Kallia neared her hospital bed, her head pounding even harder. The girl’s face tattoos—metallic feathers dusting across her cheek—had stilled and lost their luster over pale skin. The magicians, Kallia remembered their names briefly. Soloce and Lamarre. A bespectacled woman had been hovering by their beds, taking notes when Kallia, Demarco, and Aaros arrived. Her shrewd stare latched on Kallia, with a marveling sort of recognition that disappeared as Demarco demanded details of what happened.
The magicians had all been with their mentors in the Alastor Place, enjoying a few drinks on stage, when the contestants just dropped to the floor. Around the same time a circus performer collapsed in her tent.
Not dead; unresponsive.
“Was it poison?” Daron murmured.
“That was the first suspicion, given their recent activities,” the doctor supplied, her voice gruff and hair wild and in her face as if she’d spent the day running to and from chaos. She lifted one of the men’s hands, watching it fall limply before making a note. “But how do we explain the other victim? And how are the other fellows who’d been passing the same bottle around still on their feet?”
“Magic gone awry?” Aaros suggested.
“Didn’t seem like these gents were practicing any tricks.” The doctor pushed up the thick, tinted spectacles that took up half her face. “Obviously competition brings out the beasts in most people, but something strange is at work here. Each of them had this clutched in their hands.”
She showed them a crumpled piece of paper, bearing a single line of words:
Three of Mind
“Can you make anything of it?”
Kallia wrung her fingers into a tangled clump. Aaros and Demarco appeared just as perplexed. They were dots with no connection, and only she could see a possible link between them. A line marked in blood.
Jack. The stabbing beat of her heart knew he was behind this.
Kallia stilled her fingers, opening her palms as if in offering. “Do you mind if I try?”
The doctor lifted her brow. “To do what, exactly?”
“Reach inside and see if I can wake them. Or at least find out what’s wrong?”
Invasive magic, bordering on manipulation. Every instinct in her recoiled at the suggestion. But what choice was there, other than to watch these three rest until they withered away?
As the doctor pondered, probably debating the ethics of it, Kallia felt a nudge at her elbow. “You’re sure you want to?” Demarco whispered. “After today?”
It was clear the doctor heard, from the curious cock of her head. Aaros, too. Kallia’s cheeks heated as she recalled it in flashes. A force of light, falling into his arms before being laid on the ground. A surge of magic, unlike anything she’d ever felt. Remembering it, the weariness returned. A heaviness that still hadn’t left her bones entirely.
“What use is power if you don’t use it to help others?” Kallia pressed forward, ignoring his disapproving silence. Magic of the mind was not easy. The kind she’d performed on the second show night had been much more difficult without direct contact to the audience’s minds. With touch, however, it became all too simple to open doors.
When the doctor didn’t stop her—merely scribbling notes behind the shield of the clipboard as if for plausible deniability—Kallia neared Juno’s bed. She flexed out her hands, crowning them against the girl’s temples. Skin still warm, but not entirely alive. An unnatural texture hovering between life and death.
Seeking connection was the trick. It was how Jack reached inside her mind, her memories, while she could never get a clear read on him. She had been too trusting, not guarded in the way she needed to be with him.
Juno’s guards were down, as well.
As soon as Kallia’s fingertips pressed, the room around her vanished. Blackened.
Iced.
A dark expanse surrounded her, running jagged with light and rapid like a flickering flame across the walls. The images blurry, the sensations cold as her first step into Glorian. Unforgivable. Like how a curse would feel, if one could touch it.
Every part of her shivered as the light settled ahead in the darkness, to a line of silhouettes in the distance.
A group of shadows, walking toward her. Their pace was languid, slow.
Almost.
Almost.
Almost.
The voice slithered. It pierced her with a familiarity she suddenly couldn’t recall. In vain, she tried to run from it, to sever the connection. But there was nowhere to run in the dark, nowhere to hide. A sickness filled her as they loomed ever closer, terrors faceless and formless as the