Except her hand didn’t move. Her arm was glued to her side. She stared at Katherine, trying to open her mouth to ask what the fuck was going on, but she couldn’t do that either.
Katherine’s face split into a grin. “Unsettled magic,” she said. “It can really do anything, can’t it?”
Unsettled…
Katherine took her hand away and held up her bleeding palm. “I’d say with the amount of power you’re using, your senses are probably on the fritz. Hard to tell if just a little bit has gone missing.”
The grip on Sylvia’s hand, the one that she had thought was Katherine’s feeble final stand. She should’ve known Katherine wouldn’t give up that easy.
“Just wanted to repay you for Lily, Syl.” Katherine grinned. “Considering you love to steal things from people without their knowledge, I figured I’d give you a taste of your own medicine.”
Sylvia yanked up every scrap of magic she had left and threw it against the spell, but it held, Katherine’s focus too strong to break.
Until the door opened. Katherine’s gaze turned away for just a second, but it was enough. Sylvia wrenched herself free, throwing every bit of power she had left at Katherine and whoever had opened that door.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Katherine saw red.
She was furious—furious that Sylvia was doing this, furious that she’d been forced to take unsettled magic into her veins again—but the red wasn’t from that. The red was the color of the air, so thick with power that she couldn’t see through it.
She tried to piece together the last thirty seconds, but her brain was foggy. Distantly, she lifted a hand and brought it to the back of her head, where pain radiated through her skull. She was bleeding. Why was she bleeding?
She’d had Sylvia under her control. She’d made that horrible choice, taken this power—Lily’s power—into her veins again, so that she could end this. It was almost over. And then… and then the door opened. And she’d turned her head.
A spark of gold filtered through the red. And then another. And another.
Class 5 spells.
From Silas.
Suddenly, the red of the air split open, and he was there, runes glowing bright on both of his hands, illuminating a face contorted with fury. Fury that he aimed at Sylvia, who was shooting sparks of red magic back at him with a renewed vigor.
His palms were a mess of cuts, drips of blood showing his passage across the room, but he slashed them again, a gold rune lighting up asa cage of magic slammed down over Sylvia. Her unsettled magic sliced through the bars like butter, and she bolted toward him, but in another flash of gold, he disappeared. Katherine’s jaw dropped. So Noctis had figured out teleportation after all.
Silas used his new position behind Sylvia to jump at her, his hand clasping on her neck, his freeze spell holding her in place as another cut and another rune made the floorboards shift beneath her, morphing and grabbing at her legs, snaring her with chains of wood. They crawled up her body, aiming for her hands, her face, but before they could reach, Silas’ skin started to glow red. He pulled away from Sylvia with a curse of pain, stumbling back as her power burned the wood bindings to ash.
She whirled, hurling one of the tables at him and sending him stumbling backward. Even with Silas’ advanced spells, Sylvia’s willingness to just keep pulling more and more of her unsettled magic meant that she couldn’t be topped.
But Katherine had some of that power too.
She forced herself up, ignoring the dizziness and nausea as she rushed to Silas’ side. Her brain automatically started to flip through the litany of spells she had left in her. She could—
But no, she realized. It didn’t matter what spells she had ready, because the only limit to what unsettled magic could do was her imagination. She didn’t know how long the unsettled magic she’d taken from Sylvia would last her—she had only pulled a bit, too thrown by the feeling of it in her veins to keep going. But she had power left, and she would hit Sylvia with everything she had.
She formed a ball of sparks in her hand with just a thought. Threw it at Sylvia with another.
It was intoxicating and terrifying at the same time.
Silas’ head whipped toward her at the sight of the unsettled magic. “You—”
“I took it from her,” she said, stopping him before the confusion and betrayal in his eyes over her new power could cut her to the ground. “Just a few minutes ago. I swear.”
Before she could find out if he believed her or not, Sylvia was upagain, lashing out with a whip of magic. It cracked in the air between them as Katherine and Silas dove out of the way, hitting a nearby support beam, the wood charring as it splintered under the heat.
“Quite the story, isn’t it, Silas?” Sylvia taunted.
Katherine pushed herself back to her feet, searching for her former mentor, but it was hard to see through the growing smoke. She wiped at her tearing eyes, waving a hand and using magic to clear a few feet of air in front of her.
