“I have to,” Darek said, even though he had tears in his eyes. “This is my destiny, Jemmie. I’m going to be a god among men.”
It hit my consciousness hard, awakening a memory from its slumber. Slowly, I raised my head. “No,” I said. “You’re the devil.” I rolled onto my side and glanced at the gaping hole in the floor that stretched all the way down to the river below. It was only feet away.
Up onto all fours, I grabbed the hilt of the knife and pulled it out with one swift motion. Blood hit the floorboards, and my teeth began to chatter. I clutched an arm to my stomach, pressing hard as I leaned against the end of the trough. Avoiding looking at the carnage within, I raised my head.
Darek’s spell had already begun. He threw his left hand over the trough of blood, and with one quick slash opened a gash across his own palm. When the first drops of his blood hit the rest, the crimson liquid vibrated and rippled outward, like a stone had been dropped in the center. Wind kicked up outside and ripped through the cracks of the mill, drowning out the sound of Darek’s voice as he shouted an incantation. He plunged his hand into the trough. The magic immediately took hold and a mushroom cloud of smoke and light burst upward.
Darek rocked on his feet. There was no locant barrier surrounding him now, but his black tollat magic was coiling around him in ribbons, mixing with the other magic to create something new.
Something terrible.
Though I could barely feel my legs, I sensed that they were moving, propelling me to my own end.
Magic glittered like a rainbow of serpents above us, soaring up from the casting trough and arching back down when it hit the ceiling. Darek repeated the incantation over and over again. Bright red lines appeared on his arms, and spread up to his neck, and then up the side of his face.
He looked right at me with black eyes. The blackness seeped out, over the bridge of his nose and back toward his ears. He grinned at me. A devil’s grin.
I took two giant steps and rammed the knife up and beneath his rib cage, straight into his heart.
Darek leaned into me with a groan. I staggered back, caught beneath his weight.
“You really think this will kill me?” he said. “A knife?” He laughed. “It’s too late, Jemmie. I’m already immortal.”
“Not if I take your power from you.”
I gave the knife another shove and he gasped again, then I pressed myself against him, wound to wound, a grisly embrace. I felt the connection between us, our blood mixing, all the different kinds of magic running through our veins. That warm, fuzzy feeling washed over me again, strengthened my own magic in a way I couldn’t describe with words. With my arms around him, I twisted in the ribbons of loosed magic, winding them around us as I staggered toward the open pit. Faintly, I could hear Crowe shouting, but it didn’t stop me.
I was going to throw myself into the sea, and take the devil with me.
The skeins of magic began to weave themselves together around us, closing in. Using my locant power and the connection of our blood, I seized Darek’s siphoning power as my own and bound it, gilding my own bones with it even as I wrenched it from his. Ashy fog billowed around me as I sucked him dry.
“No,” he breathed as the magic abandoned him.
The blackness pulled away from his eyes, just in time for me to see them gloss over. I lost my balance as his body went limp in my arms and his face smoothed. For a brief moment he was just a boy who had once offered me a piggyback ride out of the swamp, a boy with a sweet smile and warm hands.
It was too late, though. For him and for me. My faltering steps had carried us backward, and we were already plunging through that hole in the floor. “Now the sea has us,” I whispered as we fell toward the rushing river below and let the Undercurrent welcome us both.
NINETEEN
I COULD HEAR THE ROARING OF A RIVER.
Not the Sable River. This was different.
This was everywhere. This was bigger.
The Undercurrent whispered to me, called my name.
The rushing of water through my fingertips, the cold seeping into my skin, the blackness running through my veins. As I let the current carry me, I reached out my hand and brushed something vital, something huge and inhuman and very much alive, even in this place of death. It whispered to me in the voice of a monster, singing me a song of blood and power, caressing my soul with its long, spindly fingers, wrapping them around the very essence of me.
Distantly, I was aware of a pull, of something trying to yank me away from this perfection, and I fought it. But the creature that lived in the Undercurrent laughed while it dragged its fingertips along the seams of my soul, knitting me back together in its own image. Go, it said, urging me home, returning me to the living with its fingerprints all over my heart.
TWENTY
“YOU FIX HER, GODDAMN IT, OR I SWEAR TO GOD—”
“Try harder.”
“She has no pulse.”
“She’s not dead, Jane. I can still feel her—”
“Crowe, I’m sorry. I’m not strong enough.”
“Take my blood. Just bring her back!”
“Come back to me, Jemmie.”
Light flashed behind my eyes. I could feel the distant pull of the ground beneath my legs and the grip of strong arms wrapped around me, the press of his face against mine. He was shaking. Shaking. And the earth trembled.
The roar of the nearby river was in my ears, and still he held me.
“Crowe,” I whispered.
He pulled back. “Jemmie?”
“Am I alive?”
A beautiful honeyed glow broke over the treetops on the other side of the river, casting a halo of light behind his head. The sunlight. I could taste it on the tip of my tongue.
I could hear the birds in the trees and the worms in the earth and the fast beating of Crowe’s heart.
I could sense every breath pulled in and pushed out. I could sense the world sighing.
A single tear streamed down Crowe’s face. It glittered in the light.
And then he kissed me and the earth stopped trembling, and held its breath.
I was alive.
TWENTY-ONE
CROWE TIGHTENED HIS ARM AROUND MY WAIST, HOLDING me upright. My entire body had broken in the fall, and water had filled my lungs, but he’d healed me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hadn’t needed it. That my body knew how to put itself back together. I could still feel the aftereffects of Crowe’s venemon magic and mine knitting my bones.
He led me to his car, where my mom and dad waited, looking pale from blood loss but otherwise alive. By some miracle and Crowe’s powerful healing magic, the only people we lost were Darek and Killian.
I fell into my parents’ arms and Mom sobbed against my neck, her tears soaking my hair.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing for.
When they pulled away, they both looked at me with those concerned Mom and Dad faces, the kind that said they were still worried that something might be broken, something they didn’t know how to mend.
Something was different.
I was different.
I was better.
No one had to say it for me to feel it. The blood magic.
“Me next,” Alex said, and pulled me to her. Her slender arms wove around me and squeezed me tight. Her heart thudded hard in her chest. “I heard you were a badass, just like I always thought you were.”
I smiled. “I suppose I was. And I suppose you were right.”
She let me go but held on to my shoulders. “I was so scared, Jemmie,” she said in a choked voice. “And I was afraid he was going to hurt you, too.”
“He did,” I told her. “But I was stronger than he was.”
She blinked and looked away. “Here,” she said, taking a deep breath and turning back to me. She slid on a large pair of aviator sunglasses over my eyes. “Just for right now,” she said. “Until it wears off.”
I nodded and thanked her and kissed her cheek.
It wasn’t going to wear off.
I’d caught sight of my reflection in the window of Crowe’s car. The blackness I’d seen in Darek’s eyes that had bled across half his face now had a home in mine.