But Reese shook her head weakly and rasped, “The shoulder’s just a cut. That’s not . . .
”
She swallowed hard, then pushed up her sleeve and said faintly, “This is worse.”
Her right wrist was swollen and angry, the flesh dimpled in a semicircular bite that was blackened at the edges and wept clear fluid from the center. The sight sledgehammered Dez in the gut and chilled him down to his very soul. “Son of a
bitch
.
”
The magi had been lucky so far—none of them had been bitten—but they all knew what it said in the library about
makol
bites: They had to act immediately. And even then, the odds weren’t good for a mage.
For a human, they were even worse.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Strike zapped the entire fighting force straight to the sacred chamber in the center of the mansion, both because Reese would need all the help she could get, and because it was a defensible position.
Michael and Nate each took a door and cast heavy shield magic, because until further notice, no place was safe.
Dez carried Reese to the big
chac-mool
altar, which was set in cement made from the ashes of long-ago Nightkeepers. He slid down so they were sitting together on the floor, with him leaning back against the altar and her cradled in his lap, her back to his front, so he could brace her and hold her injured arm steady.
She moaned weakly, drifting back to consciousness to ask, “What are you doing?”
“We need to cut you and get the poison out right away,” he whispered into her hair. It was the only way—it might be an old wives’ tale for snakebites, but when it came to magic, the old remedies worked best. “We’ll use a sleep spell. You won’t—”
“No,” she said. “No sleep spell.” She shuddered. “Hate ’em.” Her voice slurred, but her eyes were adamant.
He started to argue, but Sasha interrupted, saying, “I need her conscious. She has to say the spell.” The worry was plain in her face though: As a human, Reese didn’t have any magic. The spell might not have any power coming from her.
He met Sasha’s eyes, saw her agonized sympathy. “Don’t,” he rasped.
Don’t say you’re sorry. Don’t look at me like that.
“She can sense the magic,” he said almost desperately. “Not loud and clear, but she knows when I’m jacked in.” It was something he hadn’t let himself think about too closely, because it only added to the self-serving logic urging him to take her as his mate.
“Then link up with her,” Sasha ordered. “Gods know she’s going to need all the help we can give her.”
There was a commotion among the others, a flurry of phone and radio traffic. Dez caught the words “star demon” and “fucker got it” and his gut twisted with the knowledge that they were in deep, dark shit. Iago had at least four of the artifacts, might know where to find the fifth.
He cursed. They should have been safe inside the compound. What the hell had happened? How had the fuckers gotten in? He was furious—at Iago, at the whole fucking situation—but he shoved all that aside and bent over Reese. Her body was cooling from the spiked fever, but not in a good way. She was limp and clammy, her breathing labored. Her hand was swollen and hot, the blackness of the bite mark spreading along the webwork pattern of her veins.
Death follows quickly
, the codices warned about
makol
bites. And he could practically see her fading, see the darkness overtaking her. A tsunami of emotion hammered through him—rage, regret, guilt, loss, grief—all the things he hadn’t fully felt when he lost her the first time. Back then, he’d been lost himself, and by the time he found his way out with the help of the Triad magic, it had been far too late for him to go after her. Now, though, he realized that he had kept her image inside him, and fought every skirmish with her locked in his heart, knowing she was out there in the world he was defending. He couldn’t lose that, couldn’t lose her.
He wanted to pray, but couldn’t find the inner stillness he needed. So as Sasha used her belt to set a tourniquet above Reese’s elbow, he pulled his knife and carved a jerky furrow in his palm, then hers. He clasped her hand, pressed his cheek to hers, and whispered,
“Pasaj och.”
Magic flowed into him, but it weighed him down rather than lifting him up.
Sasha linked up on the other side, connecting her flow of life energy to Reese’s. “Okay,” the healer said, poising her knife over the bite mark. “On four. One, two . . .
”
She slashed on “three,” bringing a gout of watery black fluid, followed by blood.
Reese stiffened and gave a harsh, strangled cry. Pain radiated into Dez through the blood-link—it was dull and unfocused compared to what he was used to sensing from uplinks with the other magi, but it was
there
, damn it. Something was getting through. So as Sasha slashed again, making an X, he drew as much pain as he could out of the link and sent his own energy back through it.
