Chapter 42
Chapter
Forty-Two
Pain crashed down over Delainey, and she didn’t have time to brace for it. She didn’t bother trying when her priority was getting free of this damn stupid magical prison, so she and Reece could fight for their lives.
Not that they were a match for the witches of the Wallace Grove Coven, but if those assholes were going to kill her, she was going down swinging.
It didn’t matter that Brenda Nevin had so apologetically insisted Delainey would make it out of this thing alive. Delainey wasn’t letting them kill Reece, not while she still had breath in her body.
The chanting of the Nevins intensified, and, surprisingly, Delainey felt it slam into her, almost like it was giving her more power. Beside her, Reece grunted, and she realized that was exactly what it was doing, draining his life force into her.
The Wallace Grove witches were using the tether as some kind of siphon, and once they drained Reece, the tether would be nothing but a memory, an evil little trick they could forget had ever existed.
How the hell did she get out of this?
Delainey was thankful they hadn’t just shot Reece. That would have broken the tether as well as this complicated spell, but Wallace Grove was too sophisticated for that. They would never dirty their hands with such a mundane weapon.
It had to be magic. It had to be elegant.
It was all fucking bullshit.
Delainey summoned her magic, but not to fight them. Nothing would go through the ward circle, keeping her and Reece in place. She understood the basic structure, and there was no point fighting it yet.
Instead, she built as much of a wall of magic between herself and Reece as she could, trying to reject every bit of him that the siphon was dumping into her, hoping it would rebound and stay where it belonged: inside of Reece.
Power surged through her palms, and she could feel the heat of it spreading up through her wrists and forearms, her fingers trembling with the effort of pushing it back rather than letting it settle into her.
She was on her knees. She hadn’t realized she’d fallen, but Reece was there beside her, his skin deathly pale. His freckles stood out dark against skin that had gone white, and the reddish wave of his hair hung limp against his forehead, damp with sweat.
She didn’t know how long he could take this.
She kept her focus on the block between them and turned toward him, cradling his face and resting her forehead against his.
Delainey could feel magic spark everywhere they touched and worried it was more of a drain, but when she tried to pull back, Reece wouldn’t let her.
He clutched her like she was a lifeline, and she wasn’t going to pull away.
Not yet. Not now.
His broad hands clamped around her upper arms, square-knuckled fingers pressing hard enough to bruise even through her jacket, and his whole body was shaking.
But Delainey did angle her body toward Emerson. There had to be a weak link here, and it wasn’t the Nevins. She didn’t know the other witches they’d brought from Wallace Grove, so she couldn’t really work on them.
But Emerson had been living in the coven house for the last month. He’d watched Elise grow up. He was a healer. He looked a bit, well… not quite conflicted, not quite guilty. Delainey couldn’t figure out the word and wasn’t going to waste time digging through her vocabulary.
“You’re a healer, Emerson!” She screamed at him over the force of the magic assaulting her and Reece. She split her focus to try to rebuff the spell itself, not just the siphon still trickling the life out of Reece.
It was like a kink in a water hose; it could stop the flow for now, but the water was backing up and it would eventually explode out.
“You know this is wrong,” she told him. “Mind control? Murder? What are you thinking? You can still fix this!”
“Ignore them,” Brenda said without turning, chin lifted in that imperious tilt that was all command and no compromise. “You know this is for the best.”
Emerson looked away from Delainey.
Well, fuck.
She had tried.
Unsure of what else to do, Delainey hurled a ball of her own magic over the circle, and it fizzled to nothingness when it hit the wall of power that had her and Reece trapped.
The impact sent a ripple across the invisible barrier, and the force of the rebound knocked her back half a step. Damn it. She’d known that would happen, but she still had to try.
If this fiasco was telling her anything, it was that the Wallace Grove Coven wasn’t immune from making mistakes.
She just had to find the weak point to get them out of this.
“Delainey.” Reece’s voice was weak, and he clutched at her arm with fingers that could barely grip. She turned back to face him.
He looked like he’d been stabbed somewhere she couldn’t see, all the blood drained out of him. His eyes had gone dull, none of that gold flicker she’d grown used to, and his shoulders were hunched in on themselves as if his own frame had become too heavy to hold upright.
It was a physical manifestation of his life force being siphoned through this damned spell, and she was failing to stop it.
She could feel trickles of power coming through the bond between them. He shouldn’t have been fading so fast, but that was when she realized her mistake.
The siphon wasn’t just directing power into her. It was bleeding him dry, however it could. So while she’d been rejecting the power that came from him, it had still been bleeding out all around them.
“Fuck, Reece, I’m so sorry,” Delainey said, pressing both palms flat against his chest, feeling the rapid, shallow hammer of his heartbeat through the fabric of his shirt.
“I don’t regret it,” the words were almost a gasp, one hand lifting to cover hers where it rested against his sternum. “These last weeks with you. I…”
Whatever he was going to say was cut off by a honking car horn, of all things.
The intensity of the draining spell ebbed for a moment as the concentration of the Wallace Grove Coven broke.
The first person Delainey saw was Serena, already flinging bolts of electricity at the gathered witches. Serena’s hair whipped behind her, and her hands crackled with white-blue arcs that jumped between her spread fingers before she hurled them forward.
She must have been practicing, Delainey realized. Her electric spell work had been really iffy the last time she’d seen it. Elise was right behind her, along with Nico, Javi, Hugh, and Cole.
The cavalry. Oh, fuck yes.
“Hold on!” she gripped Reece’s face. “You just have to make it a little bit longer.”
With the block between them completely failing, Delainey let it drop and gasped as his life force rushed into her. For one dizzying second, she could feel every blade of grass beneath her knees as if her senses had been cranked past their limit.
