Chapter Seventeen #2
It took a moment—I imagine no one trusted the sudden, bizarre stillness around them, let alone this strange bridge.
The back of my neck prickled. This was far outside the scope of anything human magic could do, and how could you trust something you didn’t understand?
But then one of the figures started running across the transparent platform, and others followed.
I watched them dash toward us, breathing as Daziel had instructed, magic thrumming through me.
In. Out. In. Out.
My vision was going. The people on the bridge were getting smaller and smaller. Did my knees work? Daziel had wings.
Had I performed blood magic? Had I bound a demon? Had I broken the law and a two-thousand-year-old treaty?
Runners emerged, staggering up the beach, soaking wet. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t watch anymore. I had to concentrate on holding the magic, on not letting it rip me apart into a thousand fleshy, bloody bits. Like the scrolls. My head hurt. Was it supposed to hurt?”
“Naomi.” A light female voice spoke my name. élodie. “Everyone’s safe.”
That was good. Breathing was good.
A hand on my shoulder. A deeper female voice. “Naomi, are you all right?”
I knew that voice. Opened my eyes. Yael, soaked to the bone. Had she been on the raft? She looked like an otter. Where was her other otter to hold her hand?
“Let it go,” Daziel said.
Let it go? How? I’d never handled magic like this. The more it streamed through me, the more I felt like I was merely a vessel meant to be poured through, to accept and process and deliver magic, spreading stillness across the world.
“Say ‘stop,’ ” Daziel said.
My stomach hurt. Like those years growing up when the harvest had been bad and my belly ground against itself, searching for something to eat.
“Say ‘stop’ now.”
He sounded serious. He must really want me to do…what? What did he want me to do? My whole body seemed to be centering toward something, like a flame, and it wanted to keep burning and burning and burning…
“Naomi.” Daziel’s talons dug into my forearms. “Naomi. Say ‘stop.’ ”
That was it. That was what he wanted. I had to open my mouth. Had to push sound through my vocal cords…
“Stop,” I managed.
Like a puppeteer cutting a marionette’s string, the magic snapped out of me.
I collapsed. Daziel caught me, arms circling my waist and pulling me so my head rested on his shoulder.
I was drained and empty and lightheaded, too exhausted to be confused.
At my side, élodie, Birra, and Yael stared at me with tremulous expressions.
I looked beyond them. The bridge dissipated in a gust, swirls of white drifting away and dissolving.
“Leave,” he barked at the others. “Get everyone to the caves.”
élodie swallowed but didn’t move. Yael stepped forward, her patrician features grimly set. “Let her go.”
“Leave,” he said, and they were blown backward.
His wings snapped shut, cocooning us again.
He slashed a hot talon against the marks on my skin, in one direction, then the other, forming a bloody X that the heat of his claw seared shut even as he made it.
I screamed, both from pain and surprise.
Then he reeled his wings back, revealing Yael and élodie chanting spells.
Birra held a rock and wound her arm to throw it.
“I’m not harming her,” Daziel said, sounding furious.
“Let go of her,” Yael demanded. She held a stylo in one hand, a clay tablet in another—of course she’d always be prepared to cast.
élodie’s gaze had transferred to the waves, which were wild once again. “The beach is going to be underwater soon.”
“What did you do to her?” Yael asked, face pale. “That wasn’t normal. You shouldn’t have been able to do that.”
“I saved your life,” Daziel snapped. To me, he asked, “Can you walk?”
“Yes.” I took a step, and my knee collapsed. I gazed at it, baffled. Why wasn’t my knee working? How odd.
Cursing, Daziel scooped me up. The others followed, and we caught up with the students from the platform as they scrambled up the glossy stairs carved in the cliff, which the rain had turned dangerous.
“This way,” Yael said once we’d gone two-thirds of the way up. She led us out on a small but sturdy ledge and through a tall, slanted opening into a large cavern.
Fifty drenched students huddled inside, illuminated by glow lights. Puddles covered the ground. The cave was clearly often used—people had pulled out crates of supplies and were making tea—but it had the look of a disaster zone right now.
Daziel touched my shirt. It sizzled dry.
“Thanks,” I said, grateful to be dry, wanting to curl up into him for added warmth. Instead, I glanced at the group next to me, soaked through. I’d been about to ask if he’d dry them too, but élodie spoke first.
“How did you do that?” she asked. “You didn’t write any charaktêres. You shouldn’t have been able to affect the water and air like that.”
