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“We could fight,” Ren said, thinking out loud. “Before they have reinforcements.”
Theo weighed that. “We’ll be on the wrong side of our own wards.”
“But they wouldn’t expect it,” she whispered. “And I doubt they know much magic.”
Theo looked thoughtful, weighing all the risks, when the larger Mackie brother stood. Both boys straightened. It was like watching a hound catch a scent. The way the fur on the ridge of its back rises and its body goes perfectly still. Both of them stared down the length of the bridge.
“What are they doing?” Ren asked.
With no other warning, they started to advance. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. They picked up speed and hit the wards at a dead sprint. The magic shoved them back at first, but they kept sprinting against the grain of those spells, their shoulders lowered like battering rams into the magic. Ren could sense their wards starting to drain. She also smelled burning flesh. The magic was searing the skin along the brothers’ knuckles and the bridges of their noses. It was inhuman for someone to resist that pain, but the Mackies didn’t even react to it.
“How is this even possible?…”
Another shove back from the barrier. Still the two brothers came. Ren was watching in horror when the first Mackie brother broke through. He came tearing across, closing the distance fast. Ren saw that his eyes were half-closed.
“Drop him,” she said.
Theo’s blast hit first. A glancing blow to the shoulder that spun the boy around. Ren’s bolt of concussive magic sent him right into the raised side of the bridge with a smack. The other brother broke through before they could turn. He learned from the first, ducking one shoulder to slip beneath Theo’s spell. Ren took aim, but he was already there, jackknifing through the air. He wrapped both arms around Theo’s waist in some kind of wrestling move. The two of them went down hard, sliding dangerously close to their flickering way candle.
Vega swooped down. The stone bird struck true, one talon seizing an exposed earlobe. The Mackie brother screamed as half of his ear ripped clean away, spattering blood. It was just enough of an opening for Theo to scramble clear on his hands and knees. And that was enough of an opening for Ren to take aim.
At such a close range, her spell hit him like a strike of lightning. Her own feet slid back from the force of it. Ren’s eyes widened as the magic launched him clear of the railing.
He went over the bridge with a scream.
She stared at the now-empty space, her heart pounding, and she noticed the one detail they’d missed. Something was scaling the grated side of the bridge. Carefully avoiding their wards. She saw its progress guided by a pair of blackened hands. Clyde was here.
The surviving brother was struggling back to his feet. His eyes fluttered open and shut in frightening sequence. Ren finally understood their bizarre charge. Clyde was controlling them the way that he’d controlled Cora. She’d said his power would keep growing, and clearly it had, if he could move these two around like pawns in battle.
Ren slid toward Theo as the monster appeared over the railing. Clyde looked more like the Clyde she remembered. Both of his eyes were bright blue. His lips had been restored to their rose red, and his skin had almost returned to a light tan color. Most of his hair shone brown, though there were a few burn marks running down the right half of his scalp. Dark bubbles of skin scaled his neck. Ren knew that all he needed now to complete his restoration was the two of them.
I am hungry. You are food.
He started to raise his hand toward them, but this time they had a plan.
“Now, Theo.”
It all happened at once.
Vega landed on her shoulder. The remaining Mackie brother half stumbled to his feet. Ren slid forward so that she was positioned slightly in front of Theo. She needed to take the first wave of the chain magic for this to work. Theo wrapped both of his arms around her neck, making sure there was skin-to-skin contact. Ren could see the research as clear as day in the back of her mind.
Physical connection adds strength to bond magic. Often, it forces spells to amplify or merge.…
Clyde’s spell hit her like a blast of death-woven air. She felt the bridge and the world rip out of her grasp as she was thrown once more into the memory.…
She found him by the bridge. It was a pretty thing, stretching halfway across to its intended partner on the other side of the canal. Her father was always busy, always moving, always talking. She loved the way he stopped dead in his tracks, though, the moment he spied her waiting. The way he set down everything in his arms to sweep her into a hug. She handed him the roll. He winked down at her. She saw the quiet pride that he felt in simply standing beside his daughter in front of all the other workers. Her final glimpse was of him walking across that bridge with the others. He held his head high. He kept his shoulders straight.
A king without a crown.
Ren sensed the dark passenger on her left. His clawed hand was set on her shoulder, drinking in her fear. Both of them watched the memory start to unravel. Her mind’s effort to erase pain that it couldn’t bear. Everything else came in ugly snapshots. Their screams tangling in the air. The sound of the earth breaking beneath them. Ren looked down and saw her father, bent wrongways in the belly of the canal. All the blood pouring out.
The shadowed figure was tightening his grip. Holding her there, until another voice sounded. It echoed in the memory unnaturally. Ren knew it sounded strange because it didn’t belong either. She looked back. In the real memory it had always been Landwin Brood who walked forward at this point. Gilded and arrogant, his face full of faux horror. But this time Theo displaced him. Landwin’s son strode forward, looking brighter than the rest of their surroundings. Golden hair the color of sunlight. Eyes like speckled forests. As he approached, the shadow at her shoulder fled.
“Come on, Ren.”
Theo took her hand.
She felt herself being drawn away by his touch. The chain magic provided a path for them, as they’d known it would. And the bond magic that linked them meant they could travel it together. Ren was swept out of her worst memory and carried downstream into Theo’s:
