City of Spells (Into the Crooked Place #2) - Alexandra Christo Page 0,45
mingled with the blood, sprinkling across the wound like trick dust. She wondered if he would ever get that out, or if it would embed inside of him forever. Little pieces of the dead shores and their ghostly magic, waiting for the day they would return to this hallowed ground.
“Arjun,” Karam said again.
He looked up at her and shook his head. “She can’t do this,” he said. The tears dripped to his neck. “She can’t leave me like this. She can’t just go.”
Karam reached up an unsteady hand and placed it on his shoulder.
The world around them was so quiet.
“I’m here,” she said. “Arjun, it will be okay.”
“No.”
His voice was a breath in the night.
Arjun shook his head, his tears mixing with the blood on Asees’s hand.
“Nothing is okay. She’s gone, Karam.”
He looked around the beach, at the bodies of his Kin, scattered among the headstones. So many graves.
“They’re all gone.”
Karam couldn’t move.
Even as the tears crawled down her own face, as hot as her rage, she could not speak or move her hand from his shoulder.
She was just still.
Asees was not coming back.
The six of their Kin that Karam had convinced to come here would never return to their families.
Nolan, she thought.
He had led them into a trap. Ashwood’s people weren’t guarding Wesley. They were waiting, for Karam and whoever else dared to come.
It was an ambush and if Nolan had told Ashwood where they would go looking for Wesley, then that meant he had told Ashwood where to go looking for them.
The forest.
Saxony.
Tavia.
Nobody was safe.
There was a small grunt from behind Karam and she slowly turned her head to follow the noise. Her limbs felt heavy; everything about the world was off balance.
It took her a few seconds to make sense of it, but the man by her feet, who Karam had sliced across the neck, was still alive.
He was bleeding enough to turn the sand red, but he was still breathing, which was more than she could say for Asees.
Karam hated him for surviving.
How dare he cling to life when Asees could not?
Arjun gently placed Asees’s head back to the sand and looked at the man groaning beside them. He wiped a hand across his face to smear away the tears.
“We have to perform an extraction,” Arjun said. His voice was as small as a child’s. “Before he dies. We must see if he knows anything.”
Karam nodded. She said nothing, but squeezed Arjun’s shoulder and tried to hold back any more of her own tears.
She would be strong for him.
For her friend, for her brother, for the warrior boy who needed her now more than ever.
Arjun turned the man onto his back and without ceremony or warning, he pressed his hands on either side of the Crafter’s temples and began.
Karam had only ever seen an extraction once before, when Saxony had performed it on the consort back in Creije, all those months ago, to find out where Ashwood was hiding.
Saxony had always said extractions were dark magic, because the worst kind of spells were the ones that took over people’s minds and sought to ravage their thoughts. It was meant to be agonizing for the victim—if they even survived—and it was meant to bring bad luck to the Crafter who performed it, cursing their entire Kin.
The magic had been outlawed for so long, but these were times of war and they were all already so cursed that it hardly seemed to matter anymore.
Arjun’s hand shot out to Karam’s, but he kept the other on the man’s temple, not breaking the connection.
“He’s an Intuitcrafter,” Arjun said.
The same as Zekia.
The same as Wesley.
Intuitcrafters could see into all the futures of the world, all the possibilities of what was to come and what had already been.
“He’ll die once I break the connection,” Arjun said. “But you need to see this.”
“You want me to go inside his mind?”
“You must see,” Arjun urged, his hand still stretched out. “Give me your hand.”
Karam threaded her fingers quickly through his.
The vision did not flow through her. It did not coat her mind like a warm blanket or ease into her sight.
It hit her like a thousand fists.
At first Karam could make out nothing but flashing images and voices so loud that they drilled into her skull. The world was a mess of colors and sound, and no matter how hard Karam tried, she couldn’t make sense of it.
She just knew she didn’t belong in this place and the place knew it too.