Chapter 9
REN
Ifeel them before I see them. Six new heartbeats at the edge of my range, fast and even, the controlled rhythm of people who’ve trained their pulses not to spike. Not hikers. Not tourists. Nobody walks through a campground with a resting heart rate of fifty-eight unless they’ve been conditioned to.
“Ren.” Everly’s voice, tight. She’s behind me at the picnic table. I was pretending to eat—the masking spell has been burning through my blood for a month and my appetite left somewhere around Kansas City. “What is it?”
“Six people. Coming toward us.” I close my eyes and let the blood magic reach.
Heartbeats tell you everything. These six are steady, oxygenated, primed—the physiology of adrenaline being held in check.
And something else. Something dead on them.
Spots of nothing where my magic slides off like skin over a scar.
“They’re warded. I can feel it—dampening charms, something that makes my magic go numb when I push against them. ”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
The campground stretches around us. Scrub brush.
Dirt. Open ground. A family three campsites over—I count without thinking, the way I always do: two adult heartbeats, two small fast ones, and the quick thud of a dog.
Forty-three heartbeats in my range. Thirty-eight of them have no idea what’s coming.
Atlas’s pulse changes first. Drops low, goes slow and heavy, the way it always does before the lightning comes. His conductor starts humming—I feel it in my marrow, a subsonic pressure change, like the air is holding its breath. The sky darkens.
“Not the sky,” I tell him. “Kids. Three sites over.”
His jaw tightens. The clouds hold.
“Directed bursts,” he says. “I can do directed bursts.”
“Can you?”
“I can try.”
I feel Callum’s heartbeat go flat and cold.
The way it did at Nyxhaven before bad things happened—not faster, not slower, just emptied out, all the warmth stripped from it.
His shadows are spreading across the dirt.
I feel Felix’s pulse do something I can never quite follow—a stutter, a skip, a reorganization, like his heart is reshuffling its own rhythm.
“Two on the right are weak,” Felix says, eyes closed. “Give me thirty seconds.”
We don’t have thirty seconds. The six heartbeats are closer. Forty yards. Thirty. The one in front does something and the air between us turns solid—pressure against my ribs, my sternum, like a hand pressing me flat. Barrier spell. I can’t breathe through it.
Atlas breaks it. Lightning, one burst, and the barrier shatters and air floods back into my lungs and the rain comes down—not everywhere, just on them, a wall of water that turns the dirt to mud.
Then it’s noise and bodies and blood.
I don’t watch fights. I feel them. Every heartbeat in range is mine to track, mine to keep or lose, and right now I’m holding nine—five of ours and four of theirs that are close enough to hurt us.
The other two are in the mud, pinned by Callum’s shadows, their pulses spiking with panic, and I let them spike because panicked people don’t throw spells straight.
Atlas’s rib cracks. I feel it happen—the bone giving, the lung tissue bruising, blood pooling where it shouldn’t—and I reach for him before the pain even registers on his face.
Not with hands. With blood. I find the fracture and hold it together from twenty feet away, knitting bone while he throws lightning, keeping his insides intact while his outsides do damage.
Felix goes down next. Something locks up his left side—a binding spell, hooked into his nerve endings like fishhooks, and his pulse goes ragged with the shock of it.
I’m already inside the connection, finding where the spell has dug in, pulling it loose thread by thread.
Delicate. His nervous system is not a thing you yank on.
“If you accidentally paralyze me,” he says through his teeth, “I’ll haunt you.”
“Shut up and hold still.”
Callum’s arm opens. I feel the skin part, the muscle separate, the blade of the spell finding bone. He doesn’t make a sound. His heartbeat doesn’t change. He just wraps his shadows tighter around the throat of the operative who did it and squeezes until something cracks.
Then Everly.
One of them gets through. Past the rain, past the shadows, past Felix’s probability field that’s been making spells go wide.
He’s close to her—ten feet—and he’s carrying something that makes my blood magic recoil.
An inhibitor spell. I can feel what it’s designed to do—shut things down, close pathways, make a body go quiet. Make a grimoire go dark.
He throws it.
I feel her open. That’s the only word. Something in Everly’s blood—the part that holds all four magics, the part that terrifies me—opens, and the inhibitor spell hits her and I feel it dissolve.
Eaten. Absorbed into her bloodstream the way her body absorbs oxygen.
For a half-second her pulse sings with something I’ve never felt in another human being—all four magics firing at once, a chord so loud it whites out my senses—and the operative just stops.
Staring. Callum’s shadows take him down before he remembers to move.
Quiet.
Six bodies in the mud. Hearts still beating. I check each one—I can’t not check, my magic won’t let me walk away from a pulse—and they’re all alive. Unconscious. Bound. Breathing.
