“And if you’ve hurt Darek—” Ren began.
“I don’t give a fuck about Darek,” Crowe snapped. He took a step forward, and all six Deathstalkers had their hands out in front of them, fingers spread, power fogging and slithering in the air as the scent of all of it rolled toward me. It was coming from all sides, closing us in.
And then I smelled something new, something terrible, like stale cigarettes and burning meat. It was a magic scent I’d never come up against. My head swam with it, and I swayed as my stomach threatened to revolt.
“Crowe…” I licked my lips and peered through the cloud to try to find the source of the unfamiliar odor. To our far right, several yards into the woods, someone tall ran between trees, too fast for me to recognize. The person was emitting strands of pale yellow and crimson streaked with black. “Someone is…”
Crowe took a step in front of me, his arms spreading, his magic billowing from him.
“Watch out,” Ren shouted. “He’s going to cast!”
“Crowe!” shouted a familiar male voice. Hardy, who must have seen us and come on the run. Thank God. But whatever he shouted next was lost as a fierce wind whipped my hair. Crowe stumbled into me, and we both went down. Branches cracked over our heads as curses flew from all sides. My ears were ringing and I could barely breathe—I was choking on magic, on the bitter, burning stench of it.
Crowe’s hands were on my waist and his voice was in my ear. “Can you run?”
My breath came out of me in a strangled wheeze. “Crowe,” I tried to say as amber venemon burst from his palm and rocketed wildly into the murky fog around us. He could probably see clearly, but I was almost blind from all the magic swimming around and overwhelming my senses.
A sharp wind slammed into us again, sending twigs and leaves scraping against my cheeks and forehead. My mouth filled with grit as I struggled to my feet. Crowe shouted something I couldn’t make out in the storm of air and people and magic around me.
“I can’t—” My next words were stolen from me as I staggered back from a sudden impact. Heartbeat pounding at my temples, I looked down at my shoulder to see the hilt of a knife protruding from my shirt. The pain hit me a beat later, a racing, pounding lance of agony arching out across my shoulder like a net of needles. My knees gave out.
“Jemmie!” Crowe shouted. Two people ran by in the shadows. We were in the middle of a full-on kindled brawl, shouts and grunts and gasps punctuating the fight. More of the Devils’ League must have found us because we’d initially been surrounded by Deathstalkers, but now people had spread out, seeking safe places from which to hurl their curses. Their voices were coming from all sides.
Another knife whistled through the air, a glint of steel in a ray of sun, piercing the blanket of thick fog around me. Crowe ducked out of the way as he landed at my side, and the blade skimmed past his face, leaving a long, bloody gash across his jaw.
I tried pulling myself into a sitting position, but every inch of my body throbbed with pain, as if the knife had pierced not just my flesh but every nerve in my body, sending electric shocks down to my toes. Was this real or an illusion? I put my tingling fingers up to the wound and felt blood streaming across my palm. As I became dizzy with shock, I squinted at another person moving between tree trunks nearby, palms open toward us, giving off puffs of purple magic mixed with red and black. Confusion filled me. Was that who it looked like?
Crowe wrenched me toward him before I could get my eyes to focus, and I inhaled the smoke-and-honey scent of his power as he muttered a healing incantation. But then he groaned and clutched at his middle. Only a few dozen feet away, the person I had spotted smiled a beautiful, evil smile as the animalia curse took hold. Crowe doubled over at my side, vomiting centipedes and beetles and spiders and black moths, and this was no illusion. A great, writhing mass of insects grew into a puddle around him, and no matter how much he retched, more just kept coming. This curse was going to kill him.
And I knew exactly who had hurled it. I just couldn’t understand why she would do such a thing.
My vision pulsed with blackness. Blood loss threatened to pull me into unconsciousness. And even if I could put up a barrier around us, it wouldn’t help Crowe now. Whatever was wrong was already inside him.
So I did the only thing left to me, something my father had once told me I should never do.
“Crowe,” I said in a choked voice, and stretched out my bloodied hand, hoping he’d understand what I was offering.
Blood.
He didn’t hesitate—he frantically swiped the blood dripping from the gash on his face and clamped his hand in mine.
Medici blood met Carmichael blood. Venemon and locant.
Tingling spread through me, hot where our hands met, warm everywhere else. I wondered if Crowe was feeling the same. My heart thumped in my head and in my toes, pumping magic through every inch of me. Crowe’s grip on my hand was iron—he had taken control of our combined power, and I would have given him anything in that moment. Ribbons of blue and gold surrounded us, braiding together, taking on a color I’d never seen before, indescribable and vibrant and entirely new. It was neither venemon nor locant. It was…more. A sigh escaped me. Everything inside of me felt like it’d been touched by the sun. It was the first time in my entire life that magic had felt like this.
Still holding on to me to keep our blood mixed, Crowe pressed his fingers against his throat with his other hand, squeezing till his veins bulged. Bugs squirmed behind his black-stained teeth, gnashed together. He was beyond speaking, but I swear I could hear his thoughts whisper an incantation. Somehow, he was casting using this new magic we’d created through our connection, and the effect was instantaneous. The tendons in his neck stood out in stark relief as a growl vibrated in the back of his throat, and the growl swelled to a roar as he finally opened his mouth. The insects scuttled past his teeth and over his lips, vaporizing when they hit the air, burning off into curling ribbons of black smoke.
When the lethal curse was extinguished beneath Crowe’s healing hands and the alchemy of our mixed blood, he looked down at me, and I sucked in a startled breath.
The whites of his eyes were gone, bled completely to black. “This is amazing,” he said, giving me an eerie grin. Even though the pain from my wound was gnawing at my ecstasy, I grinned back, knowing my eyes probably looked the same but unable to worry about it.
Heavy footsteps thudded toward us. Every single one was like a nail pounding into my skull. Crowe dropped my hand and scooted away from me, blinking fast and shaking his head as if to clear it. The warmth I’d felt seconds ago faded instantly, leaving me trembling and raw.
“Jemmie!”
“Dad?” I wheezed as he crouched over me. His gaze didn’t focus on my eyes, so I could only assume they looked normal again. The fog of blood magic had certainly dissipated, but so had my vision in general. My heart stumbled and skipped. My breath was wet and unsteady.
I was pretty sure I was dying.
“This is the Syndicate,” my dad shouted to the woods around us. He spread his arms and threw out a massive, glittering barrier. “Anyone caught showing further aggression will be sentenced to binding!”
“They’re running,” said Hardy, who had appeared next to Crowe and was helping him to his feet.
My mouth opened and closed as I tried and failed to gather the strength and volume to tell them who I’d seen in the woods, who had used such evil magic against Crowe.
My dad pressed a hand to my shoulder and I made a guttural, inhuman sound. My vision flashed to pure white. “Hang in there, Mo.”
Don’t call me that.… Words were out of my reach.
“Crowe, she needs you right now!”