This wasn’t like tapping into feralis on my own. Back when I’d used too much of it in my battle with Rhiannon, I’d hardly felt the turn. I hadn’t known what I’d brought on until I looked down at my own blackened hands.
This was no creeping; it was an invasion. Three rungs up the ladder of wrongness. A thing never meant to be done. Pulling another fae’s corrupted magic into you? Not what the fae taught their children under the leafy boughs.
But it was necessary. We were here, and Sylvanwild was days away.
Forget the spiritstag. Forget the grove. Dorian would live, and it would be because of me.
When the thorns hit my heart, I cried out. I held on. They ran jagged and merciless through my lungs, up into my collarbone, pierced my throat until I choked.
The dagger bit into my other palm like a lifeline. If I let go, I’d die. I knew it. I’d collapse over Dorian’s chest, vomiting black bile; my eyes would drown in shadow, and I would rise a wraith.
The magic filled me, pressing toward some unseen brink. Just before it tipped, I tore my hand from his. Air punched into my lungs as I lurched upright, my vision murky.
I uncurled the fingers of my cut hand. It swam before me, bleeding black to my wrist; it wasn’t my hand moving but the whole shrouded world. I swayed atop Dorian, darkness crowding the edges of my sight. I was losing consciousness.
Not yet.
With two quick breaths, I wrapped my hand around the dagger’sblade. The edges pierced my fingers, but the cuts were so fine I didn’t even feel them.
Take it, you bastard.
Nothing happened. The magic swirled in me, closing my windpipe. Darkening my vision. Pulling me under?—
Until, with a wrenching pain, it reversed. Inch by inch, faster and faster, raking its way through my veins and out of my hand.
The dagger whined and hissed as the blade drank. Louder, like fatty meat sizzling over a spit. Before me, the corruption twined its way around the bone, the smoke rising higher into the air.
When it had nearly drunk it all, I removed my cut hand from the blade. The corruption floated into the air, swirling toward the dagger. Droplets of magic, moving ink. They reached the blade’s surface, clung, and evaporated.
In my right hand, the dagger thrummed with power. So much, I could barely stand to hold it. So much, I couldn’t imagine not holding it.
As the last of the droplets disappeared, I turned my head and found my own reflection staring back from the wet flat of Caustrix’s tooth. A sharded face. A hairless scalp—blue eyes—distortion where the tooth warped in the middle—and then my mouth.
Who was she? Not me.
Eurydice Waters couldn’t have done that.
Had that counted as using the blade?
You may use it three times,Caustrix had said.And then?—
“Eury.” Dorian’s voice echoed in the cave, a barely there rasp. “What’ve you done?”
He lived; he spoke. Some part of me, small and buried, celebrated. Yet I couldn’t take my eyes off the reflection. Couldn’t speak. The amount of power in my hand was narcotic. Heavy. Seductive.
“Is that your blood?”
Blood—my blood?
I focused past the reflection to the blade itself. Bright-reddripped down its edges, over my knuckles, pattering onto the cave floor.
My blood.It was everywhere.
I dropped the dagger with a gasp. It struck rock, clattered. Dorian had already sat up beneath me. His hands came around mine, prying open my bloody palm. “Wildmother.” Blood welled along all my fingers, pooled along my cut fate line. So much of it.
But it was red.
Not black.