CROWE DROVE MY CAR WHILE I GAVE DIRECTIONS WITH my eyes closed, still focusing on the magic, on the weak, unsteady tug at the line I’d cast. I was terrified of losing my grip on it. My fingers were clutched around the teddy bear and the edge of my seat, and my lungs burned with a minty sting, but Crowe had been right—I was getting used to it. I could stand it, and taking this risk was worth the look on his face and the relief in his voice.

“To our left,” I muttered, and felt Crowe turn a moment later.

“We’re headed back to the festival grounds,” he said after a while.

I cracked one eye open. “The pull is still really weak. It’s like having bad reception on a phone. I’m sorry. I’m not that good at this.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “You’re doing just fine.”

I went back to focusing on Alex, on the fleeting pull of her, but the more time passed, the more frustrating it got. “It’s like she’s fading in and out.”

“We’re here,” he said. I opened my eyes again to see that he was backing into his spot in the hidden driveway near the festival grounds. “Can you keep it going here?”

I glanced up the path toward the distant domes of tents, where I could already see the heavy haze of magic blocking out my view of the midday sky beyond it. Most groups were probably tucked away in their family or club tents for lunch or to escape the heat, so the grounds probably wouldn’t be crowded, and when I opened the car door the scents were strong but not overwhelming. “I’ll try.”

We got out of the car, and Crowe tossed me my keys. I hooked the ring around my middle finger, the metal clacking together as I fidgeted.

Crowe came around and met me at the passenger-side door. He grabbed my free hand, lacing our fingers together. “If you want to close your eyes and focus again, I’ll make sure you don’t fall.”

Too late, my thoughts responded as I felt the warm press of his palm against mine. “Um. Okay.” I bit my lip and let my eyes fall shut. His grip on my hand tightened. “To the right.”

Pine needles crunched softly beneath our feet as we walked forward. Crowe was silent, but I could feel his tension, his hope, his fear. I could tell there were a million questions he wanted to ask, but that he was afraid of pulling my focus from Alex.

I was afraid of the same thing. One moment I could feel her pull and see the faint amber glow of her in my mind’s eye, and the next I was plunged into a numbing darkness. My stomach would drop with dread until she flickered back. I didn’t really know what a locator spell was supposed to feel like and could only hope I was doing it right. My embarrassment at my lack of skill kept fraying my concentration.

“To the right,” I murmured. “Wait, no.” I opened my eyes as she disappeared from my magical radar again. “Shit.” I looked around. We had skirted the main festival grounds and were at the far northwestern end of the clearing, beyond which were dense woods.

We were near the Deathstalker tent. Crowe was glaring at their scorpion flag as if he’d like to set fire to it. “Is that where you were leading us?” he asked.

“I… don’t know,” I said. “I just lost her again.” I took in our direction, the place I’d been heading before my sense of her had vanished. “We were heading away from their tent.”

“But you said the signal was weak, right? And that you haven’t done a locator spell before.” He was still staring daggers at their tent. “You got us pretty damn close.”

“Let me try to find her again.” My magic wreathed around me like a blue ribbon, and my nose became full of the stinging scent of my own power. With her teddy bear clutched under my other arm, fingers digging into its plush body, I focused on my best friend.

And found nothing.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

Crowe whipped around, releasing my hand. I staggered a little and turned. Six Deathstalkers were coming toward us, the long grass parting to form a path for them. The smell of terra magic reached me a second later, and I could see the telltale pink haze of it coming from a guy with broad shoulders and a scorpion tattoo on his chest, visible as his leather vest gaped open. “He’s probably a Stoneking,” I whispered, nodding toward the guy.

Crowe gave me a sidelong glance and nodded, his hair blowing in the breeze the Deathstalker had conjured. “We’re looking for my sister,” he said to the group as they came to a stop at the edge of the woods, about twenty feet from where we stood.

They fanned out quickly, hemming us in. Crowe put up his hands—which were completely steady. “If you’ve got her,” he continued in a low voice, “the best thing to do is to let her go.”

“Yeah?” said a Deathstalker with full-sleeve tattoos and a scar across her forehead. “How about you give up our prospect first?” This one was emanating faint wisps of crimson—animus magic, like Killian’s.

