Élodie looked torn. The storm had destroyed her pretty hairdo, despite the obviously expensive spells holding it upright. Ignoring Daziel, she addressed me. “Naomi, I don’t know about this. He’s a demon.”
Daziel glared at her. “If I do this, it’s only because Naomi asked. It’s nothing to me if a few humans die.”
This alarmed me, but I decided to shelve it for later. “Look,” I said to Élodie, “if we can save them, we need to make every possible attempt.”
She looked torn. When it came down to it, apparently, Élodie might not like me, but she still worried about my safety. “Let me stay. I won’t tell anyone what you do.”
“No.” Daziel sounded rudely aristocratic and walked away.
“It’ll be okay,” I told her, though Daziel’s manner had also set me on edge. Whatwashe going to do, that he didn’t want any other humans to see?
He paused once we reached the water’s edge, where the waves lapped hungrily against the glossy black beach. The wind tore at us. I started to bend, looking for a large rock on which we could scratch charaktêres.
Daziel stopped me gently. His voice, now that we were alone, was soft, and his gaze apprehensive. “This must be written on your skin.”
“What?” Alarm shot through me. Oh. Wow. Myskin? Because that sounded a lot like—if itbrokemy skin…
He didn’t say anything. Wind curled his hair. The feathered markings on his neck looked more real than usual.
Carving in skin meant blood magic.
Blood magic was dangerous, and illegal.
More shouts sounded across the river. Through the rain, I could make out people clinging to the wildly rocking platform. “We’ll be able to save them?” I confirmed, and he nodded. I steeled myself. “Okay. Do it.”
I expected him to raise a hand, but instead there was a terrible ripping noise, and two dark shapes unfolded behind Daziel. They were so unexpected I didn’t understand what was happening, couldn’t comprehend the dark membrane and the tendons dividing it. When they whipped toward me, I shrieked and jumped.
He grabbed my arm to keep me from bolting, and I stared, wide-eyed, at the appendages sprouting from his back. Breath tore through me in ragged bursts, and panic clawed at the back of my mind—some vestigial reaction telling me I was in danger. “Those are wings,” I said, in case Daziel hadn’t noticed.
“Privacy.” The wings swept forward, forming a tight, secure cocoon with only the two of us inside. The world was immediately tinted red. He tugged me closer by my forearm, then gently pulled down the sleeve of my blazer, then my cardigan. He pushed up my shirt sleeve to bare my shoulder and bicep.
Chills rose on my skin despite the heat streaming off Daziel. This suddenly seemed like a very bad idea. My voice came out high-pitched. “Maybe we could fly to pick everyone up? If…you can fly?”
“Too many people,” he said shortly, and raised his hand. His talons looked so, so sharp, and I closed my eyes, reminding myself to breathe.
A slicing pain cut through my shoulder, and I shrieked. He stopped immediately. “Can you do this?” he asked, his voice terribly adult and serious. “We don’t need to. But it is the only way I can think of to save them.”
I swallowed. Okay, then. What was a little pain in the face of people’s lives? “Yes.”
I forced my eyes open, focusing on his wings tenting us, wrapping us in a dark, private world. He carved something I couldn’t see into my shoulder, the pain real but not impossible, leaving behind a burning sensation. I concentrated on breathing. It was warm in here, insulated against the winds, and I wondered if he could wrap himself up like this and sleep in the wilderness.
It was beautiful, too, in the strangest way, like being inside atemple. Light didn’t so much filter through his wings as emanate from them, a steady glow allowing me to see Daziel’s features, so different from a human’s. So ethereally beautiful.
“Repeat after me,” Daziel said. “ ‘Calm the water and form a bridge from the platform to the shore.’ ”
It wasn’t a spell, not as letterform magic worked. Spells were more specific. A spell would have described what calm meant, would have specified the square footage. This was more the high-level takeaway of what a spell would do.
But if I’d learned anything from Daziel, it was shedim had very different magic than humans. “Calm the water and form a bridge from the platform to the shore.”
Magic ripped through me, a dizzying, sickening amount. It billowed through my body, disorienting me. I clutched Daziel’s arms. I felt like I was teetering on a rope a thousand feet above a gorge, or inhaling a sunset. My body was being blown out in every direction.
And blown from it was stillness.
The first hint was the silence. The howling of the wind calmed, the dash of the waves lessened, and the sounds of human panic vanished. Daziel uncurled his wings. In my peripheral vision, I saw the eerie flatness of the water, the people on the platform. The rain kept falling, slashing through the sky, but there were no waves, no dangerous swells.
“Hold it,” Daziel said. “Breathe through it.”
I didn’t have the capacity to respond. Magic lurched through my body, knocking against the walls of my stomach, the back of my knees, the side of my throat. I felt distended and unreal, like it might bubble out of me, explode my body.
