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She tried to summon another shield. The Eitr sputtered out of her hands. She had been pushing too long. Her head was full of high white sound. Her wounds were bleeding heavily. Current and Eitr both, for the first time, were not within her reach.

The lightning came down.

A white column of fire.

Someone put himself between her and it.

"LYSANDER—"

The world went white.

The thunderclap shook the air out of her chest.

When she blinked through the after-image, Lysander was standing in front of her, his sword planted in the obsidian to keep himself upright. Smoke was coming off his mechanical arm. The brass was blackened. Where the bolt had struck, the metal had split. Her insides twisted.

Then his knees went.

"Lysander!"

She got under him before he hit the ground. His weight nearly took her with him. She lowered him as gently as she could. His breathing was shallow. His skin was branched with dark lines, like a path of lightning that had reached him through the brass.

"You idiot. Why would you—"

"Wanted to see if the new arm could take it."

"That's not funny."

"It's a little funny."

He coughed. There was blood in it. His good hand came up and found her cheek and stayed there, cold against her skin. The fingers that had been steady against her jaw the night before were not steady now. The promise from the night before flashed through her head.

"Witchling." His voice was thin. "If I don't — you finish this. You walk out. You find your sister. Promise me."

She pressed her forehead against his. The skin was cold; hers was hot.

"All right."

"All right," he echoed.

Vinea's laugh came down on them. "How touching." The daemon raised his claws. "Now you both die."

She spat blood at him.

Idonea was a single bruise. Her skin had opened in too many places to count. The blood was running over her hands faster than she could close any of it. There was no sign of Nellith anywhere. Vinea was where she'd to keep her focus.

She caught a flicker of scales in the chaos, Lance, banking hard. A moment later he was back at her shoulder, her cracked frames hooked in his jaw. He set them into her palm with the precision of a creature who'd been watching her search for them every morning since Draugaros.

She jammed them crookedly onto her face. The left lens was cracked, but it was enough.

She cut her palm with her dagger and let the blood fountain. She let it soak into the obsidian.

The daemon plane answered.

Current. Eitr. A third thing darker beneath them both, older, kin to her on this plane in a way she'd not asked to be kin.

Her hands shook, eyes slit, nails lengthened.

"No," Lysander rasped, his hand tightening on her wrist. "Idonea — don't."