“She might be trying to influence you,” I murmured to Crowe, whose eyes narrowed.

“We don’t have your prospect,” Crowe said to the woman. “But I’d like to know where he is, too. He was the last one seen with my sister.”

“Uh-huh,” said a third. He had buzzed black hair and a long beard. Glimmers of sapphire hung in the air around him. He had the same magic I had, but either he was holding it close or he didn’t have nearly as much as my dad.

“Locant,” I whispered.

Crowe gave me another look, this time with an arched eyebrow, before returning his focus to our current predicament. “Where’s Killian, Ren?”

“None of your fucking business,” said a fourth Deathstalker, the one apparently named Ren. She had dreads pulled back in a red bandanna and intense pale green eyes that contrasted with her dark skin. “And we’re gonna have to ask you to clear out now. We’re having a meeting.”

“Without your president?” Crowe asked. His fingers, still held up to show he meant no harm, twitched. A faint amber glow, one I knew only I could see, flared off his fingertips.

“Get back to your clubhouse, Crowe,” said the bearded guy, cracking his knuckles.

“I want my sister. If Killian has her somewhere on these grounds, I’m going to find her. And if she’s hurt, I’m going to have to find some way to work out my extreme disappointment.” His fingers curled, and shimmering, undulating threads of venemon began to stretch from their source.

“And if you’ve hurt Darek—” Ren began.

“I don’t give a fuck about Darek,” Crowe snapped. He took a step forward, and all six Deathstalkers had their hands out in front of them, fingers spread, power fogging and slithering in the air as the scent of all of it rolled toward me. It was coming from all sides, closing us in.

And then I smelled something new, something terrible, like stale cigarettes and burning meat. It was a magic scent I’d never come up against. My head swam with it, and I swayed as my stomach threatened to revolt.

“Crowe…” I licked my lips and peered through the cloud to try to find the source of the unfamiliar odor. To our far right, several yards into the woods, someone tall ran between trees, too fast for me to recognize. The person was emitting strands of pale yellow and crimson streaked with black. “Someone is…”

Crowe took a step in front of me, his arms spreading, his magic billowing from him.

“Watch out,” Ren shouted. “He’s going to cast!”

“Crowe!” shouted a familiar male voice. Hardy, who must have seen us and come on the run. Thank God. But whatever he shouted next was lost as a fierce wind whipped my hair. Crowe stumbled into me, and we both went down. Branches cracked over our heads as curses flew from all sides. My ears were ringing and I could barely breathe—I was choking on magic, on the bitter, burning stench of it.

Crowe’s hands were on my waist and his voice was in my ear. “Can you run?”

My breath came out of me in a strangled wheeze. “Crowe,” I tried to say as amber venemon burst from his palm and rocketed wildly into the murky fog around us. He could probably see clearly, but I was almost blind from all the magic swimming around and overwhelming my senses.

A sharp wind slammed into us again, sending twigs and leaves scraping against my cheeks and forehead. My mouth filled with grit as I struggled to my feet. Crowe shouted something I couldn’t make out in the storm of air and people and magic around me.

“I can’t—” My next words were stolen from me as I staggered back from a sudden impact. Heartbeat pounding at my temples, I looked down at my shoulder to see the hilt of a knife protruding from my shirt. The pain hit me a beat later, a racing, pounding lance of agony arching out across my shoulder like a net of needles. My knees gave out.

“Jemmie!” Crowe shouted. Two people ran by in the shadows. We were in the middle of a full-on kindled brawl, shouts and grunts and gasps punctuating the fight. More of the Devils’ League must have found us because we’d initially been surrounded by Deathstalkers, but now people had spread out, seeking safe places from which to hurl their curses. Their voices were coming from all sides.

Another knife whistled through the air, a glint of steel in a ray of sun, piercing the blanket of thick fog around me. Crowe ducked out of the way as he landed at my side, and the blade skimmed past his face, leaving a long, bloody gash across his jaw.

I tried pulling myself into a sitting position, but every inch of my body throbbed with pain, as if the knife had pierced not just my flesh but every nerve in my body, sending electric shocks down to my toes. Was this real or an illusion? I put my tingling fingers up to the wound and felt blood streaming across my palm. As I became dizzy with shock, I squinted at another person moving between tree trunks nearby, palms open toward us, giving off puffs of purple magic mixed with red and black. Confusion filled me. Was that who it looked like?

