Chapter 11 #3
Feeling satisfied that the dire awry doesn’t want everyone else to die, I can take a fucking moment to try to feel halfway human again, finding a worn-thin black cotton T-shirt in the second bedroom.
I still feel naked, though — vulnerable in my human skin, without one of my suits and all the protections woven through that Authority-issued uniform.
When I return to the kitchen, the silver platter has been set to the side, and the entire dining table is layered with chalked runes.
Some of the symbols appear to overlap. Others are carefully wiped off and replaced as Bellamy works through the spell she’s crafting.
I still don’t recognize a single rune or even the base language.
I typically never need to know what I’m looking at in order to break it, so wasting time learning that shit wasn’t high on my must-do list.
Even confined to the table, the spell looks fucking complicated. Bellamy is sweating with the effort of casting it. Or at least setting it up, because I’m fairly certain she’s going to be using my blood as the trigger.
More specifically, as an accelerant.
Which is fine. I offered it. It’s not like we don’t share enough DNA as twins.
If she wanted to use blood to come at me, she could just use her own.
Though not as effectively as using mine, because I’m a shifter and the cu-sith makes me seriously resistant to all essence-based spells.
I also don’t doubt there was blood involved in the fucked-up shit she tried to pull on me at the bar.
The scratches on the back of my neck from that encounter only fully healed after I partly transformed to fight the berserkers in the barrens. Not that I noticed at the time. I was a little fucking busy trying to stop Zaya from fucking sacrificing herself.
“Stop it,” Bellamy snaps. “You’ll disrupt the spell.”
She’s not looking my way, so it takes me a moment — and Gigi curling her lip in my general direction — to figure out she’s talking to me.
“I’m not doing anything,” I snarl back.
“You want this to work?” Bellamy asks, totally fucking rhetorical. “Keep your shit locked down.”
Right. No thinking about my sister trying to fuck me while wearing Zaya’s face. No thinking about Zaya at all.
I pace back into the kitchen, avoiding touching the still-simmering pots or anything on the counters as I start hunting for food. Meat would be nice, but based on what’s in the fridge, Bellamy is apparently a fucking vegan.
“I need his blood,” Bellamy says to Gigi as she takes a step back from the table, though her gaze remains fixed to the knife still hovering before her. “Two separate draws, and I can’t take them myself.”
Gigi grunts, producing a small, wickedly sharp blade from somewhere on her person.
I have no idea where the fuck she hid it in the skintight jeans and silk-blouse tank-top-thing she’s wearing.
No obvious essence shifts as if she’s dispelled a concealing charm or called the blade to her by other means.
“The marble mortar.” Bellamy nods toward me, then the counter. “I don’t need the pestle.”
“I have no fucking idea what —” I growl.
“The little bowl,” Gigi says, exasperated as if I’ve taken up way too much of her time. “With the thick walls. Fuck me, just standing in the same room as the two of you is going on my fucking ‘No’ list. Right under no children, no genocides, and no family, blood related or not.”
Grabbing the surprisingly weighty dark-gray stone bowl, I scoff at the combat mage. Though I don’t need to hear the truth ringing through Gigi’s words to know she’s serious. Both about the list of atrocities she refuses to participate in and where she’s ranked helping us on that list.
“Open a major vein.” Bellamy isn’t remotely as detached as she sounds.
It’s enough to make me almost feel like an ass for asking her to do a blood casting of this kind. But she can go full detox after we kill the fucking Cataclysm.
Rolling up the sleeve of the T-shirt, I cross around the counter, offering my arm to Gigi. She takes the marble bowl first, essence snapping out from her fingers and scouring it clean. I huff through my nose to stop myself from sneezing from the burnt scent.
“Here?” Gigi asks, pivoting toward the table.
Bellamy nods.
The combat mage carefully places the bowl in the center of a secondary circle of chalked runes, wary of disturbing the spell.
She’s also careful to not touch or brush up against the table.
