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He strode out through the center of the gathered crowd. She could feel the anxiety dripping from his shoulders. The need to impress. The weight of everything he carried. Ren felt each of these emotions as if they were her own. Deep and nestled. It brought out an unexpected sympathy that she forced herself to set aside, something to be examined later, because until now she’d never felt this much empathy for him.
At his command the musicians departed from the instrument. She saw the way he grinned expectantly at the crowd. She didn’t waste time watching him perform the magic again.
They had a plan. All she needed to do was execute that plan.
She broke free of Timmons’s grasp on her arm. There was resistance. Moving against what had happened in the memory felt like trudging through the muck and mire of a swamp. Ren forged a path forward, though. She kept walking through the barely remembered crowd until Theo finally noticed her.
His drowning eyes lit with understanding. “Ren?”
“Come with me, Theo.”
Both of them turned, looking around the sea of faces. Some were obscured. Not important enough to have carved a place in either of their memories of what had happened that night. Theo spotted their target first.
He sat on the railing, feet dangling. His collar was a little loose. A result of his time with Timmons, Ren knew. His eyes were wide and watchful. No doubt he was seeing more of the magic in the air around them, brightened by the breath he’d enjoyed earlier that night. Clyde Winters looked like he didn’t have a care in the world.
She remembered what Timmons had said. That she’d been the last good thing for him. Watching him now, Ren saw that was true. He looked completely at ease. A boy who had no idea he was about to be burned from the inside out by his own magic the next day. They took up their stances and the memory flickered strangely.
This was the answer to the riddle that had been bothering Ren.
Theo couldn’t recall a shadow in his vision. Not like the creeping presence in their dreams. It was such a strange inconsistency. Ren had finally realized that the revenant didn’t visit this memory the way he’d visited Cora’s or her own, because he already existed here. He was already invited. The creature—hiding in the depths of the real Clyde—watched them approach. Ren saw the eyes widen slightly. Clyde’s hands rose in a defensive gesture.
It wasn’t like changing the past. This was memory, wielded as a weapon. It was the paralytic that the revenant had been using to bind their physical bodies. Ren knew if they could be subjected to such magic, the reverse was true. The monstrous version of Clyde finally understood it had made a mistake. Predator became prey.
In the memory Clyde had no dark magic to fight back with.
In the memory he was just a boy at a party.
Ren and Theo both raised their wands.
The bridge blinked back into existence.
Only a few seconds of real time had passed.
Clyde was now frozen in place. He’d managed to leap from the railing and had approached them with every intention of sucking the marrow from their precious bones. Their combined magic had dropped him to a knee. He stared at the space between them with mindless dedication. It had worked. The chain spell’s paralytic was reversed. Occupied in that other world, he was absent in this one.
Spells lit the tips of their wands.
“Now,” Ren grunted. “Now we finish him.”
Both of them unleashed fire spells at the same time. Their bright bolts struck his motionless chest. Ren cast another. Theo did too. By the time the pain shocked Clyde back to the present, it was already too late. Their magic bore down on him, burning away flesh, digging deeper and deeper until they could see the bright bones under his skin. Neither of them stopped casting until the creature’s screams fell silent. The revenant who’d chased them across a mountain chain—who’d killed their friends—was reduced to ash and bone. Ren’s chest heaved.
“We did it.”
She was so relieved that she almost didn’t see the other Mackie brother. He angled straight for Theo, who was turned slightly away, unaware of what was coming. No spells could work quickly enough. Ren met his lunge with one of her own. Her lowered shoulder struck the attacker’s hip. It swung him off course slightly, and the knife that was about to plunge into Theo’s chest bit down into his lower shoulder instead.
He let loose a scream as the surviving Mackie seized his collar, reared back, and plunged the knife toward Theo’s stomach. Ren raised her horseshoe wand.
The Mackie brothers were not twins, but they died exactly the same way. Her spell spun him away from Theo with violent force. Up over the side of the bridge. There was a trailing scream and a distant crash, and then Ren dropped to her knees beside Theo. His skin looked like pale marble. Blood poured from two different wounds. A deep cut just under his right shoulder blade and a gut wound that looked slightly shallower. Her spell had kept Mackie from plunging his knife fully in, but the blood was still flowing far too fast for her to staunch it without magic. Tears streaked down Theo’s dirt-smeared chin. He let out a pathetic moan.
“Ren. Help me. Ren, it hurts so much.”
A string of images played through Ren’s mind. One of the roads she’d imagined as they walked up to the bridge. The darkest possibility. It was second nature for Ren to prepare for every possibility. She knew if Theo died, she could still return home. They had bonded together. She could tell House Brood that the two of them had married in secret. The Broods would push back, but she could claim widowship—and eventually claim his inheritance. No witness would be able to counter her claim, because no one else had survived this journey through the woods. It would be the fastest route toward money and power. Far faster than any other path available to her…
But then Theo moaned again.
Some internal mechanism took control of her. The bond between them—that unfamiliar magic—flexed its newly forming muscles. She felt seized by something far larger than herself. A force that was equal parts pity and mercy and logic. She could not bear the thought of letting Theo die. Her mind shifted back into survival mode.
“Spells. I need to think. What spells?”
