Page 29 of Incoronate
“Caleb was able to put you under before anything like that could happen,” explained Trace. “He layered some slumber spell on top of everything else we were already doing. Between the three of us holding you down and his magic forcing you under, it was just barely enough.”
I winced at the image of it. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the fact that I had to be magically sedated like a wild animal.
“If I wasn’t so scared about what was happening to you, I probably would have been impressed that you fought it for as long as you did. A lot longer than any of us expected,” he added, his tone a mixture of admiration and grief.
“Even ravaged by a fever, you are formidable, angel,” said Dominic, brushing the back of his knuckles against my cheek.
Despite wanting to sink into his touch and let myself disappear into the distraction, I held his gaze. “And by fever, you mean the spell rot. Right?” The words sat like coal in my mouth.
I had remembered that part of the conversation very clearly. Frankly, it wasn’t a phrase you’d forget very easily. The words alone made my stomach want to fall out of my body.
Dominic dipped his head in a single, curt nod.
“Right.” I peered up at my wrists, taking in the red marks where the metal had bitten into them during the struggle. The skin around them appeared abraded and almost raw. “Pull my sleeves down please.”
“Angel—”
“Pull them down,” I repeated more firmly, and Dominic sighed and then did as I asked.
I looked up again, my gaze locking on my forearms as all the breath in my lungs left my body.
The black lines had spreadagain. They crawled past my elbows now, branching up toward my upper arms in fracturedpatterns so dense they barely looked like veins anymore. I turned my arm slowly in the low light and watched them pulse faintly with each heartbeat, as though something living ran just beneath the surface.
“Why is this happening to me?” My voice cracked on the last word before I could stop it.
Dominic straightened and then crossed his arms over his chest. I could tell he was working very hard to project a calm that I knew he didn’t entirely feel. “Caleb believes it’s some sort of power overload,” he answered simply. “Between your Slayer and Nephilim blood, and now the Horsemen essence, they appear to be fighting against each other for dominance, and your body is bearing the cost of it.”
The idea that my own body was doing this to itself, that my own abilities were turning against each other from the inside, made me feel physically sick. Then again, anything with the wordrotin it was something I wanted out of my body as fast as possible.
“How long until the fever breaks and I start feeling better?” My eyes moved between them, and I caught it immediately—the half-second of hesitation, the micro-adjustment in Trace’s expression before he schooled it.
“It’s hard to say,” he offered, his gaze sliding from me to Dominic and then back again.
He was lying to me. Placating me. But why? And then it hit me. There was no external force to remove. No curse to break. This was coming from within me. It was my own body turning against itself.
I looked back up at the poisonous lines crawling up my arms and felt the realization burrow slowly into my chest. “I’m not going to get better…am I?” I asked, meeting Trace’s eyes again.
His throat moved as he swallowed. “We don’t know anything yet, and until we do there’s no point in stressing yourself out.”
“Caleb is gathering information as we speak,” added Dominic, his tone careful but confident, as though he weren’t going to accept any other outcome. “Someone will have answers.”
I wanted to believe them. I wanted to hold onto that certainty the way I’d held onto so many other impossible things they’d promised me over the years. But looking up at my arms, at the black lines spreading like poison through my veins, at the chains keeping me tied to this bed because I couldn’t be trusted with my own body, with my own will, I just wasn’t sure belief was enough anymore.
“So,” I said, staring up at the ceiling, my skin still buzzing with heat and wrongness, “looks like we’re back here again, huh? Except this time, I’m being possessed by impending magical organ failure instead of lust. Fun.”
Neither one laughed or even smiled.
I quirked my brow at them. “What? Too soon?”
“If that’s your idea of a joke, I suggest refining your material,” said Dominic, not looking pleased in the least.
“Right. I’ll workshop it,” I said, adjusting myself on the bed as I tried and failed to find a comfortable position.
Another wave of uncomfortable heat rolled through me without warning, more vicious than the last, burning up through my chest and into my arms like a match had been lit inside me. I couldn’t stop the sound that came out of me—half-gasp, half-groan—as I instinctively tried to curl into myself.
The motion pulled at the cuffs, and I winced hard as the skin around my wrists protested.
Trace’s gaze shot up to my chained hands, his brows pinching tightly at the sight of them. “Maybe we should take them off for a while. She’s in pain.”
