Page 137 of Heart of Thieves

A pistol fires. A bullet whizzes past Nic’s face. My heart nearly stops.

“Enzo, come on!” I shout. “Pick him up!”

He blinks, then obeys without question, hoisting Nic into his arms. I stumble through the chaos, Enzo hot on my heels as Laurel battles what must be a dozen people.

We need to get as far away from her as possible. If I’m going to use Enzo’s magic to save Nic, I need to do it where she won’t be able to interfere.

I pelt into the elevator and slam my thumb against the top floor’s button. The doors slide shut, and I turn to Enzo, yanking the pendant from his neck and pressing it over Nic’s chest. Trembling, I reach for Enzo’s magic inside it that allowed me to share my heart four years ago and try to push it into Nic.

To share our heart with him, too.

His withering pulse flutters against my fingers, bringing forth a desperate hope. But the magic has grown too weak.

I push the gem harder, begging the magic to work, his heart to beat stronger, his eyes to sparkle with that starsdamned cunning charm.

“Wake up!” I sob through my teeth. “Come on!”

But Nic is nearly gone. His chest is barely rising and falling at all anymore.

“No,” Enzo whispers, voice cracking as the elevator slows to a stop. The doors slide open.

“Maybe if we get closer to the moonshard . . . ,” I gasp, dragging Enzo out into the hall and up the fire escape to the roof.

The sun is little more than a slip of orange in the sky just above the sea, almost entirely obscured by the moon.

I totter toward the brightly glowing voratium at the center of the roof. A thousand colors swim under its glassy surface.

Enzo sets Nic down next to the shard, and we press his palm to it. I hold the pendant once more to his chest, begging Enzo’s magic to bleed out from the shard, to fill Nic, to bind him to us, too.

Nothing happens.

Tears spill down my cheeks. “Why won’t it work . . . ?”

Enzo stares past me at the diminishing sun, his face ashen. The eclipse is underway, totality quickly approaching.

I blink through tears at the pendant in my hand. “What use is your magic,” I croak to Enzo, “if it can’t bring him back?”

He doesn’t move, doesn’t reply. His hands tremble, and if not for that, I might wonder if he’s dying, too.

This pendant has been Enzo’s access to my heart—the conduit through which he’s been able to draw in the soullight of my pulse, the soullight of my emotions, the soullight of my lifeblood. Why can’t it be enough for Nic as well?

I cough on a sob as something dawns on me.

If I’m a conduit, then maybe my magic is the answer here, not Enzo’s. His is weakened. It has limits. Consequences. Because it came from an unstable piece of voratium and is split between him, Laurel, Nic, and this new shard.

My mother channeled magic from the stars themselves to make the original moonshard. Could I do that too? Trembling, I toss the pendant aside and press my bare palms to Nic’s singed chest. I take a deep breath, letting my eyes fall shut, and tip my head back to the sky.

I pull myself inward and then upward, reaching, reaching, reaching. Past the cold emanating from Enzo, past the icefire in Nic.

The fear and pain in my body dissipate. The world fades as I grasp desperately upward, extending my mind as far as I can toward the distant frost of the horizon.

The further I go, the more the temperature in my bones plummets. Shivers rack through me. My teeth chatter.

And then, there it is. A gaping, frigid, endless universe at the edge of my grasp.

I take hold and pull.

It blasts through me, and my jaws slam together so hard my skull reverberates. Light rockets into me, vicious and wild. With hot tears streaming down my cheeks, I grasp the beat of it, the shape of it, the soul of it, and push it out through my palms. A torrent, a flood, a fire.