Devlin.
My Aunt Disa’s final chosen mate. Her combat mage.
The blood-based preservation spells are Bellamy’s work. I don’t have to step any farther into the room to know it.
The machine attempting to breathe for the woman in the hospital bed next to Devlin pumps again, wheezing. Blood runes similar to the ones in my holding cell ring the base of the bed, scuffed and faded now. More runes ring the room and around the door.
More of Bellamy’s work.
But not her blood.
I’ve known that for a while now.
I find the strength to step into the room, leaving the door open behind me and wishing I were numb. Wishing my chest didn’t feel as if it were cracked open and bleeding. Wishing fate hadn’t just stabbed an icy shard of inevitability through my heart.
All the answers to so many questions are displayed before me.
Whose blood could possibly be powerful enough to hold the universe at bay, keeping me — the Conduit of all that energy, that power — trapped at the Cataclysm’s whim?
Why has my connection to the Conduit powers and the intersection point felt so disjointed? Incomplete?
What happened to my aunt, and how was she unable to warn me ahead of time?
The woman in the second hospital bed looks nothing and everything like my Aunt Disa. She’s intubated, with tubes running from all her major arteries, some of which have clearly been used to harvest her blood.
During the confrontation at the Outcast’s temporary clubhouse in the hotel bar, Bellamy had alluded to seeing my aunt in a cage — or more specifically, of seeing my amulet hanging around the neck of another of the awry. But this isn’t anything like the cage I thought the dire awry was hinting at — blood runes and plastic tubing instead of steel bars …
My aunt’s naturally tan skin is too pale. Her dark-blond hair is brittle, cheeks sunken. Her eyes are closed, but I know without seeing them that they’re no longer a vibrant violet to match my own. Her arms lie neatly alongside her torso — her chest expanding and contracting by mechanical means.
She didn’t reach back for Devlin in the moment of their deaths, even though she’s not physically restrained.
Because the Cataclysm, and Bellamy at his behest, used other means to cage Disa. Other means to keep her caged.
Likely Devlin himself.
Maybe my Aunt Disa was more fallible than I thought. Maybe too human. Maybe she actually loved too much, too hard. Maybe she didn’t know that the universe would abandon her here, that her rejected soul-bound mate would or could kill her, and she waited just a little too long to react.
And now her amulet hangs around my neck.
I take the last few steps to her bedside, crossing over the containment runes without feeling whatever spell was once threaded through that blood. Disa’s blood, though I doubt that was the key to holding her. I vaguely understand that they’ve used a combination of tech and essence to keep the vessel breathing, though. Breathing and bleeding that powerful Gage blood.
Gage blood. Because Disa is no longer the Conduit.
I am.
A nasty, barely healed wound mars the top of her shoulder. The skin there is reddened, maybe even infected. It’s a match to the still-seething wound at my neck.
Who sat in my Aunt’s sitting room that day, sipping tea and spinning a tale compelling enough that Disa and Devlin ended up facing the Cataclysm? Being brought here? Being hooked up to these machines?
Did Disa think that enough of her rejected soul-bound mate, enough of Oso, still resided within the Cataclysm that he wouldn’t, maybe even couldn’t, truly harm her?
“I’m never going to know,” I whisper, giving in to the impulse to brush my fingertips across my aunt’s cheek. Her skin is colder than mine. “Not all of it, at least.”
I can’t feel even a hint of essence from her, but I need to know for certain. I reach over. Not bothering to look because I know I’ll hit the right buttons, I turn off the machines. As they die one by one, I clumsily unhook their wires and tubes. Sobbing, I wrench the breathing tube out of my aunt’s throat, then rip away the remaining tubes and lines attached to her.
There must be some proper way to do all this, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because Disa doesn’t breathe again. She doesn’t open her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I cry, clasping her inert hand and not even knowing what I’m apologizing for, except none of this was supposed to happen this way. “I’m so sorry.”