Come on, you bastard
, he thought, not sure if he was talking to himself or the poison inside her.
Come on!
For a moment, nothing happened. Then a shadow rose from the wound, a formless miasma of dark magic. Reese moaned and strained away from it, pushing back into him. “I’ve got you,” he said, over and over again, holding her tightly, the words becoming meaningless. “I’ve got you.”
“Repeat after me, both of you,” Sasha ordered. Her face was gray and drawn, and streaked with sweat.
Michael left the door to come up behind her and grip her shoulder, pouring his energy into her, the same as Dez was doing with Reese. Except it wasn’t the same, was it? Michael and Sasha were both magi and fully mated, bound together by the
jun tan
bond. Dez could offer Reese only a fraction of what the other two shared. He hoped to hell it would be enough.
Damn it
, he thought, he would
make
it be enough. He bore down and took more of the pain, gave her more of his power. They said the spell, all four of them, with Sasha leading, the others repeating.
The mist coalesced malevolently around Reese’s arm, flickering with arcs of luminous green. Dez gritted his teeth as pain came through the blood-link seemingly without end. He smelled blood and the foul, heavy stench of a
makol’
s evil, the two together overwhelming.
Come on, Reese
, he chanted inwardly,
fight!
Then, unexpectedly, there was a wrenching jolt, and for a second he was
inside
her, seeing what she saw, feeling what she felt. He felt his own solid grip enfolding her from behind, the stubborn determination that tethered her to consciousness, and the tendrils of sick, evil darkness that had made it beyond the tourniquet to root the poison within her body, holding it there.
More, he sensed her strength fading. And he sensed, for a second, a flicker of green that whispered to her, urging her to let go and rest, not to fight anymore. She was so tired, after all. Everything would be okay if she just relaxed and let things happen.
Don’t, Reese
, he projected urgently through the blood-link.
It’s a lie!
But his words didn’t reach her. More, he felt the connection grow thinner as the
makol
’s darkness trickled through her bloodstream, an amorphous cancer of the soul that whispered over and over for her to relax, let go, let the darkness win. Panic kicked through him at the realization that she was losing ground. They both were.
“Take the tourniquet off,” he said to Sasha, and heard his own voice through Reese’s ears, creating a weird dissonance in his mind.
“But—”
“Take it off,” he insisted, then said, “Trust me.” Which was a hell of a thing to ask, because Sasha was one of the ones who still looked at him warily, not yet ready to believe he was reformed.
But she hesitated, traded a look with Michael, then nodded. “Okay.”
“On three, and no tricks this time.” They counted it down and she loosened the tourniquet.
Immediately, the dark mist raced back into Reese, flowing in through the gashes on her wrist. Going on instinct, Dez poured his energy into her, all of his reserves and more.
Fight
, he told her.
Fight, damn it! Don’t you dare run away this time!
It wasn’t until he said it that he recognized the truth of it, but the realization was quickly lost as his perceptions wrenched suddenly, and then he was back in his own head, his own body. He wasn’t connected to her anymore, though he still held her hand in a bloody clasp, still felt the buzz of the uplink. “Reese,” he shouted. “Godsdamn it,
Reese
!
”
A long shudder ran through her body, and then she arched against him, trying to pull away from the blood-links. A deep, guttural moan tore from her throat and her eyes rolled back in her head.
“Gods!” Sasha gasped. The dark, wounded flesh rippled, runneling along her arm as though turbocharged worms were writhing beneath the skin, whipped into a frenzy by the poison. Michael’s eyes went silver as he channeled more energy into Sasha’s healing bond, but that didn’t seem to help. Through the last little bit of the uplink, Dez could feel Reese slipping away. Dying.
Panic lashing through him, he shouted “Do something! We’re losing her!”
“Call her,” Sasha said. “Make her come back. If she’s not conscious, she’s not fighting it!”
