After a few minutes of struggling, and with a cry of triumph, Zhara managed to force Casimir onto his back, her knees straddling him on either side of his hips, her boneblade held aloft. Without thinking, I moved, preparing to grab the Umbra Noctis and drive it into Zhara’s back, but before I could reach her, Casimir spat a mouthful of blood into the Morpher’s face. Zhara cried out in disgust and fury, wiping at her eyes.
From this angle, I had a full view of Casimir’s face as he bared his bloodstained teeth in a savage grin.
“Traitorous, filthy bastard!” she screamed.
Before she could drive the boneblade into Casimir’s eye, he bucked his hips upward, throwing her off-balance. As Zhara fought to remain in control, Casimir seized the gloved wrist that held the serrated dagger, and for a moment, the pair of them struggled, both weakened by the venom, each trying to push the tip of the boneblade toward the other. With a sudden movement, Casimir twisted the hand holding Zhara’s wrist and struck out, grasping her throat. At first, I thought he meant to choke her, but then her eyes suddenly went blank, and she moaned, lashing out blindly. And then I understood: Casimir had glamoured her so we’d have time to escape. The boneblade fell to the forest floor.
“I should kill her for what she did. For what she tried to do to you,” he growled, panting with exhaustion as he got to his feet to glare down at his opponent.
“Casimir, we have to go,” I said desperately.
He tore his gaze from Zhara’s face and found mine, his eyes blazing out from behind his tangled black curls, his lip curled in a feral expression. But as he opened his mouth to speak, Zhara snarled and flung something in his direction. A small, star-shaped knife with cruel, curving edges struck Casimir in the ribs, making him grunt in pain. I rushed over, lifting his shirt to assess the damage, and found blood leaking from the entry point.
“Do you want me to pull it out?”
He nodded. Willing my hand not to tremble, I gently tugged at the knife, eliciting a sharp hiss from Casimir. I gasped when I saw the fang-like holes the weapon had made in his flesh. “Are you alright?”
“Fine,” he growled. After swiftly recovering both the obsidian dagger and Zhara’s boneblade, he then glanced around, as if expecting another assailant to emerge from the darkness.
In the stark aftermath of so much violence, August’s death struck me anew. I had failed him. I had let so many people down.
Gently, Casimir tugged at my elbow. “Come on, Farrow.”
We were silent on the way back to Casimir’s loft, both too exhausted and drained to bother with the effort of speech. I hardly cared when it began to rain. The blood ritual was over, and we had survived, though not unscathed by any stretch. I tried not to think about August and Neha’s blood, dripping over the dais; about the burning pain in my forearm, about the new rune that marked my promise to the Order. We were a few yards away when my body finally gave out.
“We can’t just leave them there,” I sobbed into the darkness. And Gwen—where was she? If not for Casimir holding me up, I would have crumpled onto the ground.
“We have to go, Arden,” he said urgently, ignoring my protests.
I would not remember how we made it back. My thoughts in the moments before exhaustion dragged me into unconsciousness were consumed by blood and destruction, and the sickening realization that even though we’d stopped the blood ritual, it had been at the cost of two of our friends’ lives.
40
Iawoke to the sound of a door creaking open. It startled me enough that I nearly tumbled out of the bed and onto the floor. But it was only Casimir, his silhouette drenched in morning light, his dark curls sparkling with dew drops like tiny diamonds. I was in Casimir’s loft. In Casimir’sbed. Why was I here? I fought to concentrate, but my brain had all but melted into slush. How long had I been asleep? It felt like years.
“What time is it?” I croaked.
“Welcome back,” he greeted me with a soft smile. “It’s ten in the morning on Tuesday. You slept through all of Monday.”
Everything that had happened on Sunday night came flooding back to me with a sickening kind of clarity. Neha and August were dead—murdered by the Bloodthorn Order. Their blood, everywhere, pooling on the dais, caked on my hands?—
Panicking, I stared down at my hands, expecting to find dried blood—but they were clean. I looked to Casimir and found confirmation of my worst fears in his grim expression. I closed my eyes, clenching my fists tightly.
August was dead.
I was going to be sick.
The next moment, Casimir was at my side, offering meaningless words of comfort. I caught fragments like “Not your fault—” and “Nothing you could have done,” but his words made no mark on me. Guilt had already stitched its way into my heart, permanently and irrevocably embroidered on my soul.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Just,stop. There’s nothing you can say to make this better.” And with that, I crawled back under the covers, seeking out the only oblivion on offer.
Hours later, I wrenched myself from the fog long enough to see Casimir perched on the bed beside me, reading a copy ofThe Gargoyle.
The headline on the cover read: “Gruesome Undergraduate Deaths Send Ouverham College into Crisis.”
In the article beneath the headline, I caught the phrase, “suspected murder-suicide,” and stopped reading as my stomach roiled. After retching into a bucket Casimir must have set beside the bed, I rolled over to find the Daemon himself regarding me carefully.
“Satanic suicides?” Anger swelled in my chest like a tidal wave. “How could anyone possibly think they’d done that to themselves?” I tossed the paper aside and closed my eyes, but the darkness offered little relief from my waking nightmare.