Chapter 166: The Wraith 2
SÉVERINE
My familiar moved before I did.
He put himself directly in the path of the wraith with a force and a certainty that I had not seen from him in a very long time, his form solidifying into something more physical than it usually occupied, and the collision between them sent both of them backward through the room in a blur of white and dark that knocked the lamp from the table and cracked the plaster on the far wall.
"She became a wraith?" His voice came through the struggle, strained with genuine effort. "I did not anticipate this. I did not think she would have the strength—"
"Run, Séverine."
He told me, but I did not care. I was already on my knees beside my grandfather.
He was against the shield I had thrown up too late, held at a slight angle by the invisible barrier, and the blood was coming fast and dark from the wound in his chest where something that should never have been removed had been removed. The heart sat on the floor beside him, and looking at it was the most wrong thing I had ever seen in my life, and I had seen and done a great many wrong things.
I picked it up.
My hands were shaking. I registered the shaking and filed it away as irrelevant information.
"I can fix this," I said, mostly to myself. "I can fix this."
I pressed the heart back into the cavity of the wound and held it there and pushed healing magic through my palms, everything I had available, and nothing happened. The flesh refused to close. The organ sat where it belonged and did nothing.
I understood why almost immediately.
This kind of working did not run on intention. It ran on exchange. Something given for something restored. The old magic, the deep magic, the kind that predated every rule the witch community had been forced to build around itself, operated on the principle that life required life, and the life I needed to restore this would have to come from somewhere.
I closed my eyes.
I reached for the brands on the Omegas I had marked in Valcourt. The threads I had woven into them over the years, so carefully, so patiently, with exactly this kind of contingency in mind.
Something slammed into my back.
It felt like claws, and that shit went in deep, causing me to fall forward and my hands to lose contact with my grandfather’s chest.
The scream that came out of me was not dignified or controlled. It was pain made into sound.
"Séverine!" My familiar’s voice tore through the space.
"Keep it occupied," I said through my teeth, pushing back up to my knees with my back on fire. "I have to bring him back before it is too late."
I reached for my grandfather’s blood, drew the mark of equal exchange on his chest with my fingers, the rune shaking in its lines because my hands were still shaking and now blood was pouring down my back and dripping off my elbows onto the floor around me and I did not have time to care about any of it.
I started the spell.
I felt the life draining from somewhere distant. One of them. An Omega whose name I had never asked for, whose face I could not have picked from a room of strangers, whose existence had been a resource I had been carrying for months without acknowledgment of what that meant.
The heart began to move.
The tissue started to knit, slowly, horribly slowly, the flesh reaching toward itself with the reluctant cooperation of something being forced rather than healed.
Then before the necessary miracle happened, the spell broke.
All at once, like a thread cut rather than worn through.
"No." My voice came out raw. "No, no, no. You cannot be gone already. You have to still be here. You have to—"
I shook him.
"Come back. Come back to me right now. There is still a window; you have to still be here. Why won’t you come back—"
I tried again.
The spell broke again, faster this time, the energy refusing to hold the shape I was forcing it into.
He was... He was gone.
I turned.
My familiar was losing.
Not catastrophically, not yet, but in the way that told me he was using everything available to him just to keep the wraith occupied rather than advancing on either of us. The room had become unrecognizable in the last thirty seconds, with furniture overturned, the mirror shattered, and plaster cracked in two places by the force of their collision.
He had been smart enough to spell the room so sound would not leave. If not, the whole space would have been covered with my grandfather’s sentinel in seconds.
I stood up.
The pain in my back was extraordinary, and I left it where it was. I was mad. More than mad. I felt insane, and all of that rage tipped to just one person.
That dead bitch!
I threw the first wave with both hands, sixteen unseen hands materializing simultaneously and closing around the wraith from every available angle, binding her arms, her legs, the air directly around her in a cage constructed entirely from my will pressed outward.
She thrashed.
The bindings held for three full seconds, which was longer than I expected and shorter than I needed. She pulled one arm free and the whole structure destabilized, the way a woven thing unraveled when a single thread broke, and she drove her elbow backward into the binding behind her with a force that dissolved it entirely.
I rebuilt it before she could take advantage of the gap.
This time I anchored it differently, running the holds through the floor and ceiling rather than through open air, giving them something to brace against, and I felt my familiar take the opportunity I had created to hit her from the side with a working of his own, something dark and binding that wrapped around her form like rope pulled too tight.
She screamed.
It was not a sound that belonged to anything living, and the temperature in the room dropped another ten degrees when she made it, the windows frosting over at the corners.
"Hold it," I said through my teeth.
"I am holding it," he said, equally strained. "But-"
"Goddess, let me just do this!"
I did not even finish when she burned through his working first.
The dark rope dissolved into smoke and he stumbled back a step from the feedback of it, catching himself against the doorframe, and the moment his working failed she redirected all her remaining force against mine.
The bindings did not break cleanly this time. They tore, each one separately, in sequence, snapping back against me as they went with a sensation like a rubber band pulled to its limit and released directly against skin. By the time the last one went, I had stumbled backward two steps, and my palms were burning.
She then came for me immediately.
I was ready and immediately conjured and threw fire.
Not the careful, controlled application I usually preferred, but a full wall of it, floor-to-ceiling, between her and me. She passed through it like it was nothing, emerging on my