Page 22 of The Grip of Death
“We can’t just unplug the damn thing,” Preston said, his voice trembling even as he tried his hardest to stay calm. “It’s connected to the spire, taking extra energy from the sun. We fiddle with it and it might blow.”
“Just fucking do something,” someone shrieked. I couldn’t make out who had said it in the chaos, but they had the right idea.
I approached the arcane engine, grimacing as sparks and rays of pure magic slashed at my skin. I walked onward, trusting in my prismatic talent to spare me from the worst of the damage. I had to do something. Anything. Xander was in excruciating pain, his eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming down his face, his mouth open, jaw strained.
And still I looked on stupidly, not knowing what I could say or do. Hubris. That was all it was, artificers pushing too hard and too far, never truly understanding the intricacies of arcane essence, endangering others in the process. My own fiancé, the love of my life.
Disabling the engine sounded like the simplest thing to do, except that I still didn’t know how badly Xander would be impacted by the sudden disruption in the arcane circuit. I gritted my teeth as I took the last few steps to the control panel, approaching the dais even as shards of ice and jagged rock shredded my skin.
We were so excited — too excited to create and complete the first artificing project the Black Market had seen in too long a time. And yet we hadn’t bothered with the most fundamental of precautions. Did Mom and Dad ever document any of the dangers? Surely they must have tested this thing inside and out — something Preston and Giuseppe and I had apparently failed to properly do.
My fist clenched as I reached Xander at the control panel, my bleeding skin yearning for the Gauntlet’s protection. And its destructive power, too. I’d left it at home, didn’t once think that I’d need it. A single Blast or Break would have been all it took to stop this. A destroyed arcane engine we could put back together again. Xander — gods, I couldn’t fathom it. I couldn’t risk it.
Damn the engine, damn the art of artifice, damn it all to the deepest hells. We could smash the machine, leave it in smithereens on the ground, forgotten, never to be rebuilt again. Maybe we never should have rebuilt the Halls of Making to begin with. Standing barely a foot away from Xander, my hands hovering so close by, aching to do something, to touch him despite the danger, I whispered.
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Cut the circuit!” Niko screamed. He lifted his hand, preparing to cast a spell. “If you won’t break this thing to stop it, I will.”
Lobelia flung her arm across his body, blocking the way. “No! The shock would kill him.” She turned her gaze on Xander, and then on me, her eyes reddened and wet. “Ripping him away won’t help. He has to burn out his essence.”
Her mouth pulsed open and shut, like she’d meant to say more. “He has to suffer” seemed like the only thing to fill in the blanks.
All that time and energy I’d put into keeping Xander far away and safe from Incandescence, and here I was snuffing his soul out with my stupid toy. All those obstacles we encountered rebuilding the Halls of Making, all these challenges — maybe there was a reason. We should have left the past in the dust. Should have left it in the dirt. I hadn’t helped or saved Xander at all. I only made his candle burn out faster.
“Jack,” he said, his voice trembling. “I think I’m dying.”
My heart twinged from the pain of it. Damn the consequences. If Xander had to suffer, then the least I could do was suffer with him. I drew closer, gritting my teeth against the searing agony of the elements, reminding myself that this was nothing compared to what he was going through, the sensation of his own arcane essence incinerating him from the inside.
I pressed my chest against his back and wrapped him in an embrace, my hands on his heart. I could barely hear the warning, protesting cries of our friends above the storm of raging fire and ice and thunder, but it didn’t matter. They could pry my lifeless body from Xander’s skin if they dared.
I hadn’t expected Xander to relax so suddenly under my touch. Not relax, exactly, more that he was leaning against me, perhaps for support. And then I understood: this was actually helping. My presence was absorbing some of the forces being released by the combined might of the arcane engine and his own magics.
But would that even be enough to keep us both unharmed? The very touch of Xander’s body against mine burned, every inch of his exposed skin blazing hot as metal, a horrific, magnetic force binding our bodies as one, this awful arcane electrocution.
My instinct was right. If anyone else had tried to touch Xander — if anyone tried to remove us from the machine now — they would perish under the elemental assault. I couldn’t fathom how Xander had survived this long at the control panel himself. His Grayhaven conditioning must have made him more resistant to the elements, a durable conduit for channeling magic.
“We taught him well,” a familiar voice whispered in my ear. My skin crawled at the sound of it, a queasy sensation rippling throughout my body as a hand settled on my shoulder.
“Hecate,” I whispered, my voice hoarse, a dry, painful rasp in my throat. Sudden anger flared through my blood. Maybe it was the chaos of it all, the madness of standing in this swirl of unbridled magic. “The explosion. The guild. Then, and now. Did you do this?”
A second hand clutched my other shoulder. Two copies of the goddess stepped forward, flanking me and Xander, each duplicate laying more hands on my body. In my peripheral vision I could see the bitter derision in her smile.
“You are so brilliant, Jackson Pryde, and yet so foolish for accusing us of an act so heinous. You lay the blame at the feet of a goddess when this contraption of yours is solely the fault of clumsy human hands.”
I grunted at the bright heat of Xander’s body in my arms, burying my forehead in his hair for the comfort I couldn’t find, that I didn’t deserve. “Then you’ve come to watch us die.”
All three copies of the goddess laughed. “You are a fool indeed, fleshling. No. We have come to stop this. We see no benefit in an incident that would slay our brightest pupil and destroy this entire dimension.”
A little too late I noticed that my body didn’t burn so badly wherever Hecate’s hands touched me. Was she absorbing the excess energy? She really had come to help. But that last part —
“Destroy the Black Market? The arcane engine? You’re exaggerating.”
I cried out as Hecate’s fingernails dug into my skin, thirty all at once, as sharp as talons.
“The problem with you humans is how you so quickly forget your history. See how proud you are with your progress, making this machine better the second time around. And yet for all you’ve achieved, you never bothered to understand why it so crucially malfunctioned the first time.”
My blood ran cold. The first time? Mom and Dad built this machine before, then. This was the very invention that had wiped out the Halls of Making. The arcane engine created the blast that killed all those artificers, flattened the guild grounds, scrambled Whitby’s memory.
