I grunt, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Rath is the book nerd, the history-and-other-useless-shit buff. I’m just a killer with a badge, looking for a weapon with which to murder my father.
Nothing to unpack here.
“Zaya thinks this is Disa’s blood.” Bellamy ghosts a finger along the edge of the knife, careful to not touch it. “And I … I recognize the runes. I learned them at a young age.”
“What’s the spell? It’s rune-etched, right?”
She nods, unhappy. “It’s a sharpening spell on one side and a modified break spell on the other. Though that application seems odd for a knife, which you’d use to stab or slice, not to smash something.”
“Because it needed to break the soul bond.”
She looks up at me sharply, then narrows her eyes thoughtfully. “If energy passes between soul-bound mates … lending strength and resilience and maybe even some power transfer …”
“It does.” I can feel that effect between Zaya, Rought, and Rath now, even in its nascent stages. “That’s also why Disa’s chosen mates all died when she did. And why none of them aged either.”
“Huh. I didn’t know that.”
I scoff at her.
She ignores me, which is … well, smart on her fucking part but still seriously fucking annoying.
“The modified break spell,” I say. “To sever the bond between Ward and Disa so Disa’s strength, her own ability to cheat death over and over, couldn’t transfer to him.”
“Severing that bond, even without also killing her soul-bound mate, would have weakened Disa too,” Bellamy murmurs. “Even made her vulnerable afterward, maybe even in the long term …”
I swallow and look away, up toward the main house, toward my soul-bound mate. Zaya walked this world with three severed bonds for thirteen years without even knowing it. I rub the seething psychic wound at my chest, feeling like I’m bleeding out under my skin, right beneath where a tattoo should be. A tattoo I had painfully removed.
Right where the name Larkspur should be etched into my skin, into my soul. But now there’s nothingness instead. A malignant void.
“Still with me, asshole?” Bellamy snarks.
“Tell me if it will kill him.”
She grimaces. “Disa is dead. The essence trapped in her blood, even preserved here, is still powerful. But the break spell is probably useless.”
“Can you modify it? Then fortify it?”
“I can modify it … tweak the intention. Though I’m getting that we don’t have days to set this up, so it will have to be something that works with only a couple of tweaks to these runes. And we still need something specific to tie it to the Cataclysm.”
I hold out my bare arms, all the tattoos that tied me to my former life likewise scoured from my skin. “What about the DNA of his eldest son?”
Bellamy shakes her head, but it’s not a no. “Fuck. I’m going to need Gigi to anchor me. I … I don’t think we want Zaya involved in this part.”
I’m already moving for the door.
“Just text her, asshole,” Bellamy snarls behind me. “And come up with a way to modify a break into something useful.”
I pivot, reaching for Bellamy’s phone. “The other runed spell is for sharpening, right? Maybe modify the break into something like … rupture?”
“Rupture …”
“Yeah, for when I stab him in the fucking heart.”
Bellamy blinks. Then a wicked, utterly malicious grin swamps her face. I don’t need a mirror to feel it echoed across my own.
“Hard to heal from a ruptured fucking heart,” she says, viciously gleeful.
I shrug like the arrogant asshole I am. “Or it’ll at least fucking slow him down enough for the fucking dragon to bite off his fucking head.”
