Chapter Forty-Four
LOLA
Terror clamps a fist around my heart as I ripple through the crowd, noncorporeal with Enzo’s magic.
I vanished the instant Nic told me to hide a few minutes ago, and when it became clear Laurel was going to toy with us, I slipped through the motorcar’s door and skirted the crowd to get a better angle on the scene.
First, I tried to access Laurel’s magic. I figured all I needed to do was cut off her control over Enzo and the others, just like I’d cut off Nic’s illusions in the past. How hard could it be?
But as soon as I opened myself up to her magic, it became clear this would be far trickier than I anticipated.
I’d understood both Nic’s and Enzo’s magic a lot more before I first tried my hand at it; Laurel’s was utterly foreign to me.
No matter how hard I tried to clamp down on it, it slipped through my fingers, icy, slimy, wrong.
Then Paol jerked forward out of the crowd, and Laurel used Enzo’s fingers to press voratium to his chest. Panicking as Enzo’s terror ballooned in my chest, I reached for Enzo’s magic to cut it off, but as soon as I brushed the glow of his power, the Unbreakable Lie erupted in my veins.
The more desperately I grasped at it, the more feverish it became.
And then Paol dropped, and Enzo’s pain razed through me.
I’m still wobbling now, staring at the scene ahead, scrambling to figure out how to fix this as Enzo’s mouth makes words that sound utterly foreign in his voice, as Soren is puppeted forward, as Enzo’s terror bleeds into madness that has my whole body shivering.
Enzo presses empty voratium to Soren’s skin.
No. I cannot let this happen. Cannot let her break Enzo like this.
I grab for Nic’s magic, dragging it in with everything I am.
The Unbreakable Lie roars ever louder inside me, holding the power captive.
“Fine,” Nic says, bending to set Paol down gently on the street before meeting Enzo’s otherworldly glare head-on. “You wanted me out of the vehicle, and you want me to do your bidding.” He spreads his hands, one still holding the pistol, as though to say, I’m all yours.
“You’ve betrayed me before,” Laurel says through Enzo’s mouth.
“That’s the thing about forcing compliance,” Nic bites back. “You’ll never be sure if the people you make bend to your will are truly yours.”
Enzo’s smile is all wrong. “I have my ways.”
“There’s always another test with you.”
I’m vibrating with tension watching that voratium leech soullight from Soren’s collarbone.
I try not to imagine him toppling the way Paol did moments ago, attempt to keep my attention on pulling at the unmovable threads of Nic’s magic, but it’s getting harder to focus the more panicked Enzo and I become.
“Will you pass this test?” Laurel snaps. “Or keep postulating about it?” Enzo presses the voratium harder against Soren’s skin, and the glow in the metal intensifies.
Nic’s nostrils flare, but he raises the pistol, pointing it at Soren’s forehead.
“No!” I whimper, but without a body, my voice makes no sound.
Soren has put his neck on the line for me more times than I can count, has saved my life, has fought alongside me in dozens of heists. Despite his scrutiny over my behavior the past few days, he’s one of the most loyal people I know.
Nobody deserves this less than he.
And Enzo . . . Gods, I can already feel him breaking. Splinters of his panic, of his pain, of his fear raze through me, so hot and so fast I can barely see. Soren is the Tentacle that has been with him the longest.
This would utterly destroy him.
I scream as I dig my mental grip into Nic’s magic, and though I’m noncorporeal, I feel that scream shred through every sinew.
Come on.
But the magic won’t budge. Buzzing builds inside me, vibrating in my bones.
The Unbreakable Lie won’t let me wield their magic, not here where Enzo could see.
Shuddering, I try to let go of Nic’s magic, but if anything, the Unbreakable Lie ratchets higher, singing in my nerves, my bones, my teeth.
And that’s when I realize it. While the Unbreakable Lie is preventing me from using my magic, it also wants me to.
Because if I don’t stop this—if I let Enzo kill Soren now—Enzo will shatter.
Much like how Nic started believing long ago that he wasn’t worth caring for, Enzo will define himself as a danger.
He won’t accept my trust anymore, real or false.
Damned if I use my magic, because he’ll find out I didn’t trust him. Damned if I don’t, because he’ll stop believing himself worthy of trust.
I have to break the Unbreakable Lie.
Tightening my grip on my voratium, I drag at the magic so hard my teeth sing.
An inferno blazes through me.
My body flickers back into corporeality as I focus everything on cutting off Enzo’s power while using Nic’s to create an illusion in his hand of pain so intense he’ll drop the gun.
My fingernails dig into my palm. The voratium pierces my skin. Blood slicks hot through my knuckles as my teeth grind hard enough my jaw cracks.
The Unbreakable Lie screams in my ears, in my skull, in my heart, tearing me asunder.
The voratium in my hand implodes, slamming pain up my arm.
I glance down as I open my fingers, and sparkling dust falls with my blood to the ground.
Even voratium isn’t strong enough to break the unbreakable.
Tears sting in my eyes as I turn back toward where Enzo’s still pressing his pendant to Soren’s neck. No one has noticed me, here in the back. Not yet, anyway.
As though dredged up through the haze of delirium, I glimpse the photograph of my mother in my mind’s eye.
She was a conduit. Not a starblessed, like the brothers, but voratium made human. If that is what I am as well, then perhaps I don’t need a bracelet to channel the brothers’ power. Perhaps all I need is myself.
I claw past the buzzing and the agony for that trace of ice just out of my reach. I grit my teeth as a cry tears out of me, as terror burns my veins, as darkness stains my vision.
And then . . . there it is. Frigid, beautiful, terrible magic, flooding into me.
My whole body vibrates as though it’s about to explode. A fresh wave of torture strangles my heart, and Enzo’s head whips around, eyes landing on me.
Our pulse stutters.
My mind whirls.
The world goes fuzzy.
I’m dying. I can barely see him anymore—all that remain are the magic threads in my mind’s eye, pulsing with violet-blue light. Pain spasms as the Unbreakable Lie’s mounting pressure fills my soul.
The buzzing rises to a fever pitch, as though the magic does not know which way to pull me. My bones are about to splinter, my blood about to boil.
I grit my teeth and grasp with every fragment of myself I have left onto Enzo’s magic, hauling it toward me, cutting it off.
The flow of threads resists for one heartbeat. Two.
I scream as my soul rips apart. As the world fractures. As shards of ice rain through me.
Enzo jolts backward, slamming to the cobblestones with a roar that punches through my eardrums.
My vision clears enough to see Enzo and Nic both gaping. I follow their gazes to where multicolor light bleeds out of my every pore—the same multicolor light I saw that night I rolled the Unbreakable Lie. It pelts from my skin, twisting and terrible.
It detonates.
Pressure balloons outward, stealing the breath from my lungs, rippling through me in a wave of heat. The world shudders. I hit the ground. My body convulses. Stars explode.
And then they go dark.