And I felt every bit of that power when he tried again. “Rhea!”
It wasn’t a request now; it was an order, fierce and demanding. I felt it like thunder in the air around me, like an earthquake in the floor underneath me, like an electric shock radiating through my body, making me gasp. And tighten my grip enough that I thought I might break my own fingers.
That damn call would have brought me out of the grave.
It didn’t seem to be doing anything for her.
And we were running out of time—even I could see that. Rhea’s usually pale skin was alabaster, her dark lashes closed, her chest barely rising. Only her blood moved, slow but determined, seeping out of the terrible wound to stain her neck, like someone’s fingers had already done to her cheek.
She looked like a beautiful corpse.
“Maybe . . . maybe we need to try the other way,” I said desperately.
Mircea didn’t open his eyes. “What other way?”
“Seidr.” It was a spell my mother had cast on me during a trip back in time, and which I’d inadvertently passed to him. I didn’t fully understand it, which was why I hadn’t been able to remove it. And it hadn’t seemed like a priority, since it was just a communication spell.
But it was a powerful one.
More powerful than this, I thought, staring at the hazy dividing line still boiling between us.
But Mircea shook his head. “Cassie, this is Seidr. I tried reaching you the other way, the vampire way—”
“I’m sorry! I didn’t hear—”
“Nor should you have. You are not vampire. It was an instinctive reaction when your distress woke me. But it didn’t work, leaving me no choice but to try to access you through the Seidr link.”
“But—” I stared around again. “It wasn’t like this before.”
Seidr wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced, other than for being somewhere in the flesh. In fact, it was almost impossible to tell that you weren’t, except that people not in the link couldn’t see you. It was clear and perfect, not like a vision at all, while the room behind Mircea had become even less distinct than before, like it might dissolve at any second.
“It might,” Mircea said grimly, picking up on my thought. “Seidr is an expensive spell, powerwise—”
“But you have power,” I interrupted. “I can feel it, just sitting here—”
And then he opened his eyes, and I saw it, too. They were amber bright, startlingly vivid against the washed-out room around him, and flooded with power. “But you do not,” he said, “and you control the spell.”
“But I told you—I’m not doing anything!”
“But the spell still originates with you, Cassie. My people do not know how to do a Seidr spell. And remember what we were told? It was designed by the gods to talk to each other between worlds. But we are not gods. Even you are not, although you carry the power of one.”
“Power I can’t access right now,” I said, my lips turning cold as I finally understood. The Pythian power was virtually inexhaustible, but I wasn’t. And when I was too tired, I couldn’t channel it appropriately—if at all.
Mircea’s dark head inclined. “Without a good connection, I cannot give Rhea the strength she needs. I have it, but I have no way to get it to her.”
“Then send it to me! And I’ll—”
“That still requires a better connection than we have,” he said, patient with my panic. “Whether you or she is the intended recipient, I must have a stronger link. Otherwise, I can do little more than the witch already did, and slow down the process. But if you cannot strengthen the spell—”
“She’ll die anyway.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t qualify it, as a human might have, didn’t tell me it would be all right when we both knew it wouldn’t. He didn’t say anything else, for which I was grateful. He just gripped me tighter, although it was getting hard to feel his fingers anymore, like they were dissolving under mine.
And they probably were, because I was nearing exhaustion. I’d given everything I had left to that last shift, pulling a creature from another world, something I’d only very recently learned that I could do at all. And now I was powering the Seidr link, or trying to, but I wasn’t strong enough.
I never had been.
“You’ve done all you could,” Mircea said softly. “You need what strength you have left.”
He was right; I knew he was right. But it didn’t help. I lost people; I always lost people. My whole life that had been the one constant, the one fucking thing I could depend on, and I couldn’t—not again—
There was the ghost of a touch on my cheek, because he must have slipped out of my grip without me knowing. “You have to let go, Cassie.”
Yeah, people had been telling me that all my life, too. To the point that I’d started to tell it to myself: don’t care, don’t love, let everyone and everything that matters slip away. Let life take them, let it have them, because it’s going to anyway, because that’s all it does: take and consume and destroy. It lets you feel happy so the pain hurts more, lets you have hope so it can crush it, lets you have love so it can rip it away. You can fight against it, but it’s a trap, the whole damn thing.
Better get used to it.
But I wasn’t used to it. I’d never gotten used to it. I was tired of it, sick to death of it, and furious, so furious I could barely see.
I bent over Rhea, my tears dropping onto her face, my lips almost as cold as her cheek. But somehow I wasn’t kissing her good-bye. Somehow I was gripping her shoulders, shaking her, and then screaming at her like a madwoman. Or maybe it was the universe I was screaming at—I didn’t know; I couldn’t think. I just felt it, something hot and hard and furious welling up inside me, something I couldn’t seem to control because enough! You can’t have this one, you can’t take her—
“Cassie!” Mircea had grabbed me, fingers biting into my flesh, but I didn’t care.
“No, this one is mine! I’ve paid enough, I’ve lost enough!”
“Cassie!”
“No! This one is mine and you can’t have her!”
And then I was being knocked aside, hard enough to hurt, and for a second I didn’t understand what was happening. And I still didn’t, when I saw Mircea, clear and bright and there, as solid as if he was right beside me. Like the room around him, which was suddenly vivid with color and sharp edges, like Rhea beneath him as he thrust her back onto the floor, straddling her with both hands around her neck, looking for all the world like he was trying to choke her to death.
But instead of killing her, he was doing something that brought faint color back to her cheeks, that caused a small movement of her chest, that caused her eyelashes to flutter and her fingers—because at some point I must have grabbed her hand—to move—
“What—” I began, because even now I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. It seemed to be on a separate circuit from the rest of my brain, which was still screaming in denial even as I saw life flood back into Rhea.
“I should have realized,” Mircea said, looking at me wildly, through strands of sweaty dark hair.