Chapter 23
Chapter
Twenty-Three
It looked like a party in the backyard as sunrise crested over the fence and drenched the grass around them, making it shine even brighter, like they were laying on a field of emeralds.
Or maybe Delainey was focusing on the grass so she didn’t have to look at the werewolf next to her, or think about what they had almost done the night before.
The backyard was modest, hemmed in by a wooden privacy fence that had been painted blue to match the old Victorian’s siding. A birdbath stood in one corner, dry and crusted with old leaves, and a patch of bare earth near the back door marked the spot where the coven grew herbs.
She and Reece were sitting in the middle of a circle with the coven and Emerson looped around them, hands joined and expressions intense.
There were dark circles under Aya’s brown eyes, and Delainey doubted she had slept.
Her hair was pulled back in a bun resting on the top of her head, and she was wearing the same clothes as the night before.
Her reading glasses were perched on top of her head by the bun, forgotten there, and the sleeves of her cardigan were pushed up past her elbows, ink stains marking her fingertips from a night spent writing.
In front of Aya were several pages of loose leaf paper and a grimoire she must have pulled out of their library.
Hopefully, it held the answers they needed to break the manacles on Delainey and Reece’s wrists.
Those manacles needed to get broken today.
Otherwise, Delainey might do something crazy like chop off her own hand and see if that worked because she had woken up in Reece’s arms like she belonged there, and she had slept better than she had in weeks, even if you took the kidnapping out of the equation, which she wasn’t going to think about at all.
It was relief, she was sure. That had to be it.
It wasn’t that there was something special about the werewolf next to her. It wasn’t that he made something inside her glow. No, it was a crazy situation they had no business getting caught up in.
Cole and Mark were standing behind Briana and Aya, while Javi and Hugh were on the other side of the circle.
Javi looked almost relaxed, and Hugh had his arms crossed like he was waiting for some sort of threat he could fight.
Nico was behind Elise, and he looked the most comfortable of all the men, but that wasn’t saying much because none of the werewolves actually looked comfortable.
Delainey had an idea that some of the tension among her coven and Emerson came from the spectators. She had performed magic in front of werewolves before, when they successfully rescued Elise and Nico from Austin LaSalle’s clutches, but this felt different.
“You two need to clasp hands,” Aya told them.
Reece met Delainey’s eyes and held his hands out, palms facing down. His hands were large and square-knuckled, with more than a few freckles on the backs of them, and the manacles glinted dully around his thick wrists.
Delainey didn’t want to touch him, but that would raise more questions than she could afford to answer, so she reached her hands out, palms up, and they linked their fingers together. She did her best to ignore the heat of his skin against hers.
Soon this would be over and she would never have to touch him again. She felt a pain deep in her chest at the thought and tried to push it aside. Not touching him was what she was supposed to be doing. It was a good thing. If she felt a little weird about it, too freaking bad.
“No matter what you do,” Aya warned, “don’t let go of each other until I tell you it’s okay. We’re going to get started now.”
“Do you really need him there?” Reece asked. It was clear who he was talking about. There was only one him in the circle.
“Doing this with five people is already stretching us thin,” Aya said, her fingers tightening around Briana’s hand on one side and Serena’s on the other.
“But I figure you don’t want us calling in any more friends, right?
” Her look at Reece was challenging, and Delainey saw Cole take one step forward before he stopped himself.
“Emerson has graciously offered to help. Can you accept that?”
If Reece said no, this entire thing would be called off, and she and the grumpy werewolf would be bound together even longer. Delainey squeezed his fingers and gave him a look, hoping he could interpret it.
Reece’s jaw was set, but he nodded. “Just get this over with.”
Delainey felt the first wave of magic rising up from the ground, and Reece must have sensed it from the way he stiffened even further.
The sensation started as a low vibration in the earth beneath them, traveling up through the grass and into the bones of her legs where they were folded beneath her.
Reece’s fingers tightened on hers until his knuckles turned white, and sweat beaded on his forehead.
The ritual had barely started. The magic hadn’t been aimed toward them yet, and there was nothing physically hurting them.
She felt a hum in the air. Her body was warm with the nearness of magic, but that was it.
Reece looked like he had just run a mile.
She wanted to check whether the other werewolves were as strongly affected, but Reece met her eyes and didn’t look away, and she suddenly felt like his lifeline.
If she turned her gaze to take stock of the others, she feared he might think she was abandoning him to the clutches of evil magic.
