Page 54 of Rose and Shadows
“Fuck,” I ground out.
I had to stop the spell and start it again.
Something was wrong.
My will was absolute. I should have been able to control it. What the fuck was happening?
That nausea from earlier rose up and it took way too much effort to push it down.
Oh my God.Was that what was screwing with the spell? Something about this incessant nausea I’d been experiencing recently? Was it more than a trauma response, more than the fallout of everything?
I tried again.
The tendrils sped up, nearing me all too quickly.
Even as I moved to stop the spell, nothing happened, no spark of my power, of any of my abilities.
I couldn’t even tell at this juncture whether it was something currently deficient within me, or if it was the black magic taking greater control. The latter shouldn’t be possible—not to that extent and not under these specific circumstances.
Trying to remain levelheaded and quell my rapidly rising panic became meaningless.
The tendrils were a hair’s breadth away from making contact, from seeping into my blood and overriding my control.
And then crimson magic erupted, ripping right through the circle.
My frost was sucked up, like it had never been, like some sort of magical vacuum.
Victor’s blood turned to ashes.
And the black tendrils stilled, then shrieked, before dematerializing right before my eyes.
My shadows retreated.
My wounds healed instantly.
And then I was looking up into the face of Sylas.
His crimson magic was flaming wildly on both palms, his eyes blazing with it, his hooded leather coat billowing behind him from the force of all that power.
“That line you were concerned about crossing when tapping into your darker predilections?” He snuffed out his power and lowered his palms. “You just crossed it.” Frost emanated from his mouth—he’d absorbed my frost directly into himself, just like he’d done several times before for me when I hadn’t been in great control of my abilities, when emotion had influenced them.
But that wasn’t the case now.
I was in control. In fact, I’d mastered fusing both aspects of my hybridized nature so well. What had just happened didn’t make sense. And it didn’t negate that.
“You don’t understand,” I rasped, trying to recover myself after how close that had come to going south. “That wasn’t… something was impacting… I mean—”
“You invoked black magic,” he rumbled.
It wasn’t about the control issue he’d walked in on at all. He wasn’t questioning that, he was giving me the respect I deserved in recognizing how well I’d been doing with it. It was about the dangerous lengths I’d been willing to go to.
“I had to.”
“Acting out of desperation isn’t going to help the situation.”
“It will bring him back!” I snapped, pushing back to my feet.
“You don’t know that for certain. With any spell, or even any strategy, complications abound, things you can’t foresee.”
