Shadow Hunt

I noticed with grim satisfaction that Petra Corbett was lying on the ground, unmoving. I couldn’t tell from a distance, but I was pretty sure she was dead. I didn’t even care how it had happened. Dashiell, meanwhile, had stopped fighting Aldric long enough to help Hayne, who was holding on to the reins of one of the hellhest as it gnashed its teeth at Kirsten. The creature finally settled down, and Dashiell immediately turned back toward Aldric, who was snarling and kicking at his hellhest, trying to head under the bridge and escape in the other direction. I watched Will step into his path and then—

“Scarlett?” Jesse had dropped down by my side, his guns back in their holsters. Why did he sound so worried? “You’re bleeding, sweetheart.”

I looked down at myself, confused. I hadn’t been shot—well, not anywhere the vest didn’t protect me. Then a couple of bright red drops hit my shirt, and I realized they came from my nose.

“I called Sashi, she said it’s high blood pressure—if you don’t calm down, you could lose the baby,” he said.

I felt the pressure on my radius ease up some more, but I wasn’t sure how much longer I could hold it anyway. That was too much to say out loud at the moment, though, so I held up a finger to Jesse and took stock of my radius. The bargests and hellhest were still buzzing at me, but only four of the Furious Host remained.

I zeroed in on Aldric. Will had done something to cause Aldric’s hellhest to rear up, and I watched Aldric slide off the hellhest’s back, landing on his feet with a nimbleness that seemed strange for a man his age. Then he pulled and brandished the sword, Durendal, and I suspected it was helping him somehow, or maybe protecting him.

No, not the sword. There was something else on Aldric’s person. The thing I’d sensed earlier.

The scroll.

I looked at Jesse, who bent close to hear me. “Aldric has the scroll on him,” I whispered. “It didn’t short out, but I think I could destroy it.”

He nodded and stood up, running toward Aldric. I looked at Shadow. “Help him?”

She looked from me to the other bargests surrounding me, and I could see her decide she needed to stay and keep them in line, just in case their loyalty to her wasn’t absolute. Shit.

Jesse pulled one of his guns and aimed it at Aldric, but the shot hit him in the back of the Kevlar. Aldric snarled and swung around to face Jesse, which left Will an opening to jump on his back, choking him. Aldric roared and swung the sword up, but I could practically see him decide not to swing it—he would risk burying the magic blade in his own shoulder. While he was distracted, Jesse tried to shoot him in the head, and when Aldric ducked the blow, Jesse shot him in the leg instead. It collapsed, causing the Luparii leader to go down in a tumble, with Will still clinging to his back. Jesse had been smart enough to stop a good fifteen feet from them, where Aldric couldn’t swing the sword, but that meant he couldn’t get in another shot without possibly hitting Will. I stood up and staggered closer to them, pulling a knife out of my belt.

Even on the ground, Aldric would not let go of the sword. He rolled sideways and swung it at Will, who instinctively put up his left hand to protect his head—and the blade sliced clean through his forearm, just below the elbow. Will’s hand dropped with a meaty sound. He cried out in pain and felt back on his butt, cradling the stump.

“No!” I bellowed. Suddenly, the pressure of keeping everyone in my radius seemed to lift, as my range exploded outward with my emotions. Kirsten’s humans-go-away spells began popping all around us, and a bunch of werewolves turned human again. I didn’t even notice. I was trying to crawl toward Will.

Jesse turned to look at me when I yelled, and behind him I saw Aldric’s face light up with an idea. He might be losing this battle, but he could at least take out Will—and possibly run away in the chaos.

“You. Will. Not,” I screamed, and without any thought at all, I raised my right arm and pointed the flat palm at Aldric.

I was already really in tune with my radius, and I immediately felt the buzz of his magic—not just the Luparii witch powers, but the concentrated magic of the Furious Host that was currently possessing him. Fairy magic, quite possibly. I studied that magic for one heartbeat, because it was big and scary and nothing I’d ever played with before, and then I pulled on it. I called it toward me.

This was more or less what I’d done each of the times I’d “cured” someone of being a vampire or werewolf. Usually I called it into me and then let it dissolve away, like sand through my fingers, but this time the magic was too strong, too big. I wrestled with it for a moment, trying to let go of it, but it was like letting go of something you’d accidentally superglued to your hands. I couldn’t stop feeling, tasting, the Wild Hunt magic, and it was twisted and wrong, an intricate structure built on the corpses of sacrifices. But I couldn’t let go.

My body started to shake, and I vomited green-tasting . . . something.

Then there was a tearing, and everything went still. The last thing I saw was Jesse standing over me, holding two pieces of torn parchment paper.

Chapter 47

“Shh! I think she’s waking up.”

“Scarlett? Sweetheart?”

I felt feverish, but a cool hand smoothed sticky hair off my forehead. I caught a smell of Armani cologne and oranges and felt myself smiling. Jesse.

My eyes opened, and I processed the most immediate and obvious new information: hospital room. I was in a fairly plush private room—someone had obviously pulled strings—with Jesse in a chair on one side of the bed, holding my right hand. There was an IV in the other one. Sashi stood on the left side. She looked exhausted, her hair mussed, her clothes wrinkled. The first time I’d cured someone of magic, I’d lost my powers for a few weeks, but to my surprise, I could feel Sashi in my radius.

Holy shit. I was getting stronger.

Although it really didn’t feel like it at the moment.

“Hello again,” Sashi said when she saw me looking.

“You came back?” I croaked, in a voice that had obviously not been used for a while.

She smiled. “I never left. When Jesse called the night of the fight, I was at a hotel in Burbank, crying my eyes out. Didn’t want to fly home like that.”

It started coming back to me. I’d sent Will out to talk to Sashi.

Will.

I tried to sit up, but I didn’t do more than lift my head an inch, and even that was exhausting. “Will?” I asked instead.

A peculiar look crossed her face. “He’s alive,” she said.

I looked at Jesse. “The baby?”

“Also alive,” he assured me, and I breathed out a sigh, my numb body somehow filling with relief. “You had a seizure in the riverbed, and by the time we got you to a hospital, you had a pretty serious fever. The doctors were worried,” Jesse added. “But they’ve been giving you fluids around the clock.”

My eyes drifted to the IV in my left arm.

“They did an ultrasound about two hours ago, and the heartbeat was going strong,” Sashi put in.

“You guys heard the heartbeat?”

Jesse grinned. “It was amazing. Fast, like a tiny locomotive.”

I smiled, then their words caught up with me. Sashi had said the night of the fight. That was late Sunday night. “What day is it?”

“Tuesday afternoon,” Jesse said. “It’s . . . well, there’s a lot to catch you up on.”

Sashi checked her watch. “I should get back to Will’s room.”

“He’s here? In the hospital?” My brow furrowed. Werewolves didn’t go to the hospital. They didn’t need to, for one thing, and for another, they’d be identified as medical anomalies. “Why?”

She glanced at Jesse. “Scar,” he said gently, “when Aldric was going to kill Will, you took his magic.”

“Yeah . . .” I sort of remembered that part.

“Will was kneeling just behind him. You took his magic, too.”

I blinked at him for a long moment. I’d . . . what?

My first thought was that “curing” Will would prevent him from ever being able to grow his arm back. And that was on me. Tears pricked my eyes. “I’m so sorry!” I wailed. “I didn’t mean to!”