So Delainey kept her eyes on his and waited for the first lick of magic to find them.
It took several minutes. Whatever Aya was doing required a lot of power, and that power had to be called from somewhere.
The five witches were necessary to aim it, to shape it, to make it an arrow that flew true, and it would have been easier with seven or nine or even twelve.
The coven was used to working with five, even if one of those was a substitute, and Delainey could do nothing but be a subject of the magic at the moment.
There was something normal and homey to the beginning of the ritual, the summoning of power she heard in her sisters’ voices, even though there was a baritone keeping cadence with them that didn’t belong.
Emerson sat cross-legged directly across from Aya, his pressed button-down absurdly clean against the dewy grass, and his lips moved in time with the chant, though his voice was pitched lower than everyone else’s.
The magic was the same warm glow as always, except there was something slick underneath it, almost oily.
She wasn’t used to Emerson’s magic, and that was probably all it was.
Every witch had their own signature, and not all of them felt nice.
It was no mark against them. Like someone with really bad body odor, it didn’t make them a bad person, even if they were smelly.
Reece coughed in the back of his throat, and Delainey narrowed her eyes at him.
What the hell was wrong? Magic circled her wrists, warm, almost uncomfortably so, but not quite a burn.
He gurgled again and tried to jerk back.
The tendons in his forearms stood out rigid as cables, and his fingers spasmed in her grip; the strength behind the jerk was nearly enough to wrench her arms from their sockets.
She held on tightly, refusing to let him break their connection, mindful of Aya’s warning.
She wouldn’t have said that if it wasn’t important.
His skin had gone even paler than normal, and dark circles that hadn’t been there when they sat down were now prominent under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept for a week, when she knew for a fact he had gotten several hours the night before. She was his witness.
Delainey jerked her gaze to Aya. But Aya’s eyes were closed, as were everyone else’s, and the coven was swaying back and forth in their seats as Aya continued chanting. It was a familiar rhythm, one Delainey had fallen into many times herself.
But something was wrong because Reece was looking worse by the second and she felt fine.
Her mind flashed back to that night in the woods, to the realization she’d had: if she killed him, it would break the bond between them and free her for good.
But no, there was no way the coven would do that, not even to save her. At the very least, they would have told her if that was the plan.
“What’s going on?” Delainey demanded. She thought she heard a response from one of the wolves, but with the magic circling so strongly around them, it was nearly a physical barrier keeping them separate from the rest of the world.
The air had thickened to something almost tangible, pressing against her eardrums like being underwater, and she could see the magic now as a faint shimmer in the air between herself and the circle of witches, distorting the faces beyond it like heat rippling off asphalt.
Reece tried to wrench out of her grasp, but Delainey wouldn’t let him go. She trusted Aya, even if something was going wrong. She couldn’t let go. She feared it would hurt him too much. She did risk flexing her hand, and her fingertips brushed against the manacle on one of his wrists.
She gasped. It was so hot it burned. The metal seared the pads of her fingers, and she could smell it now, the acrid tang of heated brass mixed with something sulfurous that stung the back of her throat.
“We need to stop this,” she said. “Something’s wrong. Aya, wake up!”
Aya kept chanting.
Delainey looked around frantically, hoping to catch the eye of one of her sisters, hoping they might give her some clue as to why they were in this mess.
Elise’s eyes snapped open, and Delainey saw the worry in her gaze. Elise wouldn’t hurt a fly. She wouldn’t agree to killing Reece, even if she wasn’t dating Nico. Aya and Elise were best friends. Aya wouldn’t keep that from her.
The magic circled and circled, but it was focused on Reece.
Fuck this.
Delainey ignored whatever the coven was doing and shoved her own magic into the binding, fighting against that strange oiliness in her coven’s power.
Her power answered, roaring up from the depths of her chest and pouring down through her arms and into the brass like a blowtorch turned on a lock, and she could feel the competing magics colliding inside the metal, her fire, sharp and clean, shearing against that slick foreign current, the two forces grinding together with a vibration she felt in her teeth.
Reece slumped against her, and bile rose in Delainey’s throat at how pale he had gone. She shoved the magic away with all of her might, felt a lightning-strike flash of burning pain against her wrists, and heard something crack.
The sound was enormous, and the force blew outward from the manacles, flattening the grass in a perfect circle around them and sending loose grimoire pages scattering across the yard.
Distantly she heard someone scream, but before she could figure out who, the magic rebounded back into her, and she fainted right on top of an unconscious Reece.