37. Ben
“That one casts Starsear, a level-five spell,” Cress’s handbook informed me when I held out one of the pieces of paper attached to Evening Guidance. My father had stored a trove of spells on the staff, and I was still trying to figure which were useful. Most were priceless—spells I’d find nearly impossible to replace once they were used up.
At my core, I was still a blood witch, but I could still cobble up enough celestial witchery with Cress’s help to channel these spells. Very few witches, even those in varied mating circles like mine, had the ability to switch between affinities. I was rare. But that didn’t mean I was powerful, and I crammed every second I wasn’t training with Cress or sleeping. It was the evening of our third day of serious training, with one more to go before we joined the push to save everyone we could.
“Starsear is commonly a spell for celestial witches with a star alignment. Like you, bub! It makes one gigantic star-shaped, uh, thing, that explodes,” the handbook continued cheerfully in its squeaky toy voice. Now that it had identified the spell, it flew a curlicue over my head.
It then shouted a dramatic “KABEWM!” and flopped out of the sky with the clap of its pages snapping closed.
I snickered. I couldn’t help it. Ever since the mating circle ritual, I found it as amusing as Cress did.
She peered into the room I’d claimed for the evening, and my cock twitched just at the sight of her. Down, boy. Sharing lust with two other dudes was ridiculous. Especially when I was usually the first to get distracted and thus sent to the closet.
“Is everything okay?” Cress asked.
“Just demonstrating how devastating Starsear is,” the handbook whispered from the floor.
She came in to pick it up and gave it a little toss so it would take flight again. “Everything’s fine,” I added.
“Well, good. I thought you might want to know that Phaeron is having Lucas experiment with his magic.”
I clenched my fists. Lucas had barely begun to recover from his coma. There had to be a damn good reason he was being pushed to use his nebulous new magic, no matter how powerful Phaeron thought it might be. “Where?” I demanded.
We walked to the row of containment rooms for the former torchbearers. One was unlocked, and inside were the two men, standing over an unconscious body resting on a narrow cot. Phaeron watched Lucas nearly as closely as my brother stared at the woman, his hands held palms out toward her.
The door latched behind us loudly, and Lucas startled. He turned our way, and then a wide smile split his pale face. “Hey, big bro! Guess what,” he said.
An ugly gasp sounded from the woman he’d been working magic on. She leveraged herself to her elbows, looking around with rapid breaths causing her chest to heave. Phaeron nudged Lucas our way and bent to speak to her in soothing tones.
Lucas came over and dropped his voice to a whisper. “We’ve figured out how I can gather more energy for my affinity. It turns out that helping others with damage to their souls gives me the power to help more people.” He beamed with pure relief. The idea of hurting others to acquire soul energy had really triggered him.
I glanced over him in a once-over. “And you’re feeling all right?” I asked.
He considered himself, finger to chin in thought. His nod was slow in coming. “I think so. You know how it was hard to activate blood runes when we first took our affinity? It’s like that. The more I practice, the faster and easier it is. And Phaeron’s been a great teacher.” With a glance over his shoulder, he shrugged. “Though he tends to disappear a lot.”
The dimensional in question had left behind shadowy smoke in place of him and the woman Lucas had healed. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d taken her to one of our safe houses to wait for the trip to the ocean gate.
“Does he jump scare you when he comes back, or does he save that for Cress?” I asked.
“Oh, I think he reserves that for me,” she said. “I’ll just be minding my own business, and everyone else goes quiet. And I ask myself ‘He’s behind me, isn’t he?’”
The shadows twitched behind her, taking shape into Phaeron. There was a mischievous gleam in his eyes. “He’s not always standing behind you. That would be ridiculous,” I said, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from giving him away.
“Yeah, well…” She drifted off and glanced over her shoulder, yelping when he took that moment to grab her.
Lucas made a blech face when their play wrestling turned into kissing, and I elbowed him. “Hey, she has a sister,” I said in an undertone.
There was one benefit to the bleaching he’d gone through. He clearly blushed up to his ears when I embarrassed him. “Ben,” he complained. “I’m some kind of soul witch now. I don’t have time to think about girls.”
“Pretty sure you’ll be back to that in no time,” I teased.
Phaeron cleared his throat as he pulled away from Cress. “I did have a goal for us to reach this evening,” he said, gesturing for Lucas to follow him. “We have containment rooms to clear, and then I have some news to share. Grant has returned with our last glimpse of information on Myuna’s machinations.”