He’d written something, though. On my shoulder. In blood.
“Natural magic is different than letterform,” he said shortly.
“True,” Yael said, her voice steady, her gaze piercing. “But wild shedim still don’t have that kind of power. Wild shedim can’t control the elements with such totality. I’ve never read of anything like this.”
I looked down so they couldn’t read the unease on my face. A wild shayd hadn’t cast the spell; I had, hidden from view.
Daziel didn’t reveal a hint of what I feared we’d done. “You think human texts contain all possibilities?” he tossed off.
Desperate to stop my classmates from pushing further, I changed the topic. “Daziel, can you dry everyone?” To the others, I said, “You’ll get sick if he doesn’t.”
Yael kept frowning, but she stepped forward, her fine blond hair plastered to her head.
Do you trust him? she’d asked me two months ago.
Now she knew Daziel, had spent hours with him in the Keep, had gone to the pub with him.
I hoped she trusted him too, even if she knew something strange had happened.
Daziel touched Yael’s shoulder. Her clothes fluttered as water evaporated, sizzling into the air around her.
The short strands of her hair fluffed up so she looked like a duckling in spring.
She kept her gaze pinned on his face, like she was trying to read the truth there, but he looked behind her, bored, signaling someone else to come forward.
A few moments later, Stefan and Gidon hurried up. “You both all right?” Stefan asked, looking worried. Gidon, to my shock, hugged me tightly, then Yael, then Daziel.
I drew her aside as the boys grilled Daziel on events as he kept drying students. “Hi.”
“He’s more powerful than he should be,” she said with no preamble.
I tried to maintain a neutral expression. “He’s right, though. We don’t know everything about what shedim can do.”
“A wild shayd couldn’t perform that spell.” She sounded certain.
Part of me wanted to tell her what had happened, but I had no idea of the repercussions of a binding, even if both parties had agreed.
I needed to talk to Daziel about this before anyone else.
I hadn’t even known shedim could bind humans; I’d thought only humans did the binding.
“Don’t worry,” I told Yael. “I trust him.”
Her gaze slid back from Daziel to me, and I wondered how much she guessed. “So you’ve said. But be careful.”
We stayed in the cave for an hour, until the rain slowed.
Then, slipping and sliding, we made our way back across the rocks to the leatherworking neighborhood, then the tram.
It was an hour more before we reached Testylier House, where Daziel and I said reserved good-nights to élodie and Birra as we left them at their floor.
My door hadn’t even finished closing before I’d collapsed on the sofa. “What a night.”
“Don’t ever do that again,” Daziel hissed.
I lifted my head a smidgeon, shocked. “Excuse me? What?”
“You risked your life.”
“People could have died—”
“I don’t care about people,” he snapped. “I care about you.”
I stared, astonished. “Well, I care about people.”
He took a deep breath and reined himself in. “I know. I know it’s not in your nature to leave people behind. But that was dangerous, Naomi.”
I considered this. There was a lot to consider, really. “What was the spell we did?”
His steady gaze held mine. “What do you think?”
I gnawed at my lower lip. I knew it even if I didn’t want to say it. His abilities were so different from the way humans handled magic. We couldn’t affect things on such a large scale. We couldn’t affect elements. And we needed to write our spells and use neshem.
I forced the words out. “Was it a binding? The blood magic? Is that why—we didn’t need a proper spell, or neshem?”
He didn’t look away.
My stomach hollowed out. It had been. “Is it—still—?”
“No,” he said flatly. “I broke it.”
The X he’d carved. I absorbed this, remembering the way the magic had flowed through me, how there had been so much of it, how it had needed so much less direction than a spell written and cast by humans.
“That’s why people used to bind shedim,” I said in a low voice, feeling sick.
I’d always heard how powerful spellcasters had been when they bound shedim; I didn’t like having personal experience.
“You’re an inexhaustible source of magic. ”
“Not inexhaustible,” he said. “Eventually, we die.”
My gut clenched at the truth of that. “It didn’t feel great to me, either. Heady and addictive—but I couldn’t let go. It felt like it might drain me.”
He winced. “I hadn’t realized it’d hit you like that.”
I started pacing, thinking hard, while Daziel leaned against the counter, watching. “The old stories say only the most powerful spellcasters bound shedim. I’d thought they became powerful from stealing your magic, but maybe they already needed to be strong to funnel it.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Why did we need the binding, though? Why couldn’t you have done it on your own?”