Crowe wrenched me toward him before I could get my eyes to focus, and I inhaled the smoke-and-honey scent of his power as he muttered a healing incantation. But then he groaned and clutched at his middle. Only a few dozen feet away, the person I had spotted smiled a beautiful, evil smile as the animalia curse took hold. Crowe doubled over at my side, vomiting centipedes and beetles and spiders and black moths, and this was no illusion. A great, writhing mass of insects grew into a puddle around him, and no matter how much he retched, more just kept coming. This curse was going to kill him.

And I knew exactly who had hurled it. I just couldn’t understand why she would do such a thing.

My vision pulsed with blackness. Blood loss threatened to pull me into unconsciousness. And even if I could put up a barrier around us, it wouldn’t help Crowe now. Whatever was wrong was already inside him.

So I did the only thing left to me, something my father had once told me I should never do.

“Crowe,” I said in a choked voice, and stretched out my bloodied hand, hoping he’d understand what I was offering.

Blood.

He didn’t hesitate—he frantically swiped the blood dripping from the gash on his face and clamped his hand in mine.

Medici blood met Carmichael blood. Venemon and locant.

Tingling spread through me, hot where our hands met, warm everywhere else. I wondered if Crowe was feeling the same. My heart thumped in my head and in my toes, pumping magic through every inch of me. Crowe’s grip on my hand was iron—he had taken control of our combined power, and I would have given him anything in that moment. Ribbons of blue and gold surrounded us, braiding together, taking on a color I’d never seen before, indescribable and vibrant and entirely new. It was neither venemon nor locant. It was…more. A sigh escaped me. Everything inside of me felt like it’d been touched by the sun. It was the first time in my entire life that magic had felt like this.

Still holding on to me to keep our blood mixed, Crowe pressed his fingers against his throat with his other hand, squeezing till his veins bulged. Bugs squirmed behind his black-stained teeth, gnashed together. He was beyond speaking, but I swear I could hear his thoughts whisper an incantation. Somehow, he was casting using this new magic we’d created through our connection, and the effect was instantaneous. The tendons in his neck stood out in stark relief as a growl vibrated in the back of his throat, and the growl swelled to a roar as he finally opened his mouth. The insects scuttled past his teeth and over his lips, vaporizing when they hit the air, burning off into curling ribbons of black smoke.

When the lethal curse was extinguished beneath Crowe’s healing hands and the alchemy of our mixed blood, he looked down at me, and I sucked in a startled breath.

The whites of his eyes were gone, bled completely to black. “This is amazing,” he said, giving me an eerie grin. Even though the pain from my wound was gnawing at my ecstasy, I grinned back, knowing my eyes probably looked the same but unable to worry about it.

Heavy footsteps thudded toward us. Every single one was like a nail pounding into my skull. Crowe dropped my hand and scooted away from me, blinking fast and shaking his head as if to clear it. The warmth I’d felt seconds ago faded instantly, leaving me trembling and raw.

“Jemmie!”

“Dad?” I wheezed as he crouched over me. His gaze didn’t focus on my eyes, so I could only assume they looked normal again. The fog of blood magic had certainly dissipated, but so had my vision in general. My heart stumbled and skipped. My breath was wet and unsteady.

I was pretty sure I was dying.

“This is the Syndicate,” my dad shouted to the woods around us. He spread his arms and threw out a massive, glittering barrier. “Anyone caught showing further aggression will be sentenced to binding!”

“They’re running,” said Hardy, who had appeared next to Crowe and was helping him to his feet.

My mouth opened and closed as I tried and failed to gather the strength and volume to tell them who I’d seen in the woods, who had used such evil magic against Crowe.

My dad pressed a hand to my shoulder and I made a guttural, inhuman sound. My vision flashed to pure white. “Hang in there, Mo.”

Don’t call me that.… Words were out of my reach.

“Crowe, she needs you right now!”

I’ve needed him for a lot longer than that, I thought, my brain a tangle of dream and memory and now, fraying and unraveling before dissolving to pinpoint flashes of light, then fading to nothing.

There was no more magic, not now. All I had was darkness.