Page 69

Don’t get distracted, the voice whispered. It’s all right there. Everything you want. Everything you lost. Nothing else matters.

Orpheus swallowed, feeling dizzy. “Gwen, you shouldn’t trust me.”

She frowned. “Why not?”

“I’m the enemy.” It was a warning as much as it was a confession.

Except Gwen held his eyes and said, “No, you’re not.”

He broke eye contact, staring down at his hands and thinking of all the blood on them. The hermits and those who he had never touched, never seen. The people he’d hurt without meaning to. The people he’d have hurt anyway, if it meant retaining—regaining—his magic.

It’s your survival or theirs, the voice murmured. What makes their lives more valuable than yours? You’re only alive because they think you can help.

The surface of his skin tingled, a rush of sensation that made him feel sick.

The truth was, if he didn’t keep her close, he’d be all out of leverage.

“Every spell starts with a defined source,” he said so softly he nearly didn’t realize he’d spoken.

“Oh,” Gwen breathed. “Oh!”

“Pass me that lantern.”

Gwen sidled up close, lantern held out. Orpheus swallowed and pointed at one particular sigil. “This is the spell’s source sigil, which we no longer have access to.”

“How do you know?”

“Because this symbol here” —he tapped a small swirl that resembled a crude interpretation of a whirlpool, or a portal— “is making a request of a place far, far away from here.”

“Hell?” Gwen breathed, meeting his eyes.

“Yes. Hell. Though that’s not what the symbol means, it simply means elsewhere, which could be as far as a mile, or it could be five thousand. It all depends on the caster’s intent. Since this lantern is dead, we can make a best guess that they meant Hell.”

He pulled a long silver needle from the roll of tools Atticus left, thumb pressing into its nib with a gentle pressure. His fingers ached, but he was careful, cradling the lantern near the light before placing the tip of the needle against its base.

“Have you ever worked with quicksilver?”

Gwen shook her head, eyes a hungry fire. Orpheus shifted.

“I’ll teach you how to make it another time. For now, we can use this needle. Would you light another flame, please?”

Without hesitation, Gwen created a fireball. Smaller than the first, it rolled around her palm in a tight circle. Still, she offered it to Orpheus like it was everything precious in the world, and in that, he couldn’t refute her.

“Keep it,” he said, ignoring how his voice broke. “I only need it for this.”

He dipped the tip of the needle into the flame, watched the silver spark and then bubble, that same strange chemical reaction he’d taken for granted for so many years. He drew the new symbol atop the first, overwriting the command to search out a source with a direct path towards somewhere much closer. The symbol for self was a simple stroke of a line through the center of the portal, closing the open end in with an arrow up.

The rest of the spell would work just fine.

“You may place the flame inside the lantern now.”

“Wait.” Gwen yanked her Netherflame close, as if Orpheus had already made a move to steal it. “That’s it? That’s all?” Gwen’s voice was high enough to betray her disbelief. “What did you do?”

“Simply changed the source from elsewhere, to within itself.”

“The symbols are that similar?”

Not always, but… “They can be, if that’s what you want.”