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“I’m about to be dangerous too.”
He didn’t argue further.
We reached the clearing and horror made a vise of my lungs, squeezing out a breathless denial. Montgomery had Derrick prone, held aloft by vines the same way Delilah had been, the same way he’d intended for Brock. And as with Mariana, the sluaghna’s body was ensconced in tubular vines coiled up his torso. His clawed fingers dug into Derrick’s skull, and I could see the strain on Derrick’s face, the way he was gritting his teeth, eyes shut to the world.
“Can you do the thing with the vines again?” I whispered to Cade. “Take out its water?”
“There are a lot more vines here. It’s going to take me a minute to find the right root system.”
Montgomery tilted back his head and opened his mouth, the skin around his face stretching as though it were puddy or clay.
“We don’t have a minute,” I said.
Cade gripped my shoulder, forcing me to look away from the scene. “You’re an empath, Nora. A wizard of the mind. Go over there and stall for as much time as you can give me.”
Releasing me, he knelt and shoved his fingers into the ground, his eyes going full twilight again and for a lost second, I stared at him. His shoulders were tense, his mouth a grim line. A frightened voice in my head urged me to run, to come to my senses. I was not dangerous, no matter what I tried to tell myself.
These were powers beyond me.
Fight or flight, Nora Grayson. What exactly are you made of?
I wasn’t certain whose voice that was anymore: mother, Nana Bess, maybe father. It didn’t matter.
A guttural sound tore from Derrick. The blue light was passing from the sluaghna’s mouth, hovering in the air.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I sprinted toward Derrick.
Setting the place on fire wouldn’t work, I knew that. Clawing out Montgomery’s eyes at this point wouldn’t work either. And Maker help me if I knew what sort of ramifications would come of disrupting a rune this deep into a ritual. I could kill us all with the backlash of power.
But Cade was right.
I was a wizard and an empath.
Skidding to a stop before the altar, I reached and grabbed Derrick’s arm. His terror met my own, but I let down all the barriers anyway. There was no concentrating on my shoes to block him out, no little song to hum in comfort until the feelings passed. We had to face them together, had to share them.
Opening my eyes to the aether, I saw tendrils of brackish green coiling all through Derrick. I squinted, looking deeper. This was territory I’d only visited in school. Counseling never required I invade a person’s mind for answers, and truly, mucking around in a person’s innermost self was dangerous.
Here Derrick had no choice. His mind was laid bare, his emotions coursing through me at a steady, frightening pace. His were the blue pathways, the thin, spidery branches weaving through his mind and heart. All was connected in a complicated matrix, and I hesitated.
If I wasn’t delicate here, I could break this man forever.
Where the sluaghna’s talons dug into Derrick’s scalp, those brackish tendrils began to break apart into inch-long, squirming pieces. I swallowed back a gasp. They were little worms, crawling, seeking, inching their way through Derrick and for a horrified moment I realized they were feeding. They tangled with Derrick’s mind, nibbling away at him like caterpillars with a leaf.
Soon, they would hollow him out and there would be space enough for Montgomery to inhabit. My stomach clenched. This was how Delilah had died. One small bit of herself at a time.
I had to disentangle them somehow, to purge the worms from Derrick’s mind.
He was fighting, I could feel it. Memories he fought to keep flashed through me; his father’s grinning face the day he’d come home with an excellent report from school; his mother laughing at something in the kitchen of their old home; the odd smell of ozone in the house while he hid under the bed and listened to the fight outside his room.
One by one the memories started to fray, and he lost the sound of his mother’s laughter, the image of his father’s face.
“No,” I whispered. “Fight it.”
But he was fighting. He was doing all he could.
With a shaky breath, not even sure I understood what I was about to do, I reached for one of the worms and pinched it between my thumb and forefinger. It was surprisingly soft, with fine little hairs that brushed against my skin. It let out a surprised squeak, almost like that of a mouse, and disintegrated to dust beneath my fingers.
