Darcy gestures to the tables. “Shove these fuckers outta the way. I gotta make an array big enough for all of us, and then I’m gonna need a lil donation from everyone.”
All the big dudes immediately scootch the tables out of the way. Me, Santanos, and Gregory crowd around Darcy so he can get his donation. Santanos holds out his wrist for Darcy, who slices him open without remorse, whipping out an empty vial from his utility belt and catching Santanos’s blood in it.
The vial disappears into the belt, and Darcy turns to Gregory, who follows Santanos’s lead, donating a vial of blood to my man. Darcy is less violent with me, and he cuts my forearm instead of my wrist to get the blood, and when he’s done he closes the wound with a tingling lick to it. He didn’t do that for Santanos, and I’m not upset about getting special treatment.
With all the tables out of the way, Darcy collects blood from everyone else. Notably, the gargoyles bleed black, and since they’re gray people, I can’t say I’m surprised.
Once he has everyone else’s donation, my man cuts himself open and starts drawing the array. He uses his own blood to draw the inner circle and the outer circle and part of the swirly bits in the middle, but then he starts pulling out the donations to complete the inner swirly bits between the two circles. It’s the most intense array he’s done, and as I watch his skin pales and a sheen of sweat breaks out on him. He trembles slightly when he opens the third vial, and by the time he opens the eighth one, his whole body is shaking and his breath is coming out in clouds like he’s standing in a freezer.
Before this moment, I hadn’t noticed any kind of supernatural, psychic tether between the two of us, but as he expends the bulk of his magical energy and borrows more, I feel it, but only because it becomes a thin wisp, as if whatever he’s doing is borrowing from the magic that makes us vibe so strongly. As he finishes the last swoop and empties the final vial, the tether between us wavers, blinking in and out of existence.
Discomfort sits below my heart, a stabbing ache that feels like some vital organ inside me is getting ripped out slowly. I didn’t know that I could miss this fucking viscerally something that I didn’t know existed until now.
Rubbing the spot, I wait breathlessly for the array to light up with Darcy’s magic, watching him sprinkle his glitter component over it, and when it finally does, a gasp chokes me. Worry and fear that were harboring in my heart disappear as Darcy straightens his shoulders and wipes his brow, and the tether tying us together stabilizes again.
“We’re taking the array to the edge of the solar system. We’re going to follow the Magic’s instructions for how to banish The Hollow.” Darcy isn’t weak, but he’s expended a lot of magic, and the gaunt look of his cheeks tells me he’s on the brink of an empty tank.
“Why is this array so much harder than the last few?” I question, taking my place beside him.
Darcy grimaces with a look of disgust. “Because I’m carrying so many more people, because this array needs to provide a livable atmosphere for those people, and because we’re about to face an indescribable evil and I’m trying to protect this array against anything that might destabilize it. I require Hawthorn and Ethan to have your hands on our mates in case my protections fail.” He gives the gargoyles a pointed look.
The cowboy one immediately grabs me and Edovard by our elbows, pulling us in close. “Don’t you worry, Darcy. I’ll keep these civilians safe.”
The John Wayne style accent really works for him.
“Thank you,” Darcy says, then glares at the 80’s cosplayer. “Ethan?”
Ethan wraps his arms around Hassan and Gregory’s shoulders (oh, hey, Gregory is redressed again, how did I miss that?). His devilish smile reminds me of an evil cartoon character grinning wickedly, like Alastor fromHazbin Hotel. It’s surprisingly less attractive in real life than on a cartoon character. “Weird.”
Everyone glances at me except Darcy, whose eyes bounce between all of us, landing on Bellamy. “You’re gonna lead this, ain’tcha, Bella?”
“Bella is worse than Red.” Bellamy decides, takes a deep breath, and nods. “Let’s go banish this fucking thing.”
Darcy checks on Santanos, who dips his chin with an eloquent grace that I’m thinking more people need to practice in the mirror. The confidence in that movement inspires hope, and I wasn’t feeling particularly hopeless since I know The Hollow’s been banished before. “Let’s.”
Darcy presses his lips together, shoots me a heated look, and then we fly, traversing the endless, soulless expanse of space.
36
“You know, the edge of the solar system is about a hundred thousand astronomical units from the sun. It takes the light from the sun about twenty months to reach the edge.” I took an astronomy class a few years ago, but I was obsessed with space in middle school, and some of that random knowledge has stuck with me.
Darcy narrows his eyes like he does when he’s thinking about me, tilting his head to the side as he does. “We’re not taking the direct route,” he explains.
“Oh, I can tell,” I say as the darkness surrounding us brightens to less dark—it’s not light at all, it’s just less dark than the previous blackness—and then immediately darkens again. This keeps happening in a pattern, and I can see it because Santanos threw up a mage light when the array left the safety lights of the space station. “We seem to be going through a series of wormholes.”
Darcy makes a noise of disagreement. “We’re teleporting, but teleportation is complicated with complex beings. Gargoyles can do it as a natural aspect of their magic. Our small gargoyle friends can teleport themselves in their stone form, because stone is easy to teleport, and they can carry with them non livingobjects that are smaller than they are, but for groups this size and distances this great, it’s necessary for me to use smaller teleportation hops, and moving a bubble array is easier than teleporting people. I code the magic to teleport the bubble, and everything within it goes with it without the need to attune the teleportation magic to moving living organisms.”
“Our magic is already attuned to teleport living beings,” Ethan adds. “And we can only carry with us up to four times our stone weight. As a general rule, we say we can only teleport what we can lift with our own arms, and then no one is in danger of exceeding their limit and possibly getting lost in the process.”
Bellamy eyes him doubtfully. “What does ‘getting lost’ mean?”
Hawthorn growls low in his throat. “It means there’s a space between teleportation locations and you disappear from your starting point and never appear at your destination. No one has ever returned from the lost space.”
It’s a good thing Darcy’s not going to get us trapped in the lost space.
“Edovard,” Santanos calls to his mate, moving to face him.
The big guy looks down at the Avatar of Evil with curiosity. “Do you need me to feed you?”
