Page 22 of Captive Mate
Dor shrugged. “They’re my manacles.” He paused with his hands wrapped around them. The touch of his skin made my flesh crawl. It wasn’t even necessarily a bad flesh-crawling, but…I wanted him to stop. I couldn’t explain it. The panic welled up again, bubbling through my chest like air pockets in gelatin, slow and heavy and viscous. “And he will. What he does afterward is up to all of you to sort out.”
Dor twisted his hands oddly, his fingers working some pattern on the cuffs I couldn’t begin to follow, and they fell away.
Sensation rushed back in. The trees around me, solid pillars of ancient life, flowing dark-green so slowly the human mind couldn’t encompass their motion. Bright sparks dotting the forest in all directions, tiny bursts of life-force so delicate they could be snuffed with little more than a thought: squirrels, birds, rabbits, mice, and the pinpricks of insects of every variety. Nate, a glowing bundle of energy in a tangle of conflicting currents. Ian, with his deep-red alpha strength throwing out heat, and the other weres, weaker but similar, each with their own flavor. Fenwick and Dor were voids in my senses, present by their absence. I shied away from them instinctively, like a mosquito blown off course by the swat of a giant hand.
And Matthew. Matthew, who was guttering like a candle, his life force reduced to the smallest burgundy ember. I could feel him most of all, tugging on me, trying to pull my life into his through the spell that bound us.
I could stop it. Easily. The spell was mine, and I could control it — with the fucking manacles gone, I could cut him off like closing a window, escape the effects the spell was having on me, and let him die instantly.
Instead I dived in, chasing that faint glow, wrapping my magic around it like a shield and feeding it the slightest trickle of energy. It was like blowing a tiny stream of air into a dying fire, giving it stronger temporary life and praying for a bit of kindling to fall into place. I held that, and I stretched my senses through his body, finding the source of his imminent death.
I’d expected poison of some kind, but this was worse: it was magical in nature, and it had been created by a shaman. And not just any shaman. The same one who’d watched while Parker brutalized me. I’d have known the oily feeling of his magic anywhere, and I flinched back, the touch of it against my own magic almost more repellent than the touch of his body would have been.
But I couldn’t remove it without touching it, since magical tweezers weren’t a thing. I braced myself and reached out, feeling the contours of it. It was an insidious little spell, bound to a physical compound that must’ve been coating Tyler’s claws. I made a mental note to dissect him later, if Parker hadn’t thought to carry off the body.
I grasped one particle of the magical filth and poured power through it, calling out to all the similar energies in Matthew’s body. They coalesced, slowly at first, and then rushing through Matthew’s veins in clotting, black clumps that gathered around my magical touch like tar. I pulled, and pulled, and finally it was all there.
One last pull, one violent yank, and poison oozed visibly from the wound in Matthew’s shoulder, flowing over his arm like a venomous snake.
“What the fuck is that?” Nate whispered. “It looks — it looks like death.”
“Get it off him and incinerate it.” I kept pulling. Nate made an exaggerated moue of disgust that might have made me laugh if I hadn’t needed to concentrate so hard, focused his own power, and started to gather up the goo and compress it into a levitating ball that hovered over Matthew’s chest.
At last it was all out, all together, and Nate swooped it away, dropping it onto the dirt a few yards away with a splat.
I felt a rush of power and heat. He was doing what I’d told him, thank the gods.
I closed my eyes again and dipped back into Matthew’s energy. That ember of life was still glowing, and now I could feed it and let his body take over. My strength poured into him as I opened the floodgates and gave him what he needed.
The magic hit him like a wrecking ball, and he arched off the ground, his mouth open in a silent scream. His head rolled on the ground, dust all over his skin and redwood needles tangling in his hair. But it was working, and his wounds were closing, shrinking so quickly I could see the skin knitting together with my eyes as well as with my magical senses.
I slumped back, sitting on my feet and drawing what felt like my first breath since I’d started. What was with this overwhelming relief that made all my limbs loose and weak? Parker was gone for now, and I wasn’t dying with Matthew, bound in manacles that cut me off from the ability to save myself — but my situation wasn’t much better than it had been. Dor was still hovering nearby, poised to incapacitate me — or possibly make me glow in the dark — if I tried anything. Ian was ready to kill me. The next step would probably be trying to force me to lift the spell on Matthew, and between Dor and Nate and Ian, they might be able to.
The spell. That reminded me. I reached out along the conduit of magic binding me to Matthew and adjusted the balance of it, carefully and subtly so as not to attract Nate’s attention. When I was done, I was completely free of the effects of it: I didn’t need to be in Matthew’s proximity anymore.
But I left it so thathehad to be nearme. Because I was pretty sure that if we were separated, it wasn’t going to work out so well for me, starting with Ian being able to threaten me without Matthew’s interference and ending with being locked in that fucking basement again.
I lessened the effects on him, too, though. I didn’t need more near-misses with being mated to brighten up my life.
When I opened my eyes, Matthew’s were starting to flutter open too. Ian had dropped down on his knees by Matthew’s head and was gripping his shoulder so hard his knuckles were white, the look on his face painfully naked, relief and love in his eyes and the set of his mouth.
But Matthew’s hazy gaze found me first. His lips stretched in a wonky sort of grin, and he blinked up at me loopily. “Anyone ever tell you how beautiful you are?” he slurred.
“What the fuck?” Ian’s lip curled in disgust. “Did you scramble his brains evenmore?” He glared at me accusingly, and he was turning a dangerous shade of red.
“I had to channel most of my magic into him to save his life, and yes, it’s temporarily scrambling his brains even more,” I said, slurring a bit myself. Shit. I’d really drained myself. He’d been so close to death…I shuddered a little. The result of being low on magic, no doubt. “You’re fucking welcome.”
To my shock, Ian’s anger seemed to fade away a little. He looked down at Matthew, and then back up at me. “I still think you’re fucking scum. But thank you.”
I couldn’t help it; I started to laugh, dropping down cross-legged next to Matthew and resting my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands. It was both the best and the worst expression of gratitude I’d ever gotten, since honestly? I couldn’t remember another time someone had thanked me for anything for years and years. Maybe I hadn’t done anything worth being thanked for.
I laughed harder, and it started coming out more like sobs. The skin of my face buzzed and tingled, my fingers were numb, and I couldn’t stop laughing.
“We need to get them both to the house. He’s used too much magic, and Matthew’s still out of it.” Was that Nate’s voice? Maybe. It stretched and throbbed, like the funhouse-mirror version of sound.
Hands pulled me up, whose hands I didn’t know, and then someone pushed me through one of Dor’s weird void-spaces. I emerged in Matthew’s bedroom and someone else shoved me onto the bed, where I landed next to Matthew like a felled tree.
Chapter 9
