Everly #2
Then Ren's blood sense floods the room, and it isn't gentle.
My own pulse jumps the track—slams up into my throat, doubles, races.
He's shoving every heart in here toward panic without meaning to, his dread pouring out the one door his discipline has, and now we're all of us breathing too fast in a room full of live magic.
Four disciplines going off inside one room. The old hall flinches—I feel it flinch, the building drawing in like a held breath, plaster ticking somewhere above us, the candle finally guttering sideways as if even Concordia Hall has limits to what it'll quietly absorb.
It hits me on every channel at once. The penny taste floods up the back of my throat, thick and bright—blood.
Gooseflesh races up both my arms hard enough to hurt—storm.
The room goes cold in patches, like a door left open somewhere I can't find—shadow.
And at the very edges of my sight, everything is flickering, gone before I can turn my head to any of it—chaos.
So much magic in such a small space that my own grimoire stirs against it, something turning over in its sleep.
Shadow against storm. Chaos bending the air so the room keeps agreeing with Felix. Blood pushing every heart in here toward the edge of its own beat.
And me in the middle of it with all four threads pulling at once, four men I would trust with my life turning that magic on each other, over me, because of me—
—and they go past it.
I feel them go past it. Past the line where it's a fight and into the place where someone gets hurt and can't take it back.
Callum's shadow finds Atlas again, and this time it doesn't fold over the shoulder—it grips, dead center, the bad one that still aches when the weather turns, and Atlas's breath goes ragged and white.
The charge gathers in his fist. Not a warning shot this time.
I can see it gathering, blue crawling up his forearm, aimed at the center of Callum's chest. Felix flicks another card and the room lurches to keep up.
Ren has both hands open at his sides, shaking, holding nothing back because there's nothing left to hold.
They are willing. That's the thing I'll have to live with knowing: in this room, tonight, four men I love are willing to put each other on the floor over the right to keep me off it.
So I reach into all four threads at once, and I pull.
I don't decide to. My body's ahead of me the way it always is.
My hands are already up, fingers spread, and the grimoire wakes at the back of my throat with that cold coin taste, blood and metal, and I take the magic.
All of it. Shadow and storm and chaos and blood, four disciplines that have no business touching, and I haul them down through the threads and into the floor.
The room drops into silence so fast my ears ring with it.
Callum's shadow hits the boards and lies there flat and ordinary, just a shadow, just the dark a body makes.
Atlas's charge guts out with a sound like a snuffed match.
The bent air in front of Felix goes slack.
Ren's pressure lifts off our hearts all at once and four men stand in a quiet room breathing hard, looking at their own hands, looking at me.
I am shaking. I keep my chin up anyway. Chin up, shoulders back, because that's what I do.
"You don't get to do that," I say, and my voice only cracks a little.
"You don't get to ruin each other over me.
I'm not a—I'm not a thing you win." The grimoire settles under my sternum, sated, the coin taste fading on the back of my tongue, holding all four of them down at the floor like leashed dogs, and I hate that I can do this.
I hate that I'm the only one in the room who could.
"I'm in it. Whatever happens tomorrow happens to me too.
So you don't get to stand here deciding it over my head and burning the house down when you can't agree. "
Nobody argues. The fight's gone out of them, drained down into the boards with the rest.
And here is the thing I won't say. The thing I'm going to have to carry out of this room by myself.
Watching them go that far—watching four men I love willing to wreck each other, willing to bleed for the right to keep me safe—it horrifies me. It does. I felt the shadow find Atlas's shoulder and my whole stomach turned. That's the true thing and it's the first thing.
The second thing arrives right underneath it, uninvited, low and hot and entirely mine: some animal part of me wanted the proof. Wanted to see exactly how far they'd go.
And when I saw how far, it landed somewhere deep and shameful and warm, and I am disgusted with myself for it, standing here with their magic pinned to the floor, that wanting curled up small and bright behind my ribs where nobody can see it.
I don't say a word about it. I never will. I tuck it away with everything else I'm not built to look at yet, and I hate, already, that I'll be carrying it down those stairs tomorrow right alongside the fear.
Helena has been by the cold hearth the whole time, watching, the way she watches everything, like she's already seen how it ends and is only here to confirm the timing. She doesn't comment on what I just did. She has the grace, at least, not to look impressed.
It's Callum who breaks the quiet, and he doesn't break it loud.
He's flexing the hand the mark sits on, staring at the closed half moon of it, and when he speaks it's to Helena, low, like he's been holding the words behind his teeth since September and they finally got loose.
"If it comes to a choice." He stops. Starts again. "Down there. If it's the Well, or my mother—" His jaw works. "Which do we choose?"
The fire isn't lit. The hall is cold and old and full of dust that's been settling on the same mantel since before any of us were born, since before Cordelia, maybe, and the question hangs in it and turns slowly and nobody reaches for it.
Helena doesn't answer.
Atlas doesn't. Ren doesn't. Felix is looking at the middle distance again, and whatever's written on his invisible chalkboard, he's not reading it out.
I watch Callum wait for an answer, watch the wait stretch and go nowhere, and I understand that this is the thing eating him alive.
Not the choice. He could make a choice. It's that no one will say it out loud with him, that he's been left to hold it by himself in the dark, and the silence where the answer should be is louder than anything we shouted at each other tonight.
He nods once, like he expected exactly that.
Then he picks his shadow up off the floor, where I left it, and folds it back around his feet, and we go to our separate corners of the only house that won't tell on us, to wait for morning.