Chapter 70 #2
“Stop it!” I screamed, reaching for more power, but it did nothing to undo the damage to my friend.
The High Chief chuckled.
“Do you feel that?” he asked. “The limits of your magic? You cannot fight what you don’t understand. And you don’t understand me.”
I gritted my teeth, tears stinging my eyes. My magic sputtered. My fingers were numb. And Jackson…
I froze. For one awful second, my magic dimmed completely.
The wound was closing. The bleeding had slowed. And yet, he was still dying.
“What did he do?” I whispered, pressing harder, desperate to find something I’d missed. I reached deeper—beneath the blood, beneath the torn skin and muscle—trying to feel the thread of magic I could pull back together. But everything I touched kept unraveling.
“He…he did something to him,” Sean said, while shaking.
“But what? Sean, I’ve sealed the arteries—I’ve fixed the damage—so why isn’t it working?”
“Emma—” Sean choked on my name. “Please… I’m losing him!”
The words hit like a blade. I looked down at Jackson’s face—pale, barely conscious—and felt something inside me crack.
Not him.
Please, gods, not him.
“I don’t know…” The words broke out of me, choked and helpless. I started crying, not from grief but from raw panic. “I don’t know what to do. What do I do?”
My hands shook against his chest, slick with blood. I had closed the wounds, stopped the bleeding, but his life was still slipping through my fingers.
Nothing was working. Nothing was enough.
Tears blurred my vision, dripping down onto his blood-slick shirt as I tried to force more power through him, tried to feel the right spell, the right healing, something, but it was like screaming into a void.
I didn’t understand what was wrong, I didn’t have the knowledge.
His chest barely moved beneath my hands.
“You’re my family, Jackson,” I wailed. “You’re our family. You can’t leave us. Fight this.”
A soft gasp rattled in his throat.
“Em—”
The faintest whisper.
I jerked back, eyes wide, searching his face.
“Don’t cry,” Jackson murmured, blood at the corner of his mouth. “You’re too pretty to cry.”
“Idiot,” I sobbed, brushing his matted hair back from his forehead. “I don’t even know what that means.”
He smiled. Weak.
His eyelids fluttered. Just barely. My heart slammed against my ribs.
Then—slowly, like it cost him everything—his gaze drifted toward Sean.
“Hey…” Jackson rasped, voice barely more than a breath.
Sean froze.
Jackson’s lips curved the smallest amount. His eyes were glassy, unfocused, but they found Sean and stayed there.
“I love you,” he whispered.
Sean shattered.
He folded forward, forehead pressed to Jackson’s, sobs racking his whole body. “I love you too,” he choked. “You absolute bastard, I love you! Don’t you dare leave me now—”
Jackson’s eyes slipped closed.
Then everything inside me broke, until a flicker of movement caught at the edge of my vision.
Cara was running toward us, limping hard, one arm clutched to her side. Her face was bloodless, her eyes wide, not with fear, but resolve.
She dropped to her knees beside us, her breath ragged.
“The High Chief cast a shield,” she whispered with conviction. “That’s why your healing won’t take. Your magic’s not failing, it’s being blocked from the inside.”
“A shield?” I echoed, confused as hell.
“An advanced one. It’s a rare form of translation, ancient. It mimics the effect of armor from within the body. When cast, it deflects all other translation—healing, reinforcement, anything—locks everything out.”
My gaze snapped to the High Chief. He moved through Caden and James’s attacks like they were slow, irrelevant. Each strike slid off him, absorbed, redirected, and his expression never changed.
“He’s using it on himself,” I said, catching on.
“Yes, and I’m willing to bet he cast the same translation into Jackson when he struck him,” Cara replied in a hurried tone. “It would’ve sealed his body in the exact condition it was in the moment of impact. Frozen. Your magic can’t connect because it’s bouncing off a wall you can’t see.”
A knot twisted in my gut. I had been trying to heal the surface while the real damage had stayed untouched and rotting.
“So what do we do?” Sean demanded, wild-eyed.
“We save your husband,” Cara shot back, steel threaded through every word. “I didn’t help you form a True Bond in Hunza just so one of you could drop dead the next time we crossed paths.”
…What?
Cara turned to me and gripped my wrist, her fingers tight. “The Chief has no idea you’re healing him,” she said, fast and fierce. “He can’t see your haze from here, and he doesn’t know what you can do.”
Her eyes locked onto mine.
“Maurice knew what a shield was. And now, you do too. So stop focusing on what you don’t understand. Focus on what’s already inside you.”
Her voice softened, only barely.
“Your father’s translation runs through your veins. This isn’t foreign to you. It’s yours.”
She squeezed my wrist once. “You can break it, Emma. You’re the only one who can.”
Her gaze flicked to the far side of the battlefield, where the High Chief had turned toward us, hand lifting again.
“I’ll buy you some time,” she said, low and steady. “Jackson’s not going to die. Not here, and not today.”
She turned toward the High Chief, arms spread wide, head lifted like a challenge. Daring him.
I didn’t wait to see what happened next.
My hands slammed back onto Jackson’s chest, and this time—this time—I didn’t try to heal. I reached deeper, searching for the shield, the barrier Cara had warned me about.
I felt it immediately, thin and tight like wire beneath the surface. But now I understood it. I recognized its shape, its rhythm.
I closed my eyes and drew in a breath, calling up my golden haze. It flared to life beneath my skin, surging forward, not to push against the shield, but to slip through it.
The moment I found the weak point, my magic rushed in, racing through his veins, seizing every torn thread, binding, mending, anchoring.
Jackson’s breath hitched beneath my palms.
“Come on, Jackson,” I whispered. “Come back. Come back to us.”
Another breath. Stronger.
His skin flushed with color.
“Emma,” Sean breathed, eyes wide with disbelief. “I think…he’s…he’s breathing.”
“He’s stabilizing,” I said, barely able to believe it myself.
Sean let out a sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh, tears spilling down his cheeks in silent relief. His hands trembled as he pressed them to Jackson’s chest, as if needing to feel it, just to be sure.
“Keep him down,” I hissed, snapping back to focus. “Don’t let the Chief get even a glimpse of what I did. Grab him, and get him out of here, Sean.”
Our eyes locked, only for a second. Then Sean gave a sharp nod, jaw clenched.
He slipped his arms beneath Jackson—still unconscious but breathing—and lifted him with a strength I didn’t know he had. A flicker of light sparked around them as he summoned a green portal, the air warping with strain.
“I’ve got you,” my brother murmured softly to his husband, and then they were gone, vanished into the shimmer of translation.
I looked up, barely able to exhale.
Cara had collapsed to her knees, smoke curling from the sleeves of her coat, her shoulders heaving. But she was alive.
She met my gaze, her eyes filled with something soft, wrecked, and true.
Then she slumped sideways, unconscious, right as James appeared, his face bloodied. He caught her before she hit the ground, then scooped her up in his arms without a word.
And then he was gone too—back into the smoke and fire—carrying the girl who’d saved my family out of the line of fire.