Gigi shows up, gaze riveted to my homicidal twin the moment she enters the beach house. Now that I’m not leaving Bellamy alone with the fucking knife, I slip into the bedrooms again in search of more clothing. The combat mage doesn’t even glance my way, which is perfectly fine with me.
Feeling satisfied that the dire awry doesn’t want everyone else to die, I can take a fucking moment to try to feel halfway human again, finding a worn-thin black cotton T-shirt in the second bedroom. I still feel naked, though — vulnerable in my human skin, without one of my suits and all the protections woven through that Authority-issued uniform.
When I return to the kitchen, the silver platter has been set to the side, and the entire dining table is layered with chalked runes. Some of the symbols appear to overlap. Others are carefully wiped off and replaced as Bellamy works through the spell she’s crafting. I still don’t recognize a single rune or even the base language. I typically never need to know what I’m looking at in order to break it, so wasting time learning that shit wasn’t high on my must-do list.
Even confined to the table, the spell looks fucking complicated. Bellamy is sweating with the effort of casting it. Or at least setting it up, because I’m fairly certain she’s going to be using my blood as the trigger.
More specifically, as an accelerant.
Which is fine. I offered it. It’s not like we don’t share enough DNA as twins. If she wanted to use blood to come at me, she could just use her own. Though not as effectively as using mine, because I’m a shifter and the cu-sith makes me seriously resistant to all essence-based spells. I also don’t doubt there was blood involved in the fucked-up shit she tried to pull on me at the bar.
The scratches on the back of my neck from that encounter only fully healed after I partly transformed to fight the berserkers in the barrens. Not that I noticed at the time. I was a little fucking busy trying to stop Zaya from fucking sacrificing herself.
“Stop it,” Bellamy snaps. “You’ll disrupt the spell.”
She’s not looking my way, so it takes me a moment — and Gigi curling her lip in my general direction — to figure out she’s talking to me.
“I’m not doing anything,” I snarl back.
“You want this to work?” Bellamy asks, totally fucking rhetorical. “Keep your shit locked down.”
Right. No thinking about my sister trying to fuck me while wearing Zaya’s face. No thinking about Zaya at all.
I pace back into the kitchen, avoiding touching the still-simmering pots or anything on the counters as I start hunting for food. Meat would be nice, but based on what’s in the fridge, Bellamy is apparently a fucking vegan.
“I need his blood,” Bellamy says to Gigi as she takes a step back from the table, though her gaze remains fixed to the knife still hovering before her. “Two separate draws, and I can’t take them myself.”
Gigi grunts, producing a small, wickedly sharp blade from somewhere on her person. I have no idea where the fuck she hid it in the skintight jeans and silk-blouse tank-top-thing she’s wearing. No obvious essence shifts as if she’s dispelled a concealing charm or called the blade to her by other means.
“The marble mortar.” Bellamy nods toward me, then the counter. “I don’t need the pestle.”
“I have no fucking idea what —” I growl.
“The little bowl,” Gigi says, exasperated as if I’ve taken up way too much of her time. “With the thick walls. Fuck me, just standing in the same room as the two of you is going on my fucking ‘No’ list. Right under no children, no genocides, and no family, blood related or not.”
Grabbing the surprisingly weighty dark-gray stone bowl, I scoff at the combat mage. Though I don’t need to hear the truth ringing through Gigi’s words to know she’s serious. Both about the list of atrocities she refuses to participate in and where she’s ranked helping us on that list.
“Open a major vein.” Bellamy isn’t remotely as detached as she sounds.
It’s enough to make me almost feel like an ass for asking her to do a blood casting of this kind. But she can go full detox after we kill the fucking Cataclysm.
Rolling up the sleeve of the T-shirt, I cross around the counter, offering my arm to Gigi. She takes the marble bowl first, essence snapping out from her fingers and scouring it clean. I huff through my nose to stop myself from sneezing from the burnt scent.
“Here?” Gigi asks, pivoting toward the table.
Bellamy nods.
The combat mage carefully places the bowl in the center of a secondary circle of chalked runes, wary of disturbing the spell. She’s also careful to not touch or brush up against the table. Then she grabs me around the wrist surprisingly quickly, tugging my arm over the bowl. Just as quickly, she slices open my vein with the tip of that wicked blade.
I grunt, more in surprise than at the momentary pinch of pain.
Gigi then slides her hand from my wrist up my arm, pressing her fucking thumb next to the deep slice.
That hurts. I nearly fucking tear her hand off. Literally.
She angles my arm, careful to not get any of my blood on her as she directs the fucking stream she’s pressing out of my fucking vein into the marble bowl.
The wound seals over. Though the cu-sith is currently quiet, watchful within me, I’m still an uber-fucking-powerful shifter. I heal quickly.