“Oh, where is the spy extraordinaire?” I asked, following my brother and Cress as we all headed for the next containment room.
“At this hour, resting,” he answered. Somehow, he also sent me a message through the magic of the mating circle. He’d prefer to tell us something privately and had already bribed Grant to keep it to himself until tomorrow morning. Cress’s eyes narrowed, like she knew he’d done something, but she didn’t comment.
I’d have to ask him how he did that. He seemed to be figuring out what this magic could do a lot faster than the rest of us.
“Anyway, these last few torchbearers are more recent victims. Myuna’s power runs deeper in them…nearly embedded in their souls. I was able to untie her control of them, but her corruption remains,” he said to Lucas. “I would be quite keen to see if you can help them.”
Lucas squared his shoulders with confidence. “Leave it to me,” he said.
I guessed I was turning overprotective, as I earned an annoyed look over his shoulder when I said, “Just don’t overexert yourself, okay? I don’t want you leaving this pocket dimension wheeled out on a hospital bed.”
“I’ll be fine. Trust,” he said.
I stood aside with Cress, who watched them with shadows of black and purple flickering over her eyes. I’d seen it enough to know that Braza was lending her soul sight so she could watch what was going on.
“Their souls are still bleached.” She leaned over to whisper to me, gesturing to the two unconscious people on either ends of the containment room. “I see the corruption as swirls of brighter white. Lucas is trying to get a hold of it to pull it out.”
Sweat visibly beaded Lucas’s forehead. He concentrated, flexing his fingers like he could grab and tug Myuna’s influence out as easily as pulling a weed. As the minutes rolled on, it was clear it wasn’t that easy.
I ended up behind Cress, cuddling her to my front while she watched and updated me occasionally of how he was doing. His success was obvious from her gasp before she said, “He’s holding the corruption separate from that person’s soul. It looks like he’s absorbing it.”
“Is that safe for him?” I asked, looking between her and Phaeron.
The dimensional watched intently before nodding toward me. “In this case, it seems power is power,” he said.
“A lot of power,” Lucas murmured. “I don’t even know what to do with it.”
“How fortuitous, for I have a plan that hinges on that feeling,” Phaeron said.
Blinking, Lucas moved on to the next person to remove their corruption too. “I mean, sure. Whatever you want. You saved my life, after all.”
There was a heaviness to his reaction and response. “We shall face many soon that we will not be able to save. But there is one person who we must, who is corrupted more dangerously than anyone in these containment rooms. After seeing how your magic works, I believe you are up to this task.”
“Who?” Cress asked. The spike of dread from her hit me like a sucker punch.
“I suggest you gather up Geo and head to a private room. I will tell you the news and my plan as soon as we finish up here,” Phaeron promised. “You will want to be sitting down for this, bright soul.”
Phaeron didn’t hide the truth from me—he’d suspected for days that Myuna had ascended Carly. It hurt, but he’d had a reason to keep it private as he sought a solution for the situation first.
I could hardly breathe. Grant had spotted her commanding torchbearers separately from the goddess while wielding a staff formed of white light. Carly was bleached more severely than Lucas, according to the changeling, overriding even the magical blue dye in her hair to render her fully white, like Myuna had once done to Endaeron.
“She is still alive, so there is hope we can pry the seed of corruption out of her before Myuna transforms her into a second Hungering Darkness,” Phaeron was saying.
At some point, I’d tuned out, curling into a ball with my chin on my knees. Ugly tears and sobs ripped from me despite being pressed between Ben and Geo on the couch. “She picked my sister on purpose,” I croaked.
“Indeed. She wanted to hurt us,” Phaeron said more quietly. He stood apart, watching my breakdown, shame radiating from him. “Apologies will not suffice, I know. I failed her when she was brought before Myuna the first time and did not attempt to rescue her before… I did not know that she was capable of turning your sister against us quite like this.”
I sniffled, scrubbing at my face. “How could you have known?”
It was personal…it had to be. Myuna had to know the prophecy she feared most was on the cusp of coming true. Phaeron’s mate, assisted by his daughter, was coming to cut that bitch’s head off. And like a cornered animal, Myuna had struck out in the only way she could. She’d put us in a situation where the easiest victory was closed to us. Neither Phaeron nor I would sacrifice Carly, but if we didn’t, her torchbearers would kill our defenders and friends with free access to their magic.
