Tessa raised an eyebrow but kept her mouth shut.
Devora’s last message said Scarven had finally come for her, after three full days and four nights of silence from him. She’d been so worried he’d discovered our hand in the rescue operation at the Hollow. I’d done everything I could to ease her fears, but truthfully, I was scared too. Scarven had a reason for everything he did. Every move he made. If he invited her to stay with him and then ignored her for half a week, that meant something.
My worst fears threatened to break the surface over the last couple of days. Fears that he had somehow traced Devora back tome. Sage’s limp body appeared in my mind over and over again, every night when I slept.
But lately…Devora’s had started to replace it.
She wasn’t supposed to mean anything to me. Shecouldn’tmean anything. Because those who did wound up dead.
I needed to keep my mind off it. So, human test subject it was. I just wasn’t going to tell Tessa she was right.
“I trust you, Silas,” I said, ignoring Tessa’s glare. “We need to see what this stuff does. If we have a baseline, we can figure out how to counteract it.” I settled back into the chair and nodded to the needle carved from bone that rested on Silas’s work table. “Ready when you are.”
“This is ground fatesprig soaked in a base liquid of spring water. I then boiled it to get rid of impurities and made it into this tincture.” He waved the needle in the air. “Scarven’s Alchemist could be adding all sorts of potions we aren’t aware of, but this will give us its purest interaction. I have no idea what the reaction will be, Nox. I can’t promise your safety.”
Clearing his throat, he glanced at me again, waiting to see if I would object. When I stayed quiet, he came out from behind his work table. His protective leather gloves were smooth to the touch as he knelt to my side and turned my arm over. He pressed his thumbdown hard over the crook of my elbow, then lowered the tip of the needle.
Before it broke the skin, he paused. “Nox, I?—”
“Just do it,” I said through gritted teeth.
He plunged the needle into my skin. I watched as the dark green liquid slowly pushed into my bloodstream.
Everyone held their breath. At first, I felt nothing. Barely even a pinch from the needle. And then?—
Pain.
Blinding, ripping, piercing my body like a thousand knives embedded in my skin.
Fire.
Racing, burning, cleaving a path of molten lava through my veins.
It wasn’t simpleheat. It was as if every cell in my body was being scoured clean. Burned straight through until nothing was left.
My vision fractured from the pain, edges graying as I clenched my teeth together to avoid crying out. I doubled over and fell from the chair. My knees crashed into the ground, my fingers balling into fists, fighting off the current of fire flooding them. I inhaled sharply as I watched the veins in my forearm bulge. They quickly pulsed against my tan skin, a green so dark, it was like rot spreading.
My dragon recoiled in my chest.
Then it screamed.
I let out a roar, throwing my head back as my chest thrust forward.
My magic was trying to fight it. I could feel it twisting around the intruding force, a battle taking place in my blood. All I could think was pain. All I could see was red. It tore through me, shredding my magic, scraping every ounce of power from my body and leaving the edges raw.
I fell forward, barely holding myself up as I convulsed. Bilecrept up my throat. I vomited, my stomach doing everything it could to expel the toxin, but it didn’t matter.
Something inside me snapped.
I let out another scream through clenched teeth as I sank to the floor. After what felt like an eternity but could have only been seconds, the pain slowly morphed to something else.
Hollow. Numb. Like acid dripping into an empty shell where my magic, mydragon, once lived.
But it was gone.
41
Nox
