The fountain let out a rumble like a teakettle overflowing as the sea of burning ink battered against Ivy’s path with growing ferocity. The metal ball jangled and thrashed in Felipe’s grasp as if it wanted to escape back to the watery depths. All he needed to do was get it outside the tide. If he could do that, then he could figure out a way to destroy it. As he grew closer, Ivy’s eyes widened with horror, but he couldn’t think about his burned skin or dwell on the pain until he knew everyone was safe. Felipe had nearly reached the water line when it hit him. Pain ripped through his chest beneath his heart. He staggered back, grabbing at the tether as spots danced in his eyes. Felipe’s heart thundered so loudly in his ears that he could barely hear Ivy yelling at him to move, but he couldn’t. The pressure in his chest crushed his heart into his sternum until he could scarcely breathe.
Something was very, very wrong, and he was powerless to stop it.
***
Oliver stayed very, very still as he let down his walls, and the tether reached for Mrs. Cutler’s soul. He called to the orphaned child who grew up to help children like her, to the woman beloved by her daughter, to the matriarch the community turned to. He had barely gotten out the thought when her soul latchedon and pulled the tethers so taut they both vibrated like a struck tuning fork. Oliver gritted his teeth as his bones hummed and his body felt as it might shake apart. He let the two tethers thin and thicken between his fingers, but he couldn’t get them to harmonize. The energy rushed from end to end, constantly tipping to the point that Oliver feared the tether might tear. In the lab, Felipe always stayed close by and still while he dealt with the dead, but they were nearly so hard to manage as the living. Even though Mrs. Cutler had asked to be saved, her body still bucked at the tether’s intrusion.
Oliver sucked in a strangled breath as the pressure in his chest worsened. Felipe and Mrs. Cutler’s tethers pulled in opposite directions, threatening to split Oliver in two. The tethers slipped between his fingers as Felipe’s end thinned dangerously. Oliver’s heart pounded in his ears as he reeled Mrs. Cutler in to give Felipe more room to move. A panicked voice in the back of his head told him to knock Felipe out for his safety, but he couldn’t do that now. He couldn’t risk him being caught near the acidified water or left unable to defend himself. Instead, Oliver silently begged Mrs. Cutler to let him in. He told her how her daughter wanted him to help, how he was a doctor, how he had to use his magic to keep her alive until more help came, and if she let him in, she would live to see her children again. For a long moment, he thought it didn’t work until she let go, and her end of the tether stabilized.
Oliver let out a sigh of relief. Things still felt wrong and his chest radiated with pain, but Felipe wasn’t in immediate danger. Letting his magic spread across Mrs. Cutler’s form, Oliver forced his eyes shut. In the negative on his eyelids, he could see her blood vessels outlined in a glow of magic. A haze of it lingered over the rest of her body, but that was unsurprising. Her heart thudded irregularly as Oliver opened his eyes. A healer would have been able to sense the mechanisms within her body thathad gone awry and fix them, but Oliver could only control one organ. While he couldn’t stop the bleeding, he could buy them time. Reaching across the tether to her wildly beating heart, Oliver tried to coax it into a slower rhythm.
“What’s happening? What are you doing?” Mrs. Cutler’s daughter asked, her voice rising with panic as her mother shut her eyes again. “You said you weren’t a healer.”
Mrs. Burns hushed her and whispered something to her, but Oliver couldn’t hear what she said. If he let his attention slip for an instant, he feared something within him would snap. He had nearly gotten her heart to a more normal level when a jolt passed through him and his heart clenched painfully in his ribs. Oliver squeezed his eyes shut and coughed until his heart didn’t feel like it was going to beat out of his chest.Felipe. Oliver distantly hoped he was all right and that he had the sense to slow down because he didn’t think he could hold tightly to both of them if Felipe kept going. He didn’t want to let Mrs. Cutler go. He didn’t want to let her daughter and companion down if he didn’t have to, but he would if the choice came to it. He only hoped he could hold out long enough for the healers to come.
Drawing in a long, tight breath, Oliver raised his pained gaze to Mrs. Cutler’s daughter and Mrs. Burns. “I’m going to slow down your mother’s heart. She— she will go unconscious, but it’s the only way to keep her from bleeding out.”
“Will she die?”
“I can’t say, but that’s what I’m trying to prevent.” Oliver held both tethers in a white-knuckled grip and added, “If I can’t speak when the healers come, tell them to focus on healing her blood vessels.”
Mrs. Cutler’s daughter looked as if she might object, but Mrs. Burns put her hand on her arm and nodded. Shutting his eyes, Oliver reached for Mrs. Cutler’s heart on the other end of the tether again. She shied away from him, her struggling heartsputtering and slipping out of rhythm in time with the stretch of the tether. Frustrated tears sprang in Oliver’s eyes as he coaxed her back and held tight to her life. He wasn’t good at this. He needed Felipe. He nearly reached for the tether to give it two tugs, but he didn’t dare. It felt too fragile, like the smallest pressure would yank it loose. Forcing his own pulse slower, Oliver drew Mrs. Cutler’s heart into rhythm with his until they beat slower and slower as one.
***
When Ivy yelled his name again, her voice rough with desperation, Felipe forced himself to take a step forward. Every action felt as if he was moving through muck. His heart beat uncertainly in his ears and his body howled with pain, but he had to keep going even though the tether felt overstretched and brittle. As soon as he stumbled off the path, Ivy let the flood go with a cry of relief.
“I got it,” he said breathlessly. “I got it.”
