I watched in horror as the blood on my arms began to lift off in small bubbles, swirling in the air. More bubbles appeared as blood began to seep from my skin, moving through the space toward…Bastian?
“Snap out of it, boy!” There was fury in Noah’s voice, which was almost as unfamiliar as the hint of fear I detected there as well.
I could feel Ronan crouched next to me, his panic nearly as palpable as Noah’s terror. But that wasn’t what held my attention.
Bastian.
Blood seeped from his palm-up hands, like a fountain of unlimited crimson liquid. On his face was a look of euphoria and joy, his lips parted and eyes hyper focused on my blood floating toward him. My stomach churned at the sight of so much blood, and as the vacuum of power grew stronger, my head began to spin. When I heard Ronan’s booming voice—his words indistinct—I realized my hearing was going in and out.
My eyes fluttered shut for only a moment, and I felt as though I was about to pass out.
A sudden eruption of a new energy had me fighting with all my might to peer through my narrowly slit eyelids. I saw a massive, dark cloud of swirling wisps blasting out of Ronan. My lips parted, and I watched in shock as the shadows converged together in a sudden sweep and formed into a mid-sized wyvern that damn near filled the entirety of the small room.
Within the span of a few seconds, it launched through the air, soaring toward Bastian with an open mouth. A roar filled the space, shaking the walls as the figure collided with the Caster and knocked him onto his back. I took a ragged breath as the drain I felt on my body disappeared.
“Holy shit,” I gasped, my hand coming to my throat that was now raw to the touch, covered in burns and blisters as well. I didn’t give the injuries a second thought. All I could do was stare at the wyvern that had Bastian’s unconscious form trapped underneath the shadowed claw it had lifted and poised over his heart.
Ronan grunted suddenly, his hand moving to his chest as if in pain. The creature flickered out of existence, the swirls wafting along the ground before dissipating completely. My gaze moved to the Beast Tamer—he stared at Bastian’s trembling form on the floor before looking toward me.
“Ronan…what was that?” I asked in a whisper that echoed loudly through the silent room. Noah stared at the three of us in shock, his mouth hanging open as his brows shot up impossibly high.
For the first time in all the years I’d known Ronan, I saw true fear shining in his eyes.
“No idea, Beauty. No fucking idea.”
As the healer wrapped my left arm, the soothing balm underneath causing my skin to prickle in cool relief, Noah finished pouring himself a cup of tea. He poured four in total, but I knew one would go untouched for sure, considering it was meant for Bastian.
It had been thirty minutes since the man had woken from his unconscious state and forty since the occurrence of…well, whatever the hell had just happened.The Caster now sat in the far corner of the office, unwilling to come closer, his cold, gray gaze filled with a darkness that almost felt eerie. His skin was far paler than normal, almost chalky, and his hands were white knuckling the arm of the chair he sat in. It was like he was physically restraining himself from leaving the room.
“Bastian?” I called his name as the healer left through the office door. When Noah first called for her, to both check on Bastian and me, she assured me that my wounds would heal quickly but that I may need to return for another set of bandages. If I continued to train like this, I had a feeling the medical center staff and I would become fast friends.
“Yes?” His voice was a rough croak, and he evaded any eye contact.
Ronan made a concerned noise from next to me, his gaze focused on the corner of the room, clearly seeing exactly what I was:Bastian was losing it.
“Will you please come here?” I kept my tone patient and even, not wanting to express my own panic over his purposeful distance. I knew what this was about—it was clear by the way he kept looking at his blood-stained hands and then back at me, as if he was in an endless loop of torturing himself. Bastian’s magichad escaped his control and was now causing him to be terrified that he would hurt me—I was sure of it.
When he refused to respond, I turned my gaze back to Noah and asked, “Can someone explain what the hell just happened?”
The older angel looked toward Bastian for a long moment before releasing a sigh and returning his eyes to me. “I’m not sure how much he told you about our session yesterday after you left, so I’ll start there. Bastian’s potential of magic usage is essentially unlimited. However, yesterday we discovered he had a…’speciality,’ so to speak.”
“And this has something to do with blood?” I wagered a guess considering the pool of blood that still laid on the mats in the other room.
“Precisely, blood magic.”
Considering Bastian’s obsession with my blood ever since we’d met, that almost made a bittoo muchsense.
“So his magic backfired and started pulling my blood? Drawing on it for his own use?” I asked for clarification, looking toward Bastian but finding that his gaze was still focused firmly on the floor.
“I’m not sure fully,” Noah admitted, rubbing his temple. “But when you began bleeding from your injury sustained during training, it seemed to trigger his power. I think it caused him to go into an almost frenzy-like state, drawing on and conjuring as much of your blood as he could.”
“Impressive,” I murmured with a lifted brow, unable to stop myself from marveling at this new information. It wasn’t the only thing that needed to be addressed, though. My eyes shifted to the Beast Tamer. “Okay…and what about Ronan?”
Noah offered Ronan a curious tilt of the head before asking, “Has anything like this ever happened to you before?”
“No.” Ronan shook his head vehemently. “My magic has always acted in accordance with being a Beast Tamer, whichjust means feeling a connection to beasts and having a natural understanding and relationship with them. I didn’t even mean to create or produce whateverthatwas, I just wanted to protect Kieran, and then it acted?—”
“On its own accord,” Noah murmured under his breath before standing and walking over to his bookshelf. “Seems to be the running theme for this group.”
