from another mind. Whole. They were whole at last. They held up a hand, examined the slender fingers. Their magic was once again vast and deep and unhindered.
Vengeance belonged to them.
They stood. It had been years since they’d commanded a witch of such power, an elegant body, lovely to caress and adore.
Slowly, Maddy’s mental state stabilized and separated. Enough of her existed separately that she emerged from Kynan and his sworn.
The ruby clutched in her fist hurt, and it shouldn’t. Her throat worked, but she wasn’t able to swallow until Kynan no longer insisted on control. Across the room, the physically blind mageheld gathered himself for another attempt at an indwell.
“Fuck you,” she said with Kynan’s inflection. His sworn whispered for the mageheld’s death.
The mageheld pointed in her direction, bloody eye sockets staring at nothing. The thump of magic hitting her again hurt like hell, razor blades though her middle. Her dizziness worsened, and she crouched so she wouldn’t fall. One eye on Ashley, she pressed a hand to the floor and pulled every ounce of energy she could summon. A flood of power. The surface of the floor rippled, took on size and motion, and surged toward the demon, bigger and bigger as the magic, hers and Kynan’s, gathered force. She rolled into his indwell, and they paired, the two of them as one, combined, her will flowing with his in a single intent.
The floor underneath the mageheld buckled and deformed as if it were desperate to escape its physical container. Energy burst from the surface that turned the air around the mageheld into visible pulses. Ashley staggered, arms windmilling for balance until the mageheld contorted elbows, shoulders, hips, and spine in a desperate attempt to regain control. Both of Ashley’s knees popped, and, with a series of cracks, her spine snapped.
Ashley’s body fell to the rubble and did not move.
The mageheld manifested as a jackal-headed human with clawed fingers and toes. He threw back his head and laughed, a high-pitched, stuttering bark that stopped when they dead-dropped him.
In the cadence of Kynan’s voice, she said, “Laugh about that, you think this is so fucking funny.”
Kynan’s presence blasted through her, red-hot in her mind. They focused on the mageheld and extracted a name.
Vahid.
Vahid sneered. “The only good witch is a dead witch. And I will kill her the moment I am free.”
She spoke with Kynan’s voice and intent. “The witch is mine.”
“Yes,” Vahid said, laughing with the jackal’s voice. “She is.”
The power that flowed through Maddy and Kynan was so vast there was no end. They gathered a portion and focused it. A layer of hardened air formed around the mageheld, then more, and more until it was enough to hold him immobile and in silence. They walked to the mageheld and pressed a hand to the surface.
CHAPTER 6
Nikodemus sat up so quickly, his wife and soul mate went on alert for the second time in a day. She was on her feet immediately. Her reaction was a side effect of the bonds he’d forged between them to save her life. Carson was ferocious in her protection of him, not something he’d expected of the woman Magellan had been poisoning for years. They were waiting to hear from somebody, anybody, but especially Tau or Kynan or Maddy. At the moment, all he knew was that Tau was en route to the Baker Street house with Maddy’s latest batch of newbies.
“What is it?” Carson asked, ready for action that couldn’t yet be taken. They were safe at the Tiburon house. Álvaro Magellan’s former home with its
stunning, million-dollar views of the bay, was fully warded against attack. The earlier attempt today had been intense but brief. Luckily for them, Carson had severed one of the magehelds sent against them. He’d provided a wealth of information about the intent and purpose of an offensive the worst general in the history of the world would have known was doomed. Namely, to divert attention from an invasion of Maddy’s Kensington home.
Kynan had warned him.
He’d sent Tau to assist, but with two of his strongest sworn at the house, he hadn’t been worried much.
His beautiful wife scanned the windows and doorways, but the threat wasn’t here. He set a hand over his chest, feeling the emptiness of a loss. He stretched for Carson’s hand and gripped it hard. “I’ve lost Maddy.”
She whirled to him, shock plain on her face. “What?”
He didn’t keep many secrets from her. She knew all about the steps he’d taken to ensure Maddy’s safety. “Kynan broke his promise.”
“Which happened first?”
He released her hand and paced in front of the sofa, phone in hand. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I lost Maddy first.” He waited for an answering text from Kynan. Nothing. Nothing from Maddy, either.
“Maybe he finally snapped.” Carson was checking her phone, too. “Nothing from either of them. Nothing from anyone.”
“I don’t think so. He’s still mine.” Meaning Kynan’s fealty to him remained in place, and for that to be true despite his broken promise, well, there was essentially no scenario that had a good outcome for Maddy. He called Tau. “She did something to him. She had to have.”
There was a good chance Maddy hadn’t survived her broken oath of fealty and every possibility that Kynan had closed his bonds with Maddy in self-defense. The fact that Kynan was still sworn to him meant his actions had not violated his oath of fealty.
Tau picked up with, “On the Bay Bridge. In traffic.”
“I need you here ten seconds ago. The minute you drop them off, you come here.”
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