But he had
been
calling her, and it wasn’t working. He needed something better, something more. Something that would matter to her. He looked deep inside himself to the place where he normally kept the past locked away, but that had been breached the moment she lunged back into his life, wearing combat clothes and wielding an autopistol like she’d been born a warrior.
“Think about the dream,” he whispered alongside her temple, feeling the words rip from his chest. “Think about Montana, all those mountains, and the streams, and the big open sky. I bet you never went there, did you? So fight, damn it. Get your ass back here. If you do . . .
”
He paused, feeling the churn and burn in his gut, but went for it. “Wake the hell up and we’ll go there together.” His throat closed on the ache of guilt, sadness, and regret that washed through him as he turned his lips to her temple. “Please, baby. Don’t let it end like this.”
Please gods.
A long shudder wracked her body and she twisted against him, nearly bowing herself double.
“Shit,” Sasha hissed. “Convulsion. Help me grab her and—”
Energy detonated soundlessly inside Dez, hollowing out his diaphragm and making him feel like his elevator had just hit bottom. At the same moment Sasha jolted, and Michael said, “What the fuck?”
Then Reese sagged, going utterly limp.
“Reese!”
Dez surged out from behind her, rose over her with both hands wrapped in her shirt. “Reese, damn it!”
Sasha grabbed his shoulder.
“Look!”
Dark mist was churning angrily from the weeping cuts, boiling out of Reese. It formed an angry, pulsing blob that went from black to green as it emerged.
Then
poof
. It disappeared.
He stared for a second, blinking at her arm. The X-marked cuts still bled and the bite was a dark, angry red. But the blackness was gone and the swelling was abating even as they watched. More, he could feel her breathing grow steady, her body temperature level off. And when he looked away from her wrist, he found her watching him with eyes that were blurry and unfocused, but held every ounce of now-Reese: a mix of the stupidly brave, crime-fighting girl he had known and the woman she had grown into, who dared him, challenged him, stood up to him.
She was back.
His throat closed on a hard, hot surge of emotion. “Hey.” It was all he could manage.
Her eyes fluttered shut, but she whispered, “Montana, huh?” And she drifted off with a smile on her lips.
He let his forehead drop to his hands, which were still clutched in her shirt. Despite what he’d been through with the Triad spell, he still wasn’t all that religious in the worshipping sense. Now, though, he sent a fervent thought-stream skyward:
Thank you, gods.
And he got, in return, a flare of heat that radiated through him, washing inward to his head and heart. He wasn’t sure if it came from magic, the exhaustion he felt bearing down on him freight train fast, or some celestial source. But it made him feel a little less alone.
Groaning, he dragged himself to his feet, then reached down and gathered Reese to his chest. He felt the pull of muscles as he lifted her, the ache of fatigue as he held her tightly. But neither Nate nor Michael offered to take her. They were mated magi; they knew better.
He fixed Nate with a look. “Is the mansion safe?” Part of him wanted to hit the road again, find some anonymous hotel where nobody would think to look for them. He was never truly comfortable at Skywatch.
But Nate nodded. “We know how they got in.”
“How?” Dez grated the word.
“A delivery van came through an hour ago and set off the ward. JT looked over the truck, didn’t see anything, and figured it was another false alarm, so he waved them through, then reset the system.”
“You’re kidding. He fucking waved Iago and a truckload of
makol
through the front door?”
Michael’s glower promised dire retribution. “Yeah. They crashed the system from the security hub to get out.”
“Shit.” Dez needed to get Reese someplace safe. But he also needed to crash. Another few minutes and he wasn’t going to be worth shit. He glanced toward the garage. “I need to—”
“You need to get Reese settled and then get some food and rest yourself,” Nate interrupted. He gripped Dez’s shoulder. “We’ve got your back.” Behind him, several of the others nodded, including Sasha, who for a change wasn’t looking at him with trepidation.
It seemed that for all that he’d worked his ass off to earn their trust, it had taken him stepping up for Reese to win them over. And, oddly, he was okay with that. He nodded. “All right, I’m going. But first, what was with the coyote?” When he got blank stares, he briefly recounted the strange incident, which he would’ve been tempted to think he had imagined, only he hadn’t. “It took off right as you guys got there. Big son of a bitch.”