Devils & Thieves (Devils & Thieves #1)(42)

Crowe wrenched me toward him before I could get my eyes to focus, and I inhaled the smoke-and-honey scent of his power as he muttered a healing incantation. But then he groaned and clutched at his middle. Only a few dozen feet away, the person I had spotted smiled a beautiful, evil smile as the animalia curse took hold. Crowe doubled over at my side, vomiting centipedes and beetles and spiders and black moths, and this was no illusion. A great, writhing mass of insects grew into a puddle around him, and no matter how much he retched, more just kept coming. This curse was going to kill him.

And I knew exactly who had hurled it. I just couldn’t understand why she would do such a thing.

My vision pulsed with blackness. Blood loss threatened to pull me into unconsciousness. And even if I could put up a barrier around us, it wouldn’t help Crowe now. Whatever was wrong was already inside him.

So I did the only thing left to me, something my father had once told me I should never do.

“Crowe,” I said in a choked voice, and stretched out my bloodied hand, hoping he’d understand what I was offering.

Blood.

He didn’t hesitate—he frantically swiped the blood dripping from the gash on his face and clamped his hand in mine.

Medici blood met Carmichael blood. Venemon and locant.

Tingling spread through me, hot where our hands met, warm everywhere else. I wondered if Crowe was feeling the same. My heart thumped in my head and in my toes, pumping magic through every inch of me. Crowe’s grip on my hand was iron—he had taken control of our combined power, and I would have given him anything in that moment. Ribbons of blue and gold surrounded us, braiding together, taking on a color I’d never seen before, indescribable and vibrant and entirely new. It was neither venemon nor locant. It was…more. A sigh escaped me. Everything inside of me felt like it’d been touched by the sun. It was the first time in my entire life that magic had felt like this.

Still holding on to me to keep our blood mixed, Crowe pressed his fingers against his throat with his other hand, squeezing till his veins bulged. Bugs squirmed behind his black-stained teeth, gnashed together. He was beyond speaking, but I swear I could hear his thoughts whisper an incantation. Somehow, he was casting using this new magic we’d created through our connection, and the effect was instantaneous. The tendons in his neck stood out in stark relief as a growl vibrated in the back of his throat, and the growl swelled to a roar as he finally opened his mouth. The insects scuttled past his teeth and over his lips, vaporizing when they hit the air, burning off into curling ribbons of black smoke.

When the lethal curse was extinguished beneath Crowe’s healing hands and the alchemy of our mixed blood, he looked down at me, and I sucked in a startled breath.

The whites of his eyes were gone, bled completely to black. “This is amazing,” he said, giving me an eerie grin. Even though the pain from my wound was gnawing at my ecstasy, I grinned back, knowing my eyes probably looked the same but unable to worry about it.

Heavy footsteps thudded toward us. Every single one was like a nail pounding into my skull. Crowe dropped my hand and scooted away from me, blinking fast and shaking his head as if to clear it. The warmth I’d felt seconds ago faded instantly, leaving me trembling and raw.

“Jemmie!”

“Dad?” I wheezed as he crouched over me. His gaze didn’t focus on my eyes, so I could only assume they looked normal again. The fog of blood magic had certainly dissipated, but so had my vision in general. My heart stumbled and skipped. My breath was wet and unsteady.

I was pretty sure I was dying.

“This is the Syndicate,” my dad shouted to the woods around us. He spread his arms and threw out a massive, glittering barrier. “Anyone caught showing further aggression will be sentenced to binding!”

“They’re running,” said Hardy, who had appeared next to Crowe and was helping him to his feet.

My mouth opened and closed as I tried and failed to gather the strength and volume to tell them who I’d seen in the woods, who had used such evil magic against Crowe.

My dad pressed a hand to my shoulder and I made a guttural, inhuman sound. My vision flashed to pure white. “Hang in there, Mo.”

Don’t call me that.… Words were out of my reach.

“Crowe, she needs you right now!”

I’ve needed him for a lot longer than that, I thought, my brain a tangle of dream and memory and now, fraying and unraveling before dissolving to pinpoint flashes of light, then fading to nothing.

There was no more magic, not now. All I had was darkness.





TWELVE


MY SENSE OF SMELL RETURNED FIRST, BRINGING ME THE scent of venemon magic, of Crowe, smoke and honey. Then sound. His voice, commanding and fierce.

“Dammit, Jemmie, open your eyes.”

I obeyed, squinting at slivers of sunlight shining through the canopy of leaves above me. Crowe blocked the view a moment later. “You’re fine,” he said tersely, pulling his hand away from my shoulder. My shirt was torn and covered in drying blood, but my wound was gone.

“Your eyes,” I whispered.

They were dark green once again. “Shhh,” he said. Voices from behind him told me my dad, Hardy, Jackson, and Boone were talking about what had just happened.

“—better that we just let people cool down before we jump to any conclusions,” Dad was saying.