Page 91 of Bound to the Wolf
But Emerson had been living in the coven house for the last month. He’d watched Elise grow up. He was a healer. He looked a bit, well… not quite conflicted, not quite guilty. Delainey couldn’t figure out the word and wasn’t going to waste time digging through her vocabulary.
“You’re a healer, Emerson!” She screamed at him over the force of the magic assaulting her and Reece. She split her focus to try to rebuff the spell itself, not just the siphon still trickling the life out of Reece.
It was like a kink in a water hose; it could stop the flow for now, but the water was backing up and it would eventually explode out.
“You know this is wrong,” she told him. “Mind control? Murder? What are you thinking? You can still fix this!”
“Ignore them,” Brenda said without turning, chin lifted in that imperious tilt that was all command and no compromise. “You know this is for the best.”
Emerson looked away from Delainey.
Well, fuck.
She had tried.
Unsure of what else to do, Delainey hurled a ball of her own magic over the circle, and it fizzled to nothingness when it hit the wall of power that had her and Reece trapped.
The impact sent a ripple across the invisible barrier, and the force of the rebound knocked her back half a step. Damn it. She’d known that would happen, but she still had to try.
If this fiasco was telling her anything, it was that the Wallace Grove Coven wasn’t immune from making mistakes.
She just had to find the weak point to get them out of this.
“Delainey.” Reece’s voice was weak, and he clutched at her arm with fingers that could barely grip. She turned back to face him.
He looked like he’d been stabbed somewhere she couldn’t see, all the blood drained out of him. His eyes had gone dull, none of that gold flicker she’d grown used to, and his shoulders were hunched in on themselves as if his own frame had become too heavy to hold upright.
It was a physical manifestation of his life force being siphoned through this damned spell, and she was failing to stop it.
She could feel trickles of power coming through the bond between them. He shouldn’t have been fading so fast, but that was when she realized her mistake.
The siphon wasn’t just directing power into her. It was bleeding him dry, however it could. So while she’d been rejecting the power that came from him, it had still been bleeding out all around them.
“Fuck, Reece, I’m so sorry,” Delainey said, pressing both palms flat against his chest, feeling the rapid, shallow hammer of his heartbeat through the fabric of his shirt.
“I don’t regret it,” the words were almost a gasp, one hand lifting to cover hers where it rested against his sternum. “These last weeks with you. I…”
Whatever he was going to say was cut off by a honking car horn, of all things.
The intensity of the draining spell ebbed for a moment as the concentration of the Wallace Grove Coven broke.
The first person Delainey saw was Serena, already flinging bolts of electricity at the gathered witches. Serena’s hair whipped behind her, and her hands crackled with white-blue arcs that jumped between her spread fingers before she hurled them forward.
She must have been practicing, Delainey realized. Her electric spell work had been really iffy the last time she’d seen it. Elise was right behind her, along with Nico, Javi, Hugh, and Cole.
The cavalry. Oh, fuck yes.
“Hold on!” she gripped Reece’s face. “You just have to make it a little bit longer.”
With the block between them completely failing, Delainey let it drop and gasped as his life force rushed into her. For one dizzying second, she could feel every blade of grass beneath her knees as if her senses had been cranked past their limit.
“Sorry,” she muttered to Reece. The amp to her power may have come from his life force, but she was going to use it if it meant she could save his life.
Delainey started pelting the inside of the circle with balls of magic, more to annoy the Wallace Grove witches than anything else. Brenda and Tim kept chanting, but Emerson turned away. Delainey didn’t know if it was to fight. She couldn’t quite make out what her coven and the pack were doing, but she knew what they’d planned: kicking some damn ass.
Delainey heard a crack and realized it wasn’t something physical. It was a manifestation of the magic circle around her.
She looked toward where it suddenly felt weaker and saw Briana in an army crawl, looking barely conscious as she tore at the ground with her fingers, centimeter by centimeter, physically breaking her way through the circle. The raw skin of Briana’s wrist where she’d torn the charm bracelet free was smeared with soil and blood; her pale fingers gouging into the packed earth at the circle’s edge.
