“Ah, dear Helen needed little work. Some people are simply built to hold the burden of greater things.”
I tried to keep hold as the threads to Olivia vibrated—a hair from breaking. “You won't get me to work like this,” I said, my voice scratched, like I'd been screaming. “My emotions are part of my creativity.”
“Oh, indeed, that's why I have them. I'll feed a little emotion back into you, when needed. It's how people work best. Small motivations to do what is needed, then I'll kill those and find new ones. A lovely cycle.”
He pulled again, and I arched up, watching the rest—the last—of my feelings disappear into his hand.
“And now...you will follow me.”
“You lie. I know this, objectively.”
“Do I? Do I lie?”
I tilted my head. Had he? Or had I assumed as such because I had felt repulsed or angry or terrified? What did those words even mean? I think I had known.
“Open the door,” he said.
I'd never make it out. It was a sterile thought. I'd never make it out as me.
Who was I?
“There will be so many interesting things to explore, Miss Crown. You might even find the key behind it.”
I looked at the door. Patterns swirled, making no sense.
“How do I open it?”
He smiled.
An influx of something fell over me. Magic—my own returned to me, but different. I looked at my hands, at the grayed-out connections that were rapidly decaying. One broke and fell.
Without sense or color, I had no notion of who it had been connected to. My memories said I would have cared at one time. I shrugged. No matter. It was cleansed now.
Would the world objectively be better with a cleansing? With an infusion of people who were better able to take care of it?
“Open the door.”
With the influx of magic to my mind, the pattern on the door revealed itself as something logical.
I walked toward it, disregarding Enton Stavros's smile. I had no use of it or his regard. I only felt compelled toward an answer—the answer I would find behind the door.
Physical pain stopped me before I reached it. A sharp, physical pain in my midsection that radiated through my limbs and froze my feet. I examined the cause—it was a reaction to an embedded magic that was not my own, but that was hooked into something that was sluggishly regenerating at my core.
I needed to be elsewhere, and it was stopping me from that goal. I examined it further.
A vow. A simple thing. I remembered that the person who held the vow both lied and told the truth. I remembered him without the emotion that dull memory said had once colored our interactions. I looked at the vow, trying to reason out how to move past it.
It was a simple thing. Even more so because all the parameters were easily met.
There was a table, a table I cared nothing for, and as long as that was the case, I was to destroy it. Magic had made it so.
So be it. I raised my hand.
“What are you—”
I paid no attention to the voice. I had a vow that demanded to be met.
Without fanfare, I let the magic fly. Watched as the paint around it swirled and exploded. I tilted my head as the table broke, then shattered, and suddenly there were people and creatures everywhere—mass chaos and a brutal battle—and I was amid it all, while the world cracked in pieces around me. A shot of magic broke my arm, a dragon's razor-sharp tail opened my midsection, a spell shattered my leg.
“Stupid, stupid girl,” Enton Stavros said from one of the cracks.
“You've said that before,” I said dully, sliding to the floor. My head hit the ground and a grayed connection flared the tiniest bit gold, attached to something that was growing faster now within me. There was a sense of bone-deep relief through the connection that I couldn't share.
Never again, never again, never again. Never there, Raphael said.
No.
An animal with jagged teeth fell in front of me.
Stavros still has other means. Do not underestimate him, Butterfly.
Yes. There was nothing else to the answer, though. No fear or determination.
Something that looked like a dragon mixed with a tiger started to charge, gaze on someone behind me. It was going to run me down in the process. Magic, rough and raw, was mine again, leaking into the air around me, but I just watched as the beast charged. I had no further goal. No desire.
Magic shot from someone behind me, then the dragon tiger surged and fell.
“Ren.” Constantine hunched over me. Flashes of light illuminated the air around him. Blood ran down his face and there was a singed quality to the skin around his neck. He was warm. He had my cheeks in his hands and his hands were warm, thumbs rubbing circles into my skin.
“Ren.” I felt my left foot twist under the force of another stray spell. He frantically pulled a shield around us and magic seared over the split skin of my midsection. “Where are your shields? Where did you go? Why can't I feel you?”
I put my hand over his. “You are warm.” I touched my elbow in the arm that no longer worked. “This was you.”
There was a look on his face that I tried to objectively parse through the haze of disconnected reality—shock, anguish, terror, rage. I watched a myriad of expressions pass over his features. The pain of them seemed worse than that of my broken bones. Why would someone seek feelings?
His forehead pressed against mine, as if he could no longer bare to see whatever was showing in my eyes.
I could feel him pushing at the connection that had once existed, battering against it, trying to reform it. But his feelings battered against the decay like a bulldozer against old concrete—there was nothing to build, only more to destroy.
“Roald, you wanted proof about Prestige Stavros's abilities.”
People were moving, fighting, recording. I stared at the ceiling.
“What proof,” Stavros said, and a crack of thunderous magic split the room. A sickly mixture of Kinsky's, Kaine's, and mine roiled through the room.
There was a scream and the battle sounds grew louder.
“Constantine, dammit, move,” Stuart Leandred said harshly, grabbing his son's shoulder. “She's been hollowed. There's nothing you can do right now.”
“Oh,” Constantine said implacably, darkness coiling around him as his fingers slipped from my skin. “I think that's quite false.”
He turned without looking at me again, cloak flaring out behind him, but Stuart grabbed his arm while still holding defensive spells in front of them both. “If he can do it to her, he'll flip you, too.”
“She loves easily,” he said, shaking him off. “I, do not.”
Constantine held out a hand behind him as he strode forward, and I could feel magic pulling from me in great waves, bridged from a source that required the minimalist of connections to work. With Axer's magic illuminating the air beneath Constantine's palms, my damaged magic traveled up and along his knuckles and wrist like liquid fire.