Chapter 16 #2
Marta, on the other hand, was exhausted. She’d drained more of herself last night than she’d intended, and the soreness between her legs matched the rest of her muscles. It was like she’d done a triathlon and then fucked ten people afterward.
“Look, we all knew what would happen when we went into the woods last night,” I said. “We all agreed to it.”
“I didn’t think it would be that intense,” Atlas confessed. “And the next one…” He grabbed the book and flipped it open to the flesh-binding spell. “If blood binding felt like that, flesh binding is going to kill me.”
“Or make us stronger,” Marta argued.
“You don’t know that,” he said. “You don’t know how any of this is going to turn out. Constance stopped writing after the last soul ritual. This is…” He shook his head. “This is dark magic.”
“There’s no such thing as dark magic,” Marta said, the ire in her tone forcing Atlas to grind his teeth.
No love lost between these two.
Despite what we’d done, they were still at each other’s throats. Maybe it would always be this way.
“There’s only chaos and order,” she said. “Everyone walks the line between both.”
“Then what are demons, huh?” Atlas said. “Vampires? Rabid shifters?”
“Forces of chaos,” she said. “They thrive on it.”
“And last night was your definition of order?” Atlas sighed.
“The spell worked as intended, even if it was a little…unorthodox,” Marta rebutted. “We are one step closer to being able to share magic.”
“But without a full coven, we don’t know if what we’ll end up with will be the same thing we had before we got stuck here,” he growled. “What if it’s worse? What if we unleash something we never should have fucked with in the first place?”
“As long as it gets us home,” Marta snarled. The frustration ricocheted between them like a ping-pong ball, bouncing back and forth, feeding off each one’s anger and pent-up aggression. “The end will justify the means.”
“I’m not sure about that,” he said, pushing to his feet.
“So you want to stay here for the rest of eternity?” She shoved upright, getting in his face.
“Alright, knock it off.” I slammed my hands on the table to get their attention and break the cycle. “You said we had a week, right? We’ll keep researching. We’ll keep scouring the library and trying to connect to the other side.”
Atlas pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know, man. Something’s wrong.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Wrong, how?”
He glanced between us as a thick wave of trepidation coursed through the bond.
“I feel…different,” he said. “I’ve been having these dreams.”
That got my attention. “What dreams?”
He looked like he was about to say something life-altering, but instead he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want us to forget what brought us here. We created this liminal for a lust demon. Asmodeius. People were consuming each other, fucking each other to death.”
“Your point?” Marta asked, drumming her nails on her coffee mug.
“What if the demon’s here?” Atlas cleared his throat. “What if it’s inside us? What if it’s fucking with us? We already feel like we can’t control our impulses. This is just making it worse.”
“Even more reason to keep going with the rituals,” she said.
Atlas had a good argument. I almost hadn’t been able to stop last night, and even now, sitting next to them and not touching them took an incredible amount of restraint.
I wanted to lick the sweat off Atlas’s abs.
I wanted to bury myself between Marta’s legs.
I wanted to fuck them both, consequences be damned, society’s ideas of taboo be damned.
“Look, creating that amount of magic at one time…” Atlas rubbed his hands over his eyes, pushing them back into his hair. “Demons feed off that shit. They live for it. It may not have shown itself yet, but that doesn’t mean it’s not here.”
Marta squared her jaw and nodded once, reluctant resolution settling in her gut.
“You’re right,” I said, glancing up at her. “Do we have to be outside for the flesh binding? Can we do it indoors, behind the wards?”
She nodded. “I think so. Outdoors is better, but as long as we protect ourselves and we start at the right time of day, it shouldn’t matter where we do it.”
Atlas sighed, his anxiety momentarily quelled. But my mind went back to something else Marta had said.
“What do you mean we’re running out of time?” I asked.
“In the human realm, it’s the middle of October. In two weeks, it’ll be November 1.”
“And?” Atlas raised his eyebrows.
“Día de Muertos.” She blinked as a wave of regret and anguish flickered down the bond. She explained it was the time of year when the connection between realms was at its most potent. “Usually we think about it in terms of the living and the dead, but—”
“It could mean this realm, too,” Atlas finished.
“Exactly,” she said as a burst of exhilaration exploded from her chest. “If we could get my coven to pull from the other side while we push, maybe we could overwhelm the veil and slip through.”
“How do we get them to pull?” I asked. “You haven’t been able to contact them.”
“I think it’s time we leave the estate,” she said. “If I go to Tita’s house, I might be able to reach her from there.”
“How?” Atlas asked. “Do you and Tita have some kind of telepathic connection?”
“No, but we have a direct bloodline.” She took another sip of coffee and sighed. “It’s not like the coven, not like our blood binding. We share DNA. I’m hoping I can reach her through the mirror.”
He raised his eyebrow as a wicked heat of disbelief twisted through his chest. “A mirror?”
“Mirrors have long been believed to be the doorway to other realms,” I said. “You think that will work?”
“I’ve been trying to reach the coven from here, but I think the heavy protective wards around the space are keeping me out. Tita’s house is warded, too, but not by hundreds of years of witch blood. This is her blood, my blood. It could work.”
“I thought you said it was too risky to leave the grounds,” Atlas said.
“It is,” she admitted. “But I don’t think we have another choice.”
My brother looked at me and raised an eyebrow, a silent question of whether I agreed.
“It’s worth a shot,” I said. “If it gets us home. But I don’t think you should go alone.”
“I’ll go with you,” Atlas added. “I’m dying to get out of this place, and I could use the drive.”
Marta nodded and licked her lips.
“Okay.” I agreed, but I didn’t like the thought of the two of them out there while I was stuck here with no way to help them if something went wrong.
But someone needed to keep researching. “I’ll go to the library to hunt down Constance.
Maybe there’s something in the lore that will help us with the liminal. ”
“I’m wiped from the ritual, so we’ll wait a few days before we go. In the meantime, we can test the bond. See what we’re working with,” Marta said. “Even if I can’t reach her, as long as the rituals work, we might have enough juice to do it without the coven.”