Chapter 9 #2
I wanted to believe them. I wanted to hold onto that certainty the way I’d held onto so many other impossible things they’d promised me over the years.
But looking up at my arms, at the black lines spreading like poison through my veins, at the chains keeping me tied to this bed because I couldn’t be trusted with my own body, with my own will, I just wasn’t sure belief was enough anymore.
“So,” I said, staring up at the ceiling, my skin still buzzing with heat and wrongness, “looks like we’re back here again, huh? Except this time, I’m being possessed by impending magical organ failure instead of lust. Fun.”
Neither one laughed or even smiled.
I quirked my brow at them. “What? Too soon?”
“If that’s your idea of a joke, I suggest refining your material,” said Dominic, not looking pleased in the least.
“Right. I’ll workshop it,” I said, adjusting myself on the bed as I tried and failed to find a comfortable position.
Another wave of uncomfortable heat rolled through me without warning, more vicious than the last, burning up through my chest and into my arms like a match had been lit inside me. I couldn’t stop the sound that came out of me—half-gasp, half-groan—as I instinctively tried to curl into myself.
The motion pulled at the cuffs, and I winced hard as the skin around my wrists protested.
Trace’s gaze shot up to my chained hands, his brows pinching tightly at the sight of them. “Maybe we should take them off for a while. She’s in pain.”
“I’m afraid it’s out of the question,” answered Dominic, his dark eyes moving from my wrists to my face, something in his expression pulling taut. “If the voices return, we won’t be able to restrain her again.”
“Her wrists are fucking raw,” argued Trace as he splayed his hand against my abdomen, his thumb brushing gently against my skin as though he were trying to cure me through contact alone.
“We cannot risk the voices—”
“I heard you the first time,” snapped Trace. “A few minutes isn’t going to change anything. Just give me the fucking key.”
“He’s right, Trace,” I said, gazing up from under my lashes as I tried to hide the pain from my face. “It’s not worth the risk. I can still feel the voices. They’re not gone, they’re just quiet again.”
Trace’s expression tightened, something anguished and helpless breaking through the surface. He looked like he wanted to tear something apart just to fix it. Like he wanted to rip the world apart from seam to seam just to focus on anything other than what was happening to me.
I hated that I was doing this to them. After everything we’d already survived together, after all the heartache and loss and near-misses that had nearly broken all of us, this was what was going to finish the job. Not a demon. Not the Order. Not even the Horsemen.
Me. My own body turning against itself.
How fucking poetic.
“Don’t talk like that,” gritted Trace, his hand still pressed against my skin like an open broadcast into my thoughts. “This isn’t over, Jemma. We’re going to fix this just like we do everything else.”
“This isn’t like everything else—”
“Yes, it is,” he insisted, and there was nothing shaky about it. Just that cast-iron sureness that had pulled me back from the edge more times than I could count. “Whatever it takes. However long it takes. We’re going to find a way to fix this.”
Not wanting to further upset him, I nodded like I believed him and then turned to look at Dominic.
He was watching me the way he sometimes did when he thought I wasn’t paying attention.
Taking me apart with that dark, fathomless gaze that saw through every layer I put up and never once flinched at what it found underneath.
There was no composure in it now. No careful architecture.
Just him, looking at me, and all the things he wasn’t going to say out loud because saying them would make them more real than either of us could bear.
He didn’t need to say any of it out loud though. The truth was already in the room with us, as present as the rain and the fever and the poison spreading through my body.
Killing Famine hadn’t broken the Horsemen’s claim on me the way we had all hoped it might.
The coercion was still there, still threading through me like a wire pulled taut, and now the spell rot was unraveling me from the inside at the same time.
Two clocks running at once, both counting down, and neither one with a reset button.
And underneath everything they’d said, underneath the promises and the resolve and the certainty they were holding out to me like a lifeline, the truth was already sitting painful and heavy in my heart.
There was no cure.
This wasn’t a fever that was going to run its course and leave me standing on the other side of it.
There was no external source to remove, no curse to outrun, no talisman to burn.
The rot was coming from inside me, generated by my own body as my blood turned against the magic I carried inside.
You couldn’t cut that out. You couldn’t neutralize something that was woven into the very thing keeping you alive.
Another pulse of heat tore through me, sharper than the last and I clenched my teeth as the black lines flared against my skin again. They weren’t slowing down. They weren’t going to plateau and taper off. They were going to spread until they consumed every last inch of me.
And the next time the voices came back, louder and more insistent and fed by whatever the rot had taken from me in the meantime, I wasn’t sure there would be enough of me left to fight them off.
I wasn’t sure there would be enough of me left at all.