Maybe I should stay away from him.“Pull that on me again and you might not live the next time,” she said coldly.
Zizi gave her a bloody grin.
“Where’s Yuki?” she asked, suddenly noticing his absence. It was disturbing to call a Revenant by a human name.
“Never mind him, never mind that freaking Hybrids really do exist,” Yiran said, raising his voice. He was staring at her like she was an alien. “What the hell was that? I thought you lost your magic!”
“I... I don’t know.” Holding out her hands, Rui switched up her breathing pattern, trying to channel her magic, or at least the blue flames again.
Seconds passed. Nothing happened.
“I can’t summon anything.”
“Which means your magic hasn’t returned, and the blue fire is something else,” Zizi deduced.
“What is it then?” Yiran said. “How did she manage to kill Aloysius?”
That magic can’t hurt us. It draws from the darkness, just like ours.
Aloysius cackled in Rui’s head. But it was Ten’s face she saw. Ten had claimed she’d been touched by death. Was this what he meant? Was she somehow connected to the darkness because of that? But the blue flames killed Aloysius in the end. Hybrid or not, he was still a Revenant, a creature of the dark.
Nothing made sense.
Rui stuck her hand into her pocket, fingers closing over Nikai’s mirror. The Reaper might know something, but she had to wait until she was alone to contact him.
She wished she could tell all her secrets to the two boys in front of her. They were staring, one at the night sky, the other at the highway. There were lights from vehicles drawing near.
Yiran turned from the road. “Why is it that when something bad happens, it’s always the three of us?”
“The hell would I know,” Zizi muttered. His skin had a sickly tint.
“We need to find out what’s wrong with Rui,” Yiran said to him.
“You’re right, we do.”
Since when did they get along well enough to agree? And since when wasshetheir joint responsibility?
“What we need to know is why the Hybrids tried to kidnap Zizi,” she said. “What if the missing mages were hired by Hybrids to create the spell and that’s why they’re after you now?”
“The man who hired me wasn’t a Hybrid,” Zizi said.
“And now he’s dead. The Hybrids could’ve used normies to hire the mages, and then killed them to cover their tracks. The other mages might be missing because they succeeded in creating some type of separation spell like you did, and the Hybrids took them.”
Zizi shook his head, wincing as he checked his chest wound. “More likely the mages failed and that got them killed. Aloysius was only toying with me. He wanted me alive, and I think I know why—the Hybrids want me to re-create the spell.”
Yiran raised his hand. “Wait a minute, I’m not following any of this.”
“A man came to my shop asking for a spell that could split a Revenant’s spiritual energy from itself,” Zizi said. “I told him it wasn’t possible, but he said to try anyway, that he’d double the price if it worked for even a few seconds. I took the job as a challenge, thinking I would fail. But I succeeded, and now you and Rui have proven the separation can last longer, that it could be permanent. The Hybrids must want to exploit this somehow.”
“Yuki said something about creating a new world for Hybrids,” Yiran recalled with a shudder. “A world without Exorcists—”
“Where Hybrids and Revenants can feed on humans freely,” Rui finished. “What else did Yuki say?”
“Not much.” Yiran touched his cheek gingerly. The patch of skin was raw and red.
“You warned me, Zizi,” said Rui, nauseated by the thought that came to her. “You said if I touched a Revenant after casting the spell, its qi might affect me, and the hunger will possess me. What if the Hybrids want your spell so they can create more of them?”
Yiran blanched. “Is that even possible?”