Then she grabs me around the wrist surprisingly quickly, tugging my arm over the bowl.
Just as quickly, she slices open my vein with the tip of that wicked blade.
I grunt, more in surprise than at the momentary pinch of pain.
Gigi then slides her hand from my wrist up my arm, pressing her fucking thumb next to the deep slice.
That hurts. I nearly fucking tear her hand off. Literally.
She angles my arm, careful to not get any of my blood on her as she directs the fucking stream she’s pressing out of my fucking vein into the marble bowl.
The wound seals over. Though the cu-sith is currently quiet, watchful within me, I’m still an uber-fucking-powerful shifter. I heal quickly.
Gigi sighs, glancing at Bellamy.
“That’s enough. For now.”
The combat mage shoulders me back from the table as Bellamy paces around it, hovering her fingers over the bowl. She hesitates.
“You’ve got maybe a few minutes before it loses full potency,” Gigi murmurs.
Her back to us, Bellamy takes a shuddering breath, then dips her fingers into the bowl, coating the tips in my blood. Another shudder runs through her as she raises her hand, eyeing the blood. “Fuck me,” she mutters.
“He’s a powerful asshole,” Gigi says agreeably. “But you don’t need his power. You have more than enough of your own.”
Bellamy’s shoulders stiffen, clearly hearing the reprimand paired with a command in the combat mage’s tone. But she starts circling the table again, tracing over select chalked runes with her blood-tipped fingers. She refreshes the blood each time she passes by the bowl.
To my eye, the blood appears unevenly distributed. But as she circles again and again, the runes begin to glow, seeming to absorb the blood, then dispersing it evenly until the entire pattern is interconnected and glowing dark red.
All at once, all the energy woven through the runes snaps to the center as if suddenly sucked into the knife, leaving the table bare of everything but the small marble bowl.
The runes now edging the knife glow brightly enough that I’m forced to squint. Then they … shift.
It’s so subtle that I almost miss it.
The glow fades.
The knife falls to the table with a clatter.
Bellamy slumps against the couch, pressing a trembling hand to her chest. She’s clearly winded, but hopefully not drained. Because that’s only the first spell we need.
“Fuck,” Gigi mutters, more terrified than impressed. “That knife needs to be destroyed after this … you can destroy it, right?”
“If I can’t … Zaya can.” Bellamy looks at me, as if she needs me — rather desperately — to confirm that.
I nod.
Energy shifts around us as Rath appears at the open front door. He fixes his clearly disapproving gaze over the three of us, then looks at the knife. His nostrils flare.
The essence Bellamy used, including my blood, doesn’t stink, but it’s intense.
The scent of burnt grass and seared metal, copper maybe.
And something was clearly in the chalk, which Bellamy either spelled herself or found in Ingrid’s supplies.
Based on the taste of rosehip oil and rosemary coating the back of my throat, I’m guessing the latter.
“We’re gathering in the house,” Rath says. “The Outcast MC is on lockdown. They’ve called all their members into the main pack house. No one stands between us and whatever army the Cataclysm has backing him.”
“He’s not going to just march up main street,” Bellamy says, pissy as she pushes off the back of the couch and steps up to the table to peer down at the knife. “He’s going to punch a portal onto the front lawn.”
Rath scoffs. “Through the barrier of the intersection point?”
“He’s got a lot anchoring him here,” Bellamy says ominously, flicking her gaze to me. “Five of his offspring. Doesn’t matter how reluctant they are to claim him.”
“Zaya has another theory,” Rath says. “That it’s his bond with Disa, even broken, that anchors him here. But that might not hold anymore with Disa dead.”
I nod. It’s the same reason I was concerned that the knife, etched in Disa’s blood, wouldn’t work on the Cataclysm anymore.
“Come up to the house,” Rath adds. “And bring the fucking knife. If it were up to me, I would have taken it from you already.”
