DEVON ARRIVED A while later. His scarf was wrapped high over his ears and around his head to keep out the cold. He put a hand on Dreya’s shoulder. Now that Tenn knew that they actually could read each other’s thoughts, the exchange was, oddly, a little less strange.
“The humans are asleep,” she said. “If we are to strike, we should do it now.”
Tenn nodded. Adrenaline coursed through his veins at the thought of running headfirst into a town overrun with the undead. He stood and kicked some snow into the fire. They left before the last ember died out.
They kept to the highway as they made their way to the town. It was so dark and the wind so biting it was impossible to see more than a few feet in front of them. They made their way from car to abandoned car, finding brief solace against toppled semis. Every once in a while, Dreya would pulse a small flame between her hands, letting the faint light filter out between her fingertips to guide the way. Then darkness would swallow them again. What Tenn wouldn’t give to once more live in a world with electricity. Or at least a flashlight.
It was the third or fourth time that Dreya opened to Air that she stiffened and halted them in their tracks. The flame in her hand burned longer than usual, but her eyes were focused on the road before them.
“Something is moving,” she said.
Tenn’s grip instinctively tightened on his staff. Even through the thick leather of his gloves, the metal was bitingly cold.
“Howl?” he asked.
“I do not think so,” she whispered. “It is staggering.” She sniffed. “Blood. I smell blood.”
“Tori,” Tenn said.
He opened to Earth and Water, a quick flash, just enough to let him sense the figure’s approach. Sure enough, it was a young girl, maybe thirteen, maybe younger. He could feel her cooling flesh, taste the blood that sprinkled on the ground with every footstep. Every shivering, bare footstep.
“She’s hurt,” he said. Then instinct took over. He opened once more to Earth and ran, the power guiding him through the dark.
“Tenn, wait!” Dreya yelled, but it was too late. He had already taken off, the twins falling fast behind him. He knew it was a trap. He knew that he was running to his death. But Water and Earth told him all he needed to know: Tori’s pulse was failing, her skin was bare. If he didn’t reach her soon, she was as good as dead.
He wouldn’t lose someone else because he was too slow, because he had hesitated. He wouldn’t let someone die because he hadn’t been there to help. Not again.
He couldn’t get Jarrett’s face out of his head.
He ran full speed, Earth fueling his muscles and numbing him to the wind and the snow that beat down in chunks of ice. A few hundred yards. A hundred. Fifty away, and he felt her stagger. She fell into the snow, shivering. He felt her heart skip.
He reached her seconds later, dropped to his knees in the snow and tried not to panic. Now that he was near, he could sense all the things he’d been too distanced to notice before. Like the way blood smeared over every inch of her flesh. Or the thousand cuts slashed across her bare skin. Not one inch of her was clothed, and not one inch was spared from the slices that slowly bled her dry.
When he placed a hand on her shoulder, she flinched away and screamed.
“Shh, shh,” he whispered. “It’s okay. I’m here to help.”
But the girl was lost to him. Her screams split the air, and with every inch she tried to put between them, another ounce of blood was lost. If he didn’t act fast, she’d bleed out before he even had a chance to start healing. If she didn’t die of hypothermia first.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He reached out and grabbed her arm, clamped it tight as a vise. Then he began pouring Earth into her body.
She screamed again at the pain he knew the process was inflicting. Her heart hammered fast. Stuttered. She fell silent.
He knew the cuts that crossed her skin. He’d seen them before. They weren’t the casual, careless marks of a kraven or even a necromancer. They were made by a bloodling, one who knew how to prolong the pain and the bleeding, how to make the most from their victim. He’d felt himself make those same marks when consumed by Dmitri’s past.
Devon and Dreya knelt by his side. Dreya put a hand on his shoulder. Cool light filtered down around them, but he didn’t check to see which of them was using magic.
“Tenn, you must stop,” she said. “The power you’re using will give us away.”
“Either help me or shut up,” he snapped. He wouldn’t lose her. Not like he lost his parents. And Katherine. And Jarrett. And countless others.
He poured his focus into the girl. The process was painstakingly slow, even though he worked as fast as he could. A small voice inside of him screamed that it wasn’t fast enough—he could only heal one cut at a time. He didn’t listen. He forced Water into her veins and Earth into her bones, tried to replenish the blood that was quickly seeping into the snow, staining it crimson.
There was only the slightest hesitation from Dreya.
“What can we do?” she asked.
“Heat,” he replied. He could barely hear them through his concentration. “She’ll freeze to death otherwise.”
Devon knelt by the girl’s side and placed his hands on the concrete. Fire opened in his chest, and the snow around them melted in moments. A small cocoon of warmth enveloped them and sweat burst across Tenn’s skin.
“Tenn,” Dreya whispered suddenly. Her grip on Tenn’s shoulder tightened.
“What?” he asked.
“They’re coming,” was all she said.
Tenn glanced up, spared a half second to focus on something other than the girl quickly dying at his feet. The Howls within the town emerged like a swarm of vermin. In spite of the warmth Devon enveloped them in, the air grew colder, a chill that seeped and burned into his very bones. He didn’t need to see them to know what was causing the sudden cold. Succubi. The town was harboring succubi.
