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Dark Harvest Magic (Ella Grey Series Book 2)

Page 24

by Jayne Faith


  My breaths were coming too fast. I was on the verge of hyperventilating. I kept trying to send my awareness down to draw earth energy as I’d done hundreds of times. But there was nothing there.

  “Ella, don’t panic,” Deb said. She held my face firmly in her hands, and after a second or two my terror dulled.

  I knew she’d used her magic on me, but I’d felt no whisper of it over my skin. No stirring of elemental energy. I suddenly realized I couldn’t feel the reaper, either.

  I knocked her hands away. “What did you do?” I demanded.

  Someone else came in.

  “It’s a charm that prevents you from drawing magic, but it’s not permanent,” Damien said.

  “I can’t feel the reaper anymore, either.” My eyed flicked back and forth between them.

  He and Deb exchanged a glance.

  “The reaper soul is still there,” Deb said. “After the battle, you were hanging on by a thread. You were channeling enormous amounts of magic. We had to shut it off. We barely did it in time.”

  She reached for my left hand and lifted it. For the first time, I noticed a heavy metal ring around my index finger. There was another one on my right hand. I wiggled my fingers free of her hold.

  I grasped the left-hand ring to pull it off. “I’m okay now, I don’t need a charm.”

  “No!” Damien lunged and snatched at my hand. “You can’t do that, Ella. The reaper nearly consumed you. You’re teetering right on the edge of losing the battle, of dying.”

  His voice had gone ragged.

  “Numbing you from supernatural power seems to have halted the reaper’s consumption of your soul. Those rings are keeping you alive,” Deb said.

  The emptiness inside me, the feeling of being in the world but cut off from magic, seemed to pressurize my insides. The loss was overwhelming, and it was growing worse by the minute.

  “How do you know?” I demanded. “How do you know the reaper almost has me?”

  “Johnny scanned you,” Deb said.

  I glanced over at Johnny, and then closed my eyes. “How much of my soul is left?”

  “Less than two percent,” he said.

  I felt like a numb, hollow version of myself. And I wasn’t even sure if it was because I was cut off from magic or because I was hanging onto myself by a tiny slice. Maybe both.

  I slowly raised my eyelids. “Can you take this thing off my arm?” I tipped my head at the I.V.

  Deb nodded and slipped out, returning a second later with a woman I recognized as one of the healers who’d come to Lynnette’s.

  “We haven’t formally met,” she said. “I’m Gina. Supernatural healer and conventional nurse.”

  I winced as she removed the I.V. needle.

  “Thank you,” I said to her.

  She nodded without looking up and quickly bandaged my arm and left us alone.

  Deb carefully got onto the bed and sat cross-legged next to Loki. Damien sat on the edge with one knee pulled up. Johnny slipped his arm around me and pulled me into his side.

  I sighed heavily. “Thank you for saving my life. Really, I owe you more than I could ever repay. I am grateful.” I looked at both of them in turn, my eyes drilling into theirs. “But I can’t live like this. There’s just no way.”

  I spoke quietly, but my words seemed to echo in the silence that followed.

  “I’ll be fired from Demon Patrol. Lynnette will kick me out of the coven. I can’t save Evan from the vampire feeder den if I’m completely defenseless. And I can’t live with this horrible, gnawing ache of emptiness.” I pressed my hand into my stomach as if the pain were centered there in my body and then snorted a soft, humorless imitation of a laugh. “How ironic that I never had much appreciation for my weak-ass ability, but now that it’s gone, it’s the only thing in the world I want.”

  Damien scrubbed his hands down his face. “Can you live with it for a few days?” he asked. “Give us some time to try to come up with an alternative?”

  I nodded reluctantly and finally allowed myself to relax against Johnny.

  “Hey, is Jacob going to get nailed for murder and attempted murder or what?” I asked, ready for a change of subject. Anything to distract me from the ache.

  Damien huffed, and his expression turned angry. “SC is working on it, but it’s going to take time.”

  I felt my face screw up into bafflement. “Even though the horde originated from Gregori property? How much more blatant could it be?”

  Deb shook her head. “They’re actually having trouble making a formal connection. Yes, it was Gregori Industries property, but apparently nothing else that was used there can be definitively tied to the company.”

  “Unbelievable.” I looked up at the ceiling, seething. The anger felt good. It dampened the emptiness just a hair.

  “SC has a good working theory about how he was able to produce so many Baelmen,” Damien said.

  “Do tell,” I said wryly but found I really was interested.

  “They think he somehow saved up some from past new moons. Specifically, the handful of Baelmen that attacked in the first wave. He might have stored them interdimensionally somehow, to avoid breaking the law of having more than one at a time in our world.”

  “And the horde that came later?” I asked.

  “Theory is that he borrowed against future new moons.”

  My eyes widened. “But there were hundreds. If there are around twelve new moons each year . . .” I blinked several times, trying to do the math.

  “Yeah, if it’s true, he’s basically used up future Baelmen for something like a century,” Damien said. “SC still has no idea how he managed to get so many to exist simultaneously, though. They suspect some very volatile and rare magic was at play, strengthened by the conditions of this particular new moon.”

  Something pinged in my mind, and I had a strong suspicion about why Jacob had been so desperate to keep Lynnette from harvesting magic from the edges of interdimensional rips. If that was the power he’d employed to break the physical supernatural law that prevented more than one Baelman at any one time—and had allowed hundreds to exist at once—it was an exceedingly powerful force.