“Sorry,” she muttered to Reece. The amp to her power may have come from his life force, but she was going to use it if it meant she could save his life.
Delainey started pelting the inside of the circle with balls of magic, more to annoy the Wallace Grove witches than anything else.
Brenda and Tim kept chanting, but Emerson turned away.
Delainey didn’t know if it was to fight.
She couldn’t quite make out what her coven and the pack were doing, but she knew what they’d planned: kicking some damn ass.
Delainey heard a crack and realized it wasn’t something physical. It was a manifestation of the magic circle around her.
She looked toward where it suddenly felt weaker and saw Briana in an army crawl, looking barely conscious as she tore at the ground with her fingers, centimeter by centimeter, physically breaking her way through the circle.
The raw skin of Briana’s wrist where she’d torn the charm bracelet free was smeared with soil and blood; her pale fingers gouging into the packed earth at the circle’s edge.
That was one way to do it.
Delainey scrambled over to help. With the Wallace Grove Coven otherwise engaged, they weren’t paying attention to her.
While this was an unorthodox way of breaking a circle, physically disrupting it could work.
She met Briana on the other side and started digging her fingers in parallel.
The earth at the circle’s boundary was dense, packed hard enough that her nails bent back against the soil, and every time her fingertips brushed the circle’s edge, a sharp burn shot through the pads of her fingers and up into her knuckles.
“Are you okay?” Delainey asked.
Briana gave her a soft smile and nodded.
“I’ll be okay.” Her words were muffled, like she was talking through water.
That must have been the effect of the circle, strange, since it hadn’t been like that earlier, but now they were messing with the stability of it, which could be warping its effect on the physical world.
Reece looked like he could barely sit up straight, but he shuffled over beside Delainey. “Tell me what to do.” The words were a gasped slur.
He dropped to the ground beside her heavily, the impact jarring through his whole frame, his big hands already clawing at the dirt even as his arms shook with the effort of staying upright.
“Preserve your energy. Oh my god, if you die, I’m going to be so pissed.”
Maybe she needed to work on her lovey-dovey talk, but she had priorities right now.
Reece ignored that command. Every time her fingers got close to the edge of the circle, they burned as the magic tried to repel her. But Delainey would happily let them be singed down to the bone if it got her and Reece out of this mess.
She heard a feminine shriek of rage and looked up to see Serena deflect an attack that would have laid Hugh flat out.
At least, Delainey thought it was Hugh, since he was in his wolf form and she wasn’t sure.
The wolf was massive, gray-furred and snarling, hackles raised in a ridge along its spine as it circled the nearest Wallace Grove witch.
Cole was standing next to Aya. Her hands were pressed flat in front of her, fingers spread wide as she fed power into her spell work. Javi and Aya had a magical barrier in front of them to keep the Wallace Grove witches from getting any closer.
The magic in front of Delainey wobbled, and she heard a sound like glass cracking.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she said. “Back up.”
Briana scrambled back as Delainey grabbed Reece’s arm and jerked him toward the center of the circle. The ward collapsed, and magic exploded outward.
The concussive force blew the grass flat in a perfect ring and sent a shockwave through the ground that Delainey felt in her teeth. She saw Briana fall backward in the wave, but she couldn’t worry about that right now. She thought she heard Brenda scream.
Yeah, that would hurt, having your ward collapse against your will, all the magic ricocheting back into you.
Delainey couldn’t find it in herself to feel bad about that.
She grabbed Reece’s arm. “Come on. We have to go.”
He tried to push himself to his feet. “Just give me a minute,” he said, or at least she thought that was what he tried to say. The words didn’t sound like any language she recognized. He tried to push himself up one more time, then his eyes rolled back, and he slumped over.
He went down like something vital had given way inside him, all two hundred-plus pounds of muscle and bone folding sideways into the churned-up dirt, his red hair fanning across the ground.
No.
Delainey clutched his shoulders and shook him.
Absolutely the fuck not. You do not get to die right now.
The tether was still there between them. She could feel it, but it was faint. Delainey clung to it with everything in her.
If that was the cost of keeping Reece alive, she would make it permanent right now. She just didn’t know how.
The fight raged on around them.
Elise finally managed to shuffle in and found Delainey holding Reece close and rocking, trying to send some of her magic back into him, as if that might give him the boost he needed to survive ten goddamn more minutes until they could end this battle and save his damned life.
His head was heavy in her lap, his skin so cold under her fingers that she could barely reconcile it with the man who always ran hot, whose body had been fever-warm every time she’d touched him.
Elise shuffled forward beside Delainey. “Let me,” she said, dropping to her knees on Reece’s other side and wrapping both hands around his limp one.
Delainey could feel Elise’s soft healing magic as it circled her and Reece. It tickled through the tether, and she gladly accepted that.
As long as she could feel him through it, he was still alive, no matter how hard it was to find his pulse.
But then Elise drew her magic back.
“What are you doing?” Delainey demanded. “Heal him!”
Elise looked up, her face ashen. “I can’t. There’s nothing wrong with him.”
“What are you talking about? Look at him!” Delainey shook Reece again, wondering if she should be doing that, but at this point she didn’t care. Anything necessary, she would do, as long as it got Reece back.
“They didn’t hurt him, not physically,” Elise said, pulling her hands back from his and pressing them against her own thighs.
“They drained his life force. It’s not something a healer can fix.
It’s not something I can fix. I don’t know.
I’m so sorry.” She took his hand again, and her healing magic circled them, but Delainey could feel the futility in it.
“He can’t die,” she said.
Elise closed her eyes and bowed her head. “I’m so sorry. I can’t save him.”