My magic swelled with her voice, moving into his heart, into the beating organ that held the core of his magic, his life. My magic tensed at the concentrated power of it and the ripple of energy that tried to push me out.
You weren’t supposed to let your magic enter another person’s heart, strictly speaking. I knew Ilyan did it all the time, but he was insanely strong. He could control his magic so perfectly that there wasn’t any risk. He could defend himself against the soul’s automatic defense system—that little response that tried to destroy anything that entered the heart of another. It was something I could feel trying to destroy me.
Painful pricks of energy pressed their way into my magic, into me, surging through me in a warning that I already knew I couldn’t heed. I only needed to find the blade, whatever piece had been left behind.
My chest tightened as I searched, my breaths coming in massive heaves as I tried to fight against Ryland’s defenses. The magical assault punches were coming fast now, and I knew I didn’t have much time.
“Mommy!” Her voice was a yell of excitement and joy. It rang through me as though she was standing right next to me, her arms opened wide, ready to jump on me.
And then I realized why.
I hadn’t felt her magic in centuries, but there it was, embedded in a shard of blood mixed with souls and magic so small I wasn’t even sure Ilyan could have found them. I had only found it because of Rosaline.
She had showed me the way.
Her magic was as beautiful as it had always been, incredibly strong, incredibly joyous. It was like coming home again to feel it so close, yet it was tainted by the other souls that had willingly been given to make the blade, the hatred and malice that ran off them so strong it was like bile against my tongue.
I gasped as though the flavor was really there, my chest constricting painfully as I forgot to breathe, my focus so intent on the task at hand that something so simple had been cast aside.
I inhaled with a gasp as I pushed my magic farther, wrapping it around the tiny shard as though it was precious and cradling the malice alongside the beauty.
With one strong heave, I pulled it free from the softly beating tissue that it had been lodged in.
Ryland’s magic recoiled as the toothpick-sized object was released, his power rebelling against what it was and what it had done to him.
His wasn’t the only one.
Even with the strain of Rosaline’s magic within the precious cargo, it was the malice and the poisoned magic that affected me the most. My ability rebelled against its task, trying to pull away from the heady toxin.
“Mommy?”
Fighting against the heavy hatred that was infecting me, I pulled and carefully twisted the shard from within him, drawing it out from his beating heart and through his body until it began to break through the skin from the inside, a point of pressure that grew outward. His grey-tinged skin tented before it pushed through, a thick ribbon of the brightest blood coming behind.
Blood trailed over his skin, dripping onto the floor in a great pool of red. I didn’t see that, however. I only saw the tip of the blade, the shard of knife covered in the deepest red, jagged and broken as though it was nothing more than sandstone.
I didn’t dare touch it, yet I could not fight the pull to. It was a desperate need that I hadn’t experienced before, as though the blade itself was power, as though it could give that power to me.
I reached forward without thinking, pulling the tiny thing from his body, his blood still warm on the surface as it came free, resting in the palm of my hand in a streak of crimson. Staring at me.
I couldn’t look away from it. I could feel Ryland’s magic work to heal him as my magic began to recoil back into me, the powerful strands shaking inside of me in a fear I didn’t understand.
Yes, I knew I should be afraid of it. Afraid of what it was, what it did. Nevertheless, this fear, this fear was different. It was rooted in possibilities of what was to come. Not that I had any intention of using the thing, but part of me … Part of me couldn’t help wondering what it meant, what would happen if I did.
I shook my head as her laugh sounded around me, the sound echoing in a haunting void that I hadn’t heard before, and I shivered, letting the last of the ill-placed power leave me.
I held a piece of my little girl’s soul in my hand.
That was all.
I felt dirty for thinking of it in any other way, for letting those thoughts infect me as they had.
I sat quite still as I closed my fingers around the precious piece, my fingers soft as I held it close, as I had held her so many times before.
“I’ll set you free, my darling girl,” I whispered, my voice drowned out by the creatures who clawed at the windows, their voices loud in their desperate haste to find entry.
“Everything all right?” Sain’s voice erupted behind me.
I jumped, pulling Ryland’s shirt over the now healed wound, my fist tightening around the shard in panic.
My heart was a thunder inside of me, a slither of secrecy that felt dirty snaking its way over me, a fear I hadn’t expected following behind.