Page 167 of Rising Out of the Darkness
Inhaling my breath too sharply, I choked on my own saliva, causing tears to spring from my eyes.Oh, gods.
“Gods cannot save you now. Just me, love.Now, would you like to try that again?”
I nodded silently.“Only you, always you.”
“That’s right, Wildfire, you’re mine. Today, tomorrow… forever.”
A smirk spread across my face, and fire blossomed straight down to my core. Declan snorted aloud, knowing exactly how he affected me. Hells.
“You’re mind-speaking, aren’t you?” Clara’s face lit up.
“Umm, yes. It’s new.” I shrugged sheepishly.
“Well, thank all five gods it’s in your heads and we don’t have to hear it.” She tugged my arm. “Come on, Light Phoenix, we’ve got work to do.”
“Here, eat this.” Clara shoved a strawberry pastry in my face. “You look so pale, Lena. I think we should pause taking blood from you, Bri, and Declan for a few days, let you all replenish.”
“No.” I stared down at my bandaged fingers and then rubbed the dizziness away from my forehead. “We’ll be okay. I just need to remember to eat more.”
Clara placed her hands on her hips and shot me with a scowl. She knew we needed Empath blood for the elixirs, but she wasn’t happy about the toll it was taking on us. “Alright then, let’s test this out one more time.”
Blessedly, while everyone had been searching for Clara in the castle, Eloise had snagged her satchel from her room. Inside was Lenora’s list of ingredients and notes, Clara’s research notebook, as well as samples of bark from the gods’ tree.
Clara pulled a piece of the bark on the wooden counter between us, and we both held our breath as she dropped the elixir onto it. The violet liquid sizzled as it contacted the bark.
“Well, that’s new.” Clara’s eyebrows rose.
I swallowed as the darkness that tinged the bark began to fade away. Clara’s hand shot over her mouth and she began jumping up and down in excitement. “This is it! We’ve done it, Lena!”
My heart thundered against my chest as she used her arm to clear a space on our messy workstation and threw her notebook wide open.
“Argh!” she huffed, ruffling through the pages. “I should have made this connection before. Gods, how daft I’ve been.”
“Clara, what are you talking about?”
“Alastor. Fucking Alastor. He had me study different types of elixirs for relaxation, calming, dulling the mind. He said it was to help him sleep, but I think he found a way to use it to curse the land, and maybe it’s even part of the curse that has a hold of Declan.”
Stunned, I sat on the stool next to her as her fingers ran over the words on the page. “Ah ha!” She rushed over to the herbs, picked a few I couldn’t see and crushed them between her fingers before placing them in a bowl and pouring some of our elixir on top.
Once again it sizzled inside, but this time instead of violet, it turned into a deep mahogany.
“He’d often have bandaged fingertips,” she breathed. She poured the liquid into a vial and sealed it with a cork as she handed it to me.
“What do you mean?”
“I gave him tonics for warts, remember? I’m beginning to think he was pricking his fingers to use blood magic…and I think that’s what’s been happening to the land, and maybe even the sickness that spread to those farmers. The kind of curse that he uses on Declan takes a long-drawn-out ritual. It’s very similar to Ascension and involves giving your blood back to the soil.”
Her fingers scanned over the notes in her book before walked back towards me and extending her palm out. “Give me back Declan’s elixir, let me add one thing.”
I watched her crush a mixture of herbs, then sprinkled them into the vial. “Let’s see if this addition will help.”
I was still reeling from all the information about Alastor and the curse when she handed me back the vial, and I squeezed it securely in my hand.
“Let’s go find someone to test the elixir for the suppression dynamis on, then you can have Declan try this one.”
Before I could speak, she had latched onto my arm and tugged me out the door.
Chapter 69