My grief twined quickly with a new burn in my chest, hatred blazing to life like I’d never felt before. There were few people I’d truly wanted to kill, but they were the villains of my life. Those who were now deceased, Garroway or Blaize Starsurge, for what they’d done to me, my family, or to others. But Myuna…I would commit any kind of violence necessary to ensure she joined them in hell.
Understanding seemed to glimmer in Phaeron’s gemstone eyes. “Do you want to hear my plan to fix this?” he asked.
I nodded, and he shared it. We’d prepare one last containment room layered with librarian witch runes and powered by Braza. Lucas would remain behind in the room to await delivery of Carly, though he’d have a fallback in putting them both into stasis if removing her corruption was beyond his abilities.
Geo had already agreed to be the retriever. He didn’t flinch when I slanted a look his way. “You could’ve told me about this too, you know,” I grumbled.
“My apologies,” he said in that grinding way that suggested he’d been in gargoyle form recently.
“In the meantime, I will be storing the second half of Braza’s power in this,” Phaeron added, withdrawing the dragon scale from his pocket and handing it to me.
It was ringed with runes on its front and back, currently a dormant black. “It just needs a librarian witch’s blessing before it can hold a soul and hook into the spells that would reanimate it in a gargoyle’s body,” he added.
“Wait, what?” Ben asked.
“He copied the runes from my heart last night,” Geo supplied. “I shall explain the situation to Ben.”
He drew aside a confused, scowling Ben to the other side of the room while Phaeron sat next to me to walk me through the blessing. It needed a kick of librarian witch power, something I did easily enough through drawing a rune over it with the tip of Flame, which functioned just as well as any of the other silver swords I’d used for spellcasting.
The scale crackled with power, each of its runes glowing from within with purple light. “I knew the scale could do it,” he said. He picked it up and held it to my ear so I could hear how it thrummed at a deep frequency, awaiting an occupant.
“What about the other half of her soul?” I asked.
“For right now, you will have to hold it within yourself. After we kill Myuna, I am assuming it will be a simple thing to acquire a crystal heart from our Crystal Court allies. Prince Orthus seems the sort who would give it freely, even if he knows what it’s for,” he said.
Even though we were in private, Braza made herself known with a crackle of her electric presence over my shoulders. “I assume you will have to draw upon a significant portion of my power to fight Myuna. If it all comes from the half attached to you, brightest of souls, you’ll barely notice me clinging to you while you all seek a second heart.”
“Hmm. Who are we lying to, then?” I asked.
Phaeron dipped his head in acknowledgment of the unspoken intention. “Most everyone. The death of a powercore is a monumental event, nearly unheard of, but Myuna will be an easy scapegoat for Braza’s disappearance. From there, it will take years to construct her gargoyle body with the proper intentionality that will be required to hide the suddenness of her second life from this modern world.”
My brow furrowed. That would be nearly impossible, considering most everyone had a social media trail that started with their parents photographing them in diapers. “We should at least get Madigan and her men in the know. My coven, too. They’re good at keeping secrets.”
“Agreed,” Braza said. “I’ll want some friends who know who I am.”
With a sigh, Phaeron rubbed his face and thought it over, replying after a while, “Yes, perhaps with the assistance of a fae deal. Grant’s identity has been the only well-guarded secret amongst us.”
“I’m sure áine would help us with that.”
I trusted her a hell of a lot more than Grant, even though he’d done nothing to earn that other than exist as a changeling from a dangerous court. His scouting and spying had really come in handy, but sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder what his ultimate angle was and who he served back in the Autumn Court. áine didn’t have that kind of potential baggage behind her intentions.
“She would. And while no plan is foolproof, I will do everything in my power to return your sister.” He took my hand in between both of his and searched my face for forgiveness.
I smiled back sadly. It was clear he sought the kind of absolution I couldn’t offer him. “Carly will forgive you when she’s returned to herself. I’m sure she knows you were as much a victim as she is. Hell, judging by the other torchbearers we’ve encountered, this whole time may be as memorable to her as a long nightmare.”
He brought my fingertips to his lips to kiss. “I hope so, bright soul. She is family now. The thought of her warped into undeath like my brother was is unthinkable. I have to save her now, like I wish I could’ve saved him then.” He released a ragged sound of grief.
“We will,” I said. We had to. My sister deserved nothing less.