  Suddenly aware of how full my bladder was, I threw back the covers and Damien and Johnny each held an elbow while I hobbled to the bathroom. They waited for me at the door despite my protests. Deb wouldn’t let me shower—they were all afraid I wasn’t steady enough yet—and they forced me back into my room and brought me oatmeal and eggs in bed.

  It seemed to reassure them that I was able to clean my plate and drain two glasses of orange juice. Deb and Damien both looked absolutely exhausted. I moved to the sofa with a promise that I would get up only to eat or use the bathroom. Gina took my vitals, and satisfied with what she saw, she left me her card and departed. Damien went home, and Deb sent a quick update to the coven and then crashed in my room.

  Johnny shifted me so he could sit down and then leaned me back until my head rested on his lap. He stroked my hair back from my forehead in soothing movements. I turned the TV on with the sound muted but stared out the front window instead of the flickering screen. It was late afternoon, the first of November. I’d missed most of Halloween. I rotated the rings around my index fingers using my thumbs, feeling the thickness of the metal bands.

  After a few minutes, Johnny’s hand stilled on my hair. I glanced up to see his head tipped back as he dozed. Noticing my phone on the coffee table, I reached for it.

  Then I typed a message to Rogan: Did you hear that I’ve been de-magicized?

  He responded within a few seconds.

  But the good news: you’re alive.

  I snorted at his dry humor, but the emptiness quickly sucked away my mild amusement. That seemed to be my new normal—anything I felt was greedily snatched away by the void within me.

  I can’t do this. It feels like a living death.

  My words looked a little dramatic, and I admitted I was looking for some sympathy. But it was no ex
aggeration—I felt like a wisp of a person living the barest shell of existence.

  You’d be surprised what a person can learn to live with, he texted back.

  So much for sympathy.

  A long sigh escaped my lips. I couldn’t summon up the will to reply. The screen on my phone went dark after a minute.

  Another minute or two passed, and then a new message lit up the screen.

  What are you willing to do to find an alternate fix?

  I typed without hesitation: Anything.

  I’ll see what I can do.

  I blinked at his message, realizing that I actually felt a tiny spark of hope. I closed my eyes and focused on it, urging it to swell and light up some of the void. I lay perfectly still, unaware of time passing, clinging to that pinpoint of possibility.

  I tried to think of the good: if SC was right, the Baelmen were gone for good, never to return in our lifetime. Deb was safe. The rest of the coven was no longer threatened. I wasn’t dead. I didn’t feel particularly alive, but I supposed this was better than the alternative.

  But other thoughts forced their way in.

  I finally knew where Evan was, but I couldn’t storm a vampire den with no magic and no reaper to keep me alive, even with Rogan’s help. Evan was my brother, and I couldn’t go into a rescue mission as dead weight.

  Johnny woke up and shifted so he could lie down with me wrapped in his arms. He told me about work, and after a while I gave him my account of the battle against the Baelman horde. He held me like that on the sofa for hours despite the fact that I desperately needed a shower. I pressed the side of my face into his chest, and lulled by the vibration of his voice and his warm, masculine scent, I dozed.

  There were no visions through demon eyes, no glimpses of my brother’s strung-out face. But I did dream of the giant demon, the creature that had towered above Lynnette and called me by name.

  Its skin, made of iridescent blue-black scales, seemed to burn with coal-black flames. At first I thought it was smoke, but it danced the way only fire moves. I gasped as I recognized what it was: rip magic, the same energy that had licked around the edges of the rip Lynnette had opened, and the magic that had spewed from the Baelmen’s mouths. The dark energy surrounded the hulking demon and poured off it the way blood-red magic sometimes emanated from me and Rogan. The creature appeared to be deep in slumber, its body curved in rest like a dog napping, the huge tail curled around the muscular body.

  Instead of fear, I felt an odd kinship with the creature.

  Its eyelid lifted suddenly, revealing an iris that burned with hellfire, and I jolted awake.

  For a moment I teetered, still on the edge of the dream. But when it dissipated, the void crashed down on me once again. Johnny’s even, slow breaths brushed my cheek.

  I carefully disentangled myself from his arms and began looking through the house, searching for my service belt. I puffed my cheeks with a long, relieved exhale when I found the belt on the kitchen counter. But when I unsnapped my whip and held it coiled in my hands, deep loss scooped out my insides again. I’d thought I was already hollowed out, but the whip was like a dead thing, a coiled corpse.

  I dropped it and leaned both hands against the edge of the counter as cold sweat sprang up on my face, neck, and chest. With slow, shaking breaths, I squeezed my eyelids closed and fought back the nausea that threatened to swell up my throat.

  When I could finally open my eyes, my gaze landed on one of the rings. I held my hands up close together so I could see both bands. If I pulled the rings off for a second, just the merest flash of a moment, to remind myself how it felt. . .

  There was a flurry of moment in my periphery and a heavy bump against my thigh, forcing me to catch myself against the edge of the sink.

  Loki. He whined and cocked his head, looking up at me.

  “Okay, boy. I’ll leave them where they are,” I whispered.

  I straightened and went to the back door, opening it so he could bound out into the yard. I followed him, standing on the cold concrete of the patio in my bare feet.

  Tipping my head back, I gazed at the dark sky. Before I could save my brother, I would have to save myself. And I would. Somewhere out there, either in this world or some other, was something that would give me my life back.

  Look for the next book in the series:

  Demon Born Magic (Ella Grey Book Three)

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