Chapter 25
Chapter
Twenty-Five
Delainey was freaking starving. She hadn’t eaten breakfast before the ritual because she hadn’t known how it was going to go, and it seemed better not to risk a full stomach.
But now it had been more than an hour since that little catastrophe, and all she wanted was some eggs, some toast, and maybe a bit of bacon. She could practically smell it.
They were standing on the sidewalk in front of the house. The street was narrow, lined on both sides with similar old houses in various states of upkeep. It was still early enough that not many people were outside, though she spotted Mrs. Anderson walking her dog at the end of the block.
This was going to look kind of weird to any spectators, but they needed the space. The backyard simply wasn’t big enough.
Distantly she heard someone’s sprinkler tick tick ticking.
Mrs. Anderson’s dog barked as they passed; something had set it off.
Kayla Pritchard rode her bike with her giant backpack on her shoulders, heading to school.
Delainey knew they had to get this done quickly before everyone started looking askance at them.
“It’s going to be okay,” Elise told her, giving her hand a squeeze.
Delainey glanced over her shoulder and saw Mark doing something very similar to Reece a few feet away.
Seven feet away, as a matter of fact, and she was happy about that.
Reece stood with his weight on his back foot and his arms loose at his sides, still in the borrowed sweats that were too short at the hem, his red hair uncombed and sticking up at odd angles from sleep and the morning’s chaos.
Even from seven feet she could see the raw red marks the manacles had left on his wrists, matching her own.
This little experiment was directly related to the barrier that used to hold them together.
They had made it clear in the yard that there was still some kind of connection, and now with space and observation, the coven and the pack wanted to figure out just how much distance Delainey and Reece could have from one another.
Delainey was hoping the weird pain in the backyard had been a fluke. Maybe it had been a holdover, as the last of the magic released her and Reece from its clutches.
But she remembered the feel of all that ritual magic slamming back into her as the cuffs broke, and she had a sinking feeling that she and Reece were still connected somehow, even if the manacles were now sitting in a lead box destined for Aya’s desk while she did her research on them.
“We are going to do this carefully,” Elise said. “Each of you will take one step, and then once it starts to hurt, you stop. We’ll measure the distance and see if there’s any effect on you, or if we can sense anything in the magic. Got it?”
“Got it,” Delainey replied, already rolling her shoulders back and planting her gym shoes on the concrete like she was lining up for a race.
As if there was anything complicated about this little experiment.
She wanted to sprint and see if that might snap the tether between them.
She could feel it like a pulse in her chest, right above her stomach and below her heart, and she didn’t like the idea of being magically connected to someone else, especially not someone who was as much of an anti-witch asshole as Reece.
Elise kept hold of Delainey’s hand as she walked, and Aya was right there, marking the distance next to them.
“That’s ten feet,” Aya said. “How are you feeling?”
Elise squeezed her hand again. Delainey wondered if she should pretend to be more worried than she was, because Elise’s brow was furrowed and she looked genuinely concerned. But Delainey felt fine and she said it.
Two more steps brought about fifteen feet of separation, and something started to burble in her chest like she had to burp. Delainey ignored it. That could be hunger and the need for breakfast.
Another step. She felt something tugging out of her back. It wasn’t painful, but it was like a thread connecting them. Her heartbeat kicked up.
At twenty feet, it was almost like a hook was trying to tug her back towards Reece.
The pull was physical, not metaphorical, she could feel the exact point in her chest where it anchored, just left of center, and her body listed backward a fraction with every step forward, like walking into a stiff headwind that only she could feel.
Delainey clenched her jaw and took another step, sweat dotting her brow.
“Maybe that’s enough,” Elise told her, trying to stop her from moving forward. “Delainey—”
Delainey stepped forward again.
“Thirty feet,” Aya said.
Thirty feet? Okay, could she make it to fifty?
Two more steps had her vision going blurry, and another made blood rush to her ears.
The world tilted sideways, the tree-lined street smearing into streaks of green and gray, and her own heartbeat was so loud in her skull that it drowned out the traffic noise and the birdsong and everything else until there was nothing but the wet, hammering thud of her pulse and the taste of copper flooding her mouth.
She couldn’t see the ground in front of her, and it felt watery under her feet. Her heart was thump thump thumping too fast, and she could physically feel the blood in her veins, which couldn’t be a good sign. Her head was exploding with pain.
Distantly, barely over the rushing in her ears, she could hear Elise begging her to stop and move back, but she had to keep going. If she made it far enough, the bond would snap, and she and Reece would be free of this.
Just one more step, she begged of herself.
But it wasn’t the bond that pulled her back. It was Elise, physically yanking her back and back and back until she crossed some invisible threshold and the pain evaporated like it was never there.
The world snapped back into focus in a rush: the cracked sidewalk, the leaves overhead, Elise’s blue eyes wide and frightened three inches from her face, and Delainey’s legs buckled, forcing Elise to brace her weight to keep her standing.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re a hard ass. I get it,” Elise murmured.
Delainey heaved in breaths and wished she could look like nothing had bothered her, but the physical manifestations were too obvious. “I could have made it,” she insisted. “Just a little bit further.”
Elise glared at her. “You were about to go into cardiac arrest. So no, you couldn’t.”
“It was thirty feet before the worst of the symptoms,” Aya informed them, scribbling something on the paper she’d carried out from the backyard.
Delainey turned around and saw Mark glaring at Reece, who was also sweating, arms crossed, looking like he’d been through the exact same ringer she had.
His face was still too pale under the freckles, and a wet patch of sweat had spread down the front of his borrowed t-shirt. He stood with his feet planted wide apart, like he didn’t trust his own balance, and his brown eyes, not gold, not anymore, but close, locked onto hers the moment she turned.
“You’re both the freaking same,” Elise muttered.
Delainey did not appreciate the comparison.