We’re in the 4Runner sixty seconds later. Everly driving, wipers losing the fight against Atlas’s leftover rain.
“Everyone,” I say from the back seat. I reach.
Atlas first. The rib is holding where I braced it but the bone needs finishing.
I knit it properly—feel the edges fuse, feel the bruised tissue drain, feel the blood pooling in his chest cavity thin and dissolve.
He flinches. Lightning crackles at his fingertips.
The car fills with the smell of ozone and I breathe through my mouth until it passes.
Felix. His shoulder is still half-locked, the last threads of the binding spell tangled in his nerve endings like burrs.
I pull them out one by one. Careful. The way you’d pull glass from a wound—slow, feeling for edges, making sure you got the whole piece and not just the part that shows.
He gasps. Flexes his hand. “Fully functional. Thanks.”
“Don’t get hit next time.”
“I’ll try to schedule it better.”
Callum holds out his arm without being asked.
The gash is deep, clean, the kind of wound someone makes when they know where to cut.
I close it layer by layer. Muscle. Fascia.
Skin. He watches me do it with that flat, quiet stare of his—not flinching, not grateful, just watching.
Learning what I can do. Memorizing it. I let him.
Everybody holds fear differently, and Callum holds it by understanding the thing that scared him.
Then Everly.
She pulls over. Has to—her hands are shaking too badly to steer. We’re on a back road south of El Paso, nothing but desert, Atlas’s storm breaking apart in thin grey rags above us.
“I’m fine,” she says. “I just need a second.”
She’s not fine. Her pulse is a mess—fast, skipping, running on adrenaline and the residual heat of four spells still breaking down inside her.
She’s overloaded. Not the way Atlas described his mother, not the catastrophic kind, but her body is running too hot and I don’t like how her heartbeat keeps stumbling over itself.
“Let me check,” I say.
She turns in the seat. Holds out her hand. Palm up.
The last time I touched her, the blood magic blew the door wide open and I was drowning in her for thirty seconds and I couldn’t eat for two days after.
I remember it in my hands, my chest, the back of my throat—the shock of her loneliness, the want, the way her feelings hit my bloodstream like a drug I didn’t consent to.
I take her hand anyway.
It’s still a lot. Even braced for it, even with the walls we’ve both learned to build since Missouri.
Her blood singing with four magics. The absorbed spells still dissolving in her, slow, the way a fever breaks—in waves.
Her heartbeat evening out under my fingers.
Not because I’m steadying it this time. Because she’s letting me close enough to feel it on my own.
I go through her the way I’d go through anyone after a fight.
Her blood is saturated—running hot, carrying too much, like a river after a storm.
She’s exhausted. Hasn’t been sleeping enough.
The spells she swallowed are processing, breaking down, being eaten by whatever part of her does the eating.
She’s holding. She’s holding all of it, and I don’t know how, and it makes me want to wrap my hands around her wrists and not let go.
And underneath.
She can feel me. The blood magic goes both ways and she’s inside my shaking hands and my racing pulse and the fear—my fear, naked and stupid and obvious—because I’ve just put my hands on her and everything I’ve been keeping quiet is pouring through my skin.
She can feel that I’m afraid for her. That I’ve been afraid for her since Missouri, since the pasta, since the four plates and the fifth one I made because I couldn’t stand the way she looked at me. Like I might be kind.
She can feel that it’s not just fear.
I let go.
“You’re okay,” I say. My voice comes out rough. Wrecked. “Everything’s settling. You’re okay.”
She looks at her hand. At me. At her hand.
She looks up at me. “Thank you.”
I nod. Climb into the front seat. “I’ll drive. You rest.”
She doesn’t argue. Moves to the back, curls up between Atlas and Felix, asleep in three minutes. I drive because someone has to and because my hands need something to hold that isn’t her, and the desert unrolls in front of us flat and dry and uncomplicated in a way that nothing else is.
In the rearview mirror: Atlas with his eyes closed, Everly’s head on his shoulder, Felix dealing cards one-handed against his own thigh, Callum staring out the window with his freshly healed arm cradled against his chest.
My nose is bleeding again. I wipe it on my sleeve and keep driving.
We’re alive. All of us. The family with the small kids three campsites over never knew.
That’s what matters. That’s what I keep telling myself—that I held every heartbeat, that nobody died, that the children are fine—while I drive south toward a man none of us have met and a fix that might not exist.
My hands shake on the wheel. I grip tighter and feel the leather warm under my palms and don’t think about how her pulse felt under my fingers. Don’t think about the way her blood sang.
I don’t think about it. I drive.