Dropping to his knees, Felipe yanked the fabric from his arms. It stuck to his raw skin, but he tore it off anyway. Bile rose in his throat at the sight of his mangled skin. It would pass, he told himself. It had to pass. He dragged in a rough breath and tried to shake the steaming ball of metal out of what had been his jacket, but his hands wouldn’t cooperate. His fingers were a mass of melted tissue and blood, gnarled and unfeeling. He didn’t dare look too closely. The numbness from his fried nerves was his only savior, and soon, they would come back to life. He could already feel the pain returning in his upper arm. If he was going to destroy the thing from the fountain and get back to Oliver, he had to do it quickly.
Felipe bit back a scream as the nerves in his legs and stomach lit back to life. He had felt worse pain, but he hadnever felt it in so many places at once and not in front of so many people. Ivy said something about healers arriving, but he waved her off. He didn’t need them; he was a healer. Something clanked beside him, and Felipe turned in time to see the bocce ball-sized sphere free itself from the rags that had once been his clothes. He stared at it for a second, watching it roll as if tugged by an invisible string, before he realized it was heading for the water again. Felipe threw himself on top of it, but instantly regretted it when the tether pulled dangerously taut. Every time they tethered someone, he had remained as still as possible, but he couldn’t do that now. Ivy and Sophia couldn’t hold the water back forever, and when he looked around the atrium for anyone who could help him, there was no one.
Bracing himself, Felipe scooped up the metal ball. It burned into his flesh and dribbled liquid Felipe pointedly avoided touching. If his hand hadn’t already been ravaged, it would have hurt like hell. As he carried it back to the stone bench, he turned it over in his hands. Before it had been dropped into the water, it must have been etched with words, but all he could make out now were eroded loops and lumps in the cadence of writing. Another curse. Felipe grimaced as he set the ball against the leg of the bench. It wiggled and bounced as if it wanted to make a run for the water again, but he set his foot over it and reached into his jacket for his gun.
“Hey, over here,” Ivy called to the two women who lead a cluster of people from the Paranormal Society through the atrium. “He needs a healer.”
The prim Chinese woman who was with them gave Felipe a wide-eyed look that only confirmed how bad of shape he was in.
“I’m a self-healer,” Felipe yelled back, keeping his revolver hidden beneath his arm. “Help Dr. Barlow with the wounded and stay back.”
Before they could stop him, Felipe pulled out his gun. The revolver felt like lead in his hand, and his arm shook as he quickly stepped back and trained the gun on the ball. He forced the skin of his fingers apart with a bloody split and fumbled over the hammer. His heart jittered out of rhythm as he raised the gun. He would go to Oliver the second the ball was destroyed. Drawing his body like a bowstring, Felipe called for everyone to stay back and unloaded his gun into the sphere of magic and metal. It exploded in a shower of shards, but he didn’t stop until only a pile of smoking fragments remained.
Felipe sank to his knees, his breath coming in labored bursts as he tucked the gun away. Even if he couldn’t see it, he felt the air change behind him, as if the oppressive magic had been shrugged off even if the black tide remained. Crawling on the raw skin of his knees, Felipe scooped up the largest fragments of the cursed metal ball. The heat had drained out of them, but as he held them in his hand, dark blood he was fairly certain wasn’t his own pooled in his palm. Felipe staggered to his feet. Before he could think about what that meant, more voices echoed through the gallery. Felipe stood on shaking legs. The head inspector and the others had arrived. They would help Ivy and Sophia. They would deal with the mess, but he had to get to Oliver before the others did. He had to protect him.
Felipe’s head swam with each step he took toward the makeshift stage. It hadn’t seemed nearly so far away before. Pain blossomed in his hand and arm as the nerves sprung to life, but what worried him more was the way the tether strained even as he drew closer to Oliver. Felipe climbed onto the stage, careful to stay out of Oliver’s line of sight for fear of breaking his concentration should he see his blistered and burned skin. Oliver would be livid with him, Felipe thought as he drew closer. Clustered around Mrs. Cutler’s bruised body were the womenwho had run onto the stage when she collapsed and several healers he recognized from the society but couldn’t name.
“Veinsandarteries? You’re sure?” a Black man in a fine but sedate suit asked as he placed his hands on Mrs. Cutler’s shoulders.
“Yes,” Oliver said, his voice rough and barely above a whisper. “Heal her veins, arteries, capillaries. Push the excess blood back in if you can. Mitigate shock.”
“We can do that. You can let go of her now. We’ve got her,” the prim woman said gently, her hands hovering above Mrs. Cutler’s middle.
It wasn’t until Oliver shook his head that Felipe saw how awful he looked. Sweat dotted his brow, and his already pale skin looked ghostly as he gritted his teeth. The muscles in his arms and neck shook in time with his face contorting with pain as if he held Mrs. Cutler on the tether by sheer force of will. Felipe had seen him tether many corpses and one half-dead girl, but Oliver had never looked this bad. Sinking to the boards beside Oliver, Felipe tried to force his heart to slow to take the strain off his partner, but the prickling pain of healing skin made it impossible. When he focused on the tether beneath his heart and imagined his pulse slowing, Oliver’s clawed hands shook and a bead of blood dripped from his nose.
“When— when she’s— when she’s stable, I’ll stop. Can’t let her die.”
Felipe watched the stream of blood running from his nostril thicken. It rolled down Oliver’s lips toward his chin, but he never moved or took his grey eyes off Mrs. Cutler. Fear clawed at Felipe’s breast. He didn’t like the way the way the healers glanced at Oliver. He had seen that look on his mother’s face; it never meant anything good.