Bellamy whirls on him. “Well, thankfully,” she snaps, “none of it is up to you, brother. Otherwise, our father would already have a matching antler for his fucking wall, and our little sister would be in a cage.”
Rath just narrows his eyes at Bellamy, not allowing her to bait him.
She’s not wrong, but I keep my fucking mouth shut. I’m already surprised that Zaya didn’t toss my ass to the road the moment I took my human form. I don’t want to be outside looking in when the Cataclysm shows.
And Bellamy is right on that front as well. I’ve sensed his approach for hours now, as I’m certain Zaya can. It’s like he’s already looking for a way in. Or maybe the portal takes so much power that he has to build it slowly so as not to drain himself.
I could ask Bellamy, but I’m not interested in chatting. I want to be back out there, knife in hand and ready to carve the Cataclysm’s fucking heart out of his fucking chest when he finally gets around to showing up.
Rath takes off, lumbering back up to the house and expecting us to follow like willing little soldiers. He’s not wrong about the willing part, but whose orders we’re all following is definitely still an argument to be had.
I set my gaze on Bellamy. “The last part of the spell?”
She nods reluctantly. “Let the first casting settle for a —”
Energy explodes from somewhere nearby, pulsing outward. It shudders through the beach house and rumbles under our feet.
Gigi runs for the door, tearing out into the night, heading toward the main house but no doubt on her way to the apartment off the workshop-barn to guard Coda.
“He’s here,” Bellamy whispers.
Snatching up the knife as I move, I’m just a step out the door myself when the next essence explosion hits — centered over the fucking bluff, right where I knew he’d try to break through.
More energy pulses out from that point, almost taking me off my feet.
Behind me, Bellamy grabs the doorframe to stay upright.
Zaya steps out on the back patio of the main house. Her eyes, glowing a light, bright purple, cut through the darkness.
I feel the moment she decides to let him in. Maybe the intersection point would have kept him out. Maybe Zaya is trying to mitigate the damage to its power. But she fucking grants him fucking entrance either way.
A yawning maw of noxious darkness opens on the bluff. Writhing with warped energy, it screams through all my senses, as it did the last time I faced that power.
“He doesn’t have many berserkers left,” Bellamy murmurs.
“He’ll come alone,” I say darkly, raising the knife between us. “He thinks he’s a fucking god. Give me what I need to kill him.”
Bellamy wraps her hand over mine on the hilt of the knife, essence radiating from her palm. She fixes her glowing lavender eyes on me.
“A life for a life,” she says.
Then she slits my fucking throat with the fucking knife.
Shocked by the pain, blood streaming down over the blade of the knife, I go down on one knee. Energy writhes over my hand, still tight on the hilt under Bellamy’s grip.
Another pulse of power crackles through the open portal seething on the bluff, and I gasp as the wound on my throat knits together. Under the press of Bellamy’s essence, the blood coating the blade somehow embeds into the metal, coating it red-black.
She sways, falling to her knees before me far more gently than I did. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she says. “Because I’m tapped out.”
Bellamy releases the blade into my hand, slumping back against the doorframe and fixing her gaze over my shoulder.
On Zaya. Flanked by my brothers, the Conduit is walking across the back lawn toward the bluff, toward the portal.
My father steps through that seething miasma of power, cranking his neck side to side. The portal snaps shut behind him.
“I’ll go to Precious,” Bellamy says.
I nod, already gaining my feet, already turning away and ready to shove past the three people who were meant to be mine, mine before anyone else in this fucking universe.
They look like they’re out for a fucking Sunday afternoon stroll, so it shouldn’t be difficult to catch up.
I don’t give a fuck that the bonds we once shared have been stripped from me, from us. All our destinies rewritten.
I stood between all three of them and my fucking father on that same fucking bluff before.
I’ll do it again.
Only this time, he won’t get his hands on Zaya. And Disa isn’t here to get between him and me — or, more specifically, between him and the cu-sith — so I can fucking kill him.