I turned my head, gaze pulled along with my magic.
From inside his splitting reality, Stavros was moving like painted smoke, killing the soldiers that had appeared during the time I was gone. Marsgrove was trying to destroy him systematically. But it was a phantom effort, for the reality of the world Stavros was within was not within Marsgrove's grasp.
Axer was hunched next to Marsgrove—his peril obvious as Constantine channeled the bulk of his magic—barely holding back Kaine and a fleet of snapping monsters while keeping a shield in front of Marsgrove and two others. Kaine got a shot in, but Axer just took the hit and didn't pull his magic back to him.
Stavros turned to painted mist and a killing beam aimed by Marsgrove went right through him. He came back into view, his eyes solely focused on the magic trailing from Constantine. “Dear boy, you play with forces far beyond your abilities.”
“You poisoned Verisetti,” Constantine said, stalking forward like a wraith of vengeance. “I will always hold him responsible for Salietrex, but you are responsible for making him. You will take nothing else from me,” he said, before unleashing the full force of the hell he was dragging behind him like a whip.
Stavros's mist cracked into physical shards that hung suspended in irreality.
“I will make you, and all you hold dear, pay for this, boy,” Stavros spit. “You will find that you don’t know the definition of pain.”
Constantine pulled the whip around and flicked it at the next shard, then the one after.
Shard after shard burst as Stavros flipped from piece to piece and Constantine destroyed each one.
Axer's magic rode beneath Constantine's like a wave, turning the crest of it to shatter each piece in turn like a great serpent slithering and striking after a fleeing rat.
The symbol winked in one of the shards. I reached a finger toward it. “The paintings,” I murmured. The pattern slotted easily into place.
“I already have what I need. And you, girl, what are you going to do when all who you love, die?” He said as the painted cracked and splintered, making four, then ten, then twenty pieces of him, swirling broken in shards. “When they are before you, being pulled apart? I will allow you to care again, during those last gasps of breath. And you will give me what I seek.”
“No.”
“So it begins.”
Constantine hit the piece containing the symbol with the last shot.
Axer whipped out Constantine's newest ribbon—one that I had been working with him to make into a storage space—and like in Crelussa with the bomb and my storage paper, it wrapped around the shards at the last second, and a muffled boom burst the ribbon into a hundred bits of fluff.
There was silence for an extended moment. “That was my prototype,” Constantine said, breathing harshly.
“It works,” Axer said.
And then the battle was back in motion, but this time with a fervor that was all push, push, push from the boys' side as Axer grabbed magic from every person they downed and pooled the growing mass between them.
If it had seemed like the boys were good at fighting together before, they were nearly seamless now. The creatures went down, Department grunts crumpled, and even Kaine, flinging Origin Magic—both mine and Kinsky's—wasn't slowing them down as they backed him into a corner.
Constantine pulled a vial from his coat. I knew what was in it. He had been making a concoction to take down Kaine since our first visit to Corpus Sun. Doubling down after the infections on campus. And tripling it after Stavros overwhelmed me on campus.
But Axer grabbed his arm before he could throw it. I could see them struggle, even if I felt nothing over it.
Kaine slipped through a crack in the floor.
Constantine balled up his fist, collapsed the magic and vial into the pocket of his cloak, then blew up Table Two with a guttural scream.
“We can't convert on it yet. You will get a chance to use it,” Axer murmured too low for anyone to hear. I didn't know why I could hear it, but the echo of it seemed to be coming through the gold connection.
“I will,” Constantine said viciously.
“You let him go?” One of the officials that had come with Marsgrove yelled at Constantine in disbelief. “You are exactly what they say you—”
Axer shot him in the chest. The man dropped to the floor. The other officials stepped backward.
Constantine stared at the downed man, chest heaving. “That could have been therapeutic for me.”
“Thinking about how you will make Kaine scream in unending terror will have to do. Come on.”
Both looked like they'd been through a war, but they were already healing extraordinarily fast, sharing magic back and forth—the pool of stolen magic still trailing behind them. I felt the combination of it descend on me, too, fixing my broken bones and damaged internals.
But when it touched anything other than physical ailments in me, the magic hit a wall. Constantine lifted me, trying to grow connections where they no longer existed.
He closed his eyes, his forehead touching mine again. “I can't... We need somewhere we can fix this.”
“Her shields are gone,” Marsgrove said. “And I know them well. They will take days, weeks, to heal without connection or magic. And her magic is...muddied.”
“Time,” Axer said grimly.
“There is no time,” Marsgrove said. “Look around us. The end has begun. Stavros won't wait for her to heal. He knows it will take days. He'll be moving in the next forty-eight hours.”
“He knows he's going to win,” I murmured, remembering.
Axer's perfect mouth formed a smile ripe with bloodlust.
“Where?” Constantine was touching my face again, but he was looking at Axer, ignoring everyone else arguing around us.
Stuart stepped forward. “We have facilities—”
“No,” Axer cut him off, gaze still connected to Constantine's. “Even now, they come.” The hunters—both Department and bounty. He looked down at me. “Ren, I need you to come back.”
Someone snorted in the background. “Gone bloody loony. Lock the lot of them up, we should. Did you see—”
I heard a body crash against something and fall. Axer crouched down next to me and pressed a hand over my heart. He looked at something above my head, then back at me. “Ren, I need you to come back.”
I tilted my head to look at him fully. “I haven't lef—”
Guard Rock flipped over my face and stabbed me in the jugular.
A thousand things happened at the same time—people started shouting, Marsgrove started clearing the area around us, and Constantine scrabbled to hold me down as I knifed forward in anguish with every emotion rushing back in a painful waterfall of clogged feeling—and painted blood.
Hands scrabbled for me, healing the mortal wound immediately, and I grabbed two of them. I could barely stand the crippling intensity of their emotions. “He took my knowledge. I solved it. Most of it. We don't have time for the plan.”