Page 50 of Bound to the Wolf
Delainey jerked her gaze to Aya. But Aya’s eyes were closed, as were everyone else’s, and the coven was swaying back and forth in their seats as Aya continued chanting. It was a familiar rhythm, one Delainey had fallen into many times herself.
But something was wrong because Reece was looking worse by the second and she felt fine.
Her mind flashed back to that night in the woods, to the realization she’d had: if she killed him, it would break the bond between them and free her for good.
But no, there was no way the coven would do that, not even to save her. At the very least, they would have told her ifthatwas the plan.
“What’s going on?” Delainey demanded. She thought she heard a response from one of the wolves, but with the magic circling so strongly around them, it was nearly a physical barrier keeping them separate from the rest of the world.
The air had thickened to something almost tangible, pressing against her eardrums like being underwater, and she could see the magic now as a faint shimmer in the air between herselfand the circle of witches, distorting the faces beyond it like heat rippling off asphalt.
Reece tried to wrench out of her grasp, but Delainey wouldn’t let him go. She trusted Aya, even if something was going wrong. She couldn’t let go. She feared it would hurt him too much. She did risk flexing her hand, and her fingertips brushed against the manacle on one of his wrists.
She gasped. It was so hot it burned. The metal seared the pads of her fingers, and she could smell it now, the acrid tang of heated brass mixed with something sulfurous that stung the back of her throat.
“We need to stop this,” she said. “Something’s wrong. Aya, wake up!”
Aya kept chanting.
Delainey looked around frantically, hoping to catch the eye of one of her sisters, hoping they might give her some clue as to why they were in this mess.
Elise’s eyes snapped open, and Delainey saw the worry in her gaze. Elise wouldn’t hurt a fly. She wouldn’t agree to killing Reece, even if she wasn’t dating Nico. Aya and Elise were best friends. Aya wouldn’t keep that from her.
The magic circled and circled, but it was focused on Reece.
Fuck this.
Delainey ignored whatever the coven was doing and shoved her own magic into the binding, fighting against that strange oiliness in her coven’s power. Her power answered, roaring up from the depths of her chest and pouring down through her arms and into the brass like a blowtorch turned on a lock, and she could feel the competing magics colliding inside the metal, her fire, sharp and clean, shearing against that slick foreign current, the two forces grinding together with a vibration she felt in her teeth.
Reece slumped against her, and bile rose in Delainey’s throat at how pale he had gone. She shoved the magic away with all of her might, felt a lightning-strike flash of burning pain against her wrists, and heard something crack.
The sound was enormous, and the force blew outward from the manacles, flattening the grass in a perfect circle around them and sending loose grimoire pages scattering across the yard.
Distantly she heard someone scream, but before she could figure out who, the magic rebounded back into her, and she fainted right on top of an unconscious Reece.
Chapter
Twenty-Four
Delainey was slumped on top of him. For half a second, Reece considered this good fortune. Then the memory of the last hour came rushing back: the circle, the sick witch magic that had suffused him, the feeling of being torn apart bit by little bit, drained of everything he was until there was nothing but the connection to Delainey and the manacles that held them together.
His limbs felt hollow, like someone had scooped out everything solid inside him and left only the shell, and a deep ache radiated from his chest outward as though his ribs had been pried apart and put back wrong.
He sat up and found Mark at his side. Mark had his healer’s bag open on the grass beside him, a penlight in one hand and his other palm hovering an inch above Reece’s chest, not quite touching, warm energy already radiating from his fingers.
Briana, Emerson, and Aya had their heads together, while Elise had one hand on Delainey’s, and Serena stood alone, looking bereft. Serena’s arms were wrapped around herself, her pink-streaked brown hair falling loose around her face, and the oversized university sweatshirt she wore seemed to swallow heras she stood apart from the huddle, her gaze fixed on Delainey’s still form.
Reece tried to make sense of it, but his mind was still hazy. He had no idea what the fuck had happened.
Elise tried to pull Delainey away, and Reece growled. He didn’t want anyone close to her, touching her.
He needed to protect her.
He could still feel some semblance of her deep inside him and knew that whatever they had tried, it had gone wrong.
Next to Delainey were broken pieces of metal; he realized must have been the manacles that had been circling both of their wrists. The brass had fractured into jagged shards, each piece blackened along the break line as though the metal had been burned from the inside out, and the etchings that had once covered their surfaces were barely visible under the scorch marks.
He brushed his fingers over one of them and felt nothing. Not that he had expected to. It wasn’t like he had any magic of his own. He’d never had that.
