“Yeah. Help me get there.”
Chancey took me to his dorm. My breath caught as he opened the door. Ivy sat on Chancey’s bed, a blanket draped around him as he clutched at a small waste bin. He was shaking, trembling with unstoppable convulsions. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours, but Ivy was already having withdrawals. Bad ones, it looked like.
I hadn’t realized how many drugs he was on, but now that I saw it for myself, I realized that Ivy really couldn’t stop.
Several people were gathered in the room. Opal sat beside Ivy on the bed, an arm wrapped around his shoulders, while Ez rifled through pill bottles, appearing puzzled.
Had Ez stolen medication from the hospital to help Ivy? My plea for him to help our friend came back to bite me. Whatever Ivy was going through, I didn’t want to put my brother at risk.
But we were all friends. We were in this together now. Addiction didn’t just hurt one person. It ruined everybody who was around.
Chancey stood in the corner of the room and observed it all. I didn’t know if they were back together or not, but something had to be going on between them, because Ivy was here in Chancey’s cell.
I dropped my voice to speak to Chancey privately. “This is dangerous. He should be in the infirmary, not detoxing in your room.”
“Ives isn’t gonna quit any other way. Gotta let them do it on their terms.”
Ez held out a bottle of pills to Ivy. “Here, take these.”
“Get that fucking shit away from me,” Ivy sneered as he slapped the pill bottle away. “It makes me worse.”
“Ives, you gotta. You could go into shock without ‘em,” Chancey begged.
“Dude, I’m not risking my neck— and my treatments— to sneak in and steal these for you for nothing,” Ez warned. “If I get caught, my ass is grass, so you’d better take them.”
“He’s the only one with regular access to the hospital because he’s always going for treatment, Ives. Just do as he says,” Chancey said.
Ivy scowled, but he swallowed two massive pills without another complaint.
It was seriously a group effort to keep Ivy going, and if I was being honest, none of us were equipped to handle this. Just watching Chancey fall apart as he tried to pull Ivy together was breakingmein half.
“Get him away from me,” Ivy mumbled, and he recoiled against the bed. “I don’t want to see my father.”
He was hallucinating. Fuck. Opal rubbed Ivy’s shoulders as he vomited into the bucket.
“Let me try and heal him,” I offered. Other Anichi healers had struggled to heal addiction before, and sometimes, it backfired onto the caster and caused them to feel the agony of the withdrawals. Sometimes, it even made the healer become addicted to the substance themselves. But I wasn’t going to sit here and let Ivy suffer if I could do something about it. My mother had told me addiction was one of those things you couldn’t mend with healing magic, and it was dangerous to try, but I was a demigod, so I was certain the rules wouldn’t apply to me. Whether it hurt me or not, I was taking the risk.
“Ava, no,” Opal protested. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
I was already doing it. I reached out for Ivy’s hand, grasping it within my own and curling my fingers around his. My healing magic sank deep into his body, looking for the source of his addiction, so I could destroy it.
It was like drowning. Seriously. Ivy’s body was searching for any sort of fix it could get right now, and without something to keep him high, it was going into full panic mode.
I could do this. I could heal the addiction, take Ivy’s symptomsaway.
The moment I found the source of the addiction, and tried to rip it out, it resisted immediately. It wrapped around Ivy and planted itself inside, refusing to let go.
But that wasn’t all. Once the disease came close, the addiction wrapped itself aroundme, too. Cramps and aches enveloped my entire body as a vicious chill took me over, and a heavy nausea settled into my stomach. Sharp pain settled into my bones as I began experiencing tremors, so severe they made my chair shake. The pain in my middle grew, until it was ricocheting up my spine and aggravating my injury to the point I cried out in pain.
I attempted to pull my magic back, but it wouldn’t let me go. I was too far deep in it now, stuck in the thick of it with Ivy.
I couldn’t help my friend. I couldn’t even help myself.
“Cut it out!” I felt Ez rip my hand out of Ivy’s, grasping it with his own. The warmth of my brother’s healing magic swelled over me, washing over me like a calming wave as it chased the effects of Ivy’s withdrawal out.
My entire body ached as Ez pulled back his healing magic. I slumped in my chair. “That was harder than I thought.”
“That wasstupid, Ava.There’s a reason Anichi healers are very careful when they heal addicts. The addiction doesn’t just go away,” Ez snapped.