“Fight them off,” he said, then refocused on Tori. In that momentary distraction, she had slipped away even further. Her pulse was weak, so weak.
“But the sept—” Dreya began.
“I don’t care about the fucking sept!” he yelled. He glared up at her. “I won’t let her die.”
Her jaw clenched, but she nodded and looked out to the city. Using all this magic would call the full wrath of the Church down upon them, that was for certain. He could only hope that if the Inquisitors appeared, they’d fight off the necromancers and Howls first.
Dreya opened to Air and opened her lips, a single, clear note ringing out into the wild night. The wind became a gale. But the necromancers were ready. Fire billowed up around Tenn and the others. Devon cursed and threw out a shield, the air around them whirling with flame and magic. The heat was suffocating. But it didn’t block out the darker powers at work: Tenn’s hands shook from the succubi’s life-stealing cold.
“I said fight them off!” he yelled. Rage filled him. But it wasn’t just anger, it was desperation. Tori’s skin glistened red and bloody in the firelight, and now, when he looked at her, he couldn’t help but imagine Jarrett lying there, slowly bleeding out. Every blink, and he saw Jarrett’s face. Pleading. Waiting. Dying.
Dreya didn’t answer in words. Instead, her song rose in volume as a blast of wind shot across the countryside, wailing like hungry wolves. Funnels broke down from the sky, but that didn’t stop the oncoming Howls. He could hear their screams, could feel the necromancers’ magic as they worked against him. But that knowledge was small and distant. Every ounce of attention he had he gave to the girl.
“Tenn,” Dreya said, her song cut short. Her voice was strained, her breathing ragged; the twins were already holding each other for support. “I cannot hold them off. There are too many necromancers. And I think... I think they have a Breathless One. Some Howls are resisting my magic.”
In spite of his focus, this made him halt. The Breathless Ones were hard to create and harder to kill and were thankfully rare—but just as Fire magic didn’t harm a succubus, Air didn’t harm the Breathless Ones. If anything, it gave them strength by feeding their hungering Sphere. Bloodlings, succubi, Breathless Ones... What other nightmares had been lying in wait for them?
“Devon,” he said. “Help her.”
Devon nodded. Power flashed through him as Fire billowed in his chest. The town erupted into flame.
Tori continued to slip from Tenn’s fingers. She shivered uncontrollably in spite of the heat. He poured more power into her, more than he would have ever dared before. Her body shook as wound after wound sealed itself. The ground rumbled with latent magic.
More flames erupted on all sides, and the earth heaved violently as a fresh surge of dark Earth magic flew their way. Tenn lost his grip on Tori. Just for a moment, their connection severed. He stumbled back, hurried over to her side.
But it had been long enough.
When he placed his hands on her cold skin once more, he felt her heart beat for one, final time.
“No,” he whispered. He shook her, gently, and flooded her limp limbs with magic. “No,” he said, louder, over and over until he was screaming it at the top of his lungs and it wasn’t Tori on the ground, but Jarrett, Jarrett staring up with those pleading blue eyes, Jarrett soaked in his own blood.
Blood, blood everywhere.
Tenn rocked back on his heels as another wave of magic rolled over them and sent the ground squirming. The twins screamed with power. With fear. It was too much. Too much.
Blood on his hands. Blood on his jeans. Blood seeping through his skin.
Red filled his vision.
He stood and Water was raging, raging red. Water filled him with power. All that red. All that blood. All that magic. Filling him.
He screamed.
It wasn’t a scream of loss or desperation. This was the scream of Water, of rage and death and bloodlust. The Sphere howled in his gut as torrents of energy lashed through his body. The world seemed to pause with his heart. Everything slowed. Everything stopped.
Then his heart beat again, and it beat with power.
He reached out, latched on to the hearts and pulses of every creature in that town. He felt them, all of them—the Howls and the humans, the damned and the damning. He felt their hearts throb, the water pulse in their veins. Magic flooded through him in painful ecstasy. He felt their hearts beat. All of them, beating a rhythm of life. A rhythm neither Jarrett nor Tori would ever feel again.
He clenched his fingers, felt every muscle, every vein, a glowing, terrible lacework of fragile life.
And then he stopped their hearts.
The blowback was immediate and immense. His own heart screamed out as the hundred lives at the ends of his fingertips squirmed for life. He held on. His heart ached. Tears streamed down his face and he heard them screaming. Screaming, just as his parents had screamed, as his friends had screamed, as Jarrett had screamed. Water filled him, amplified the pain, the agony, the pure ecstasy of it all. His head whipped back and his arms stretched out from his sides as the power flooded through him, lifting him off the ground in a halo of blue. The enemy screamed. He screamed louder. Their pulses throbbed. Burned.
Stopped.
A snap.
The power vanished. And as he fell to the ground like a marionette cut from its strings, he felt the hundred others die with him.
He crumpled, along with his enemy. When darkness overtook him, he heard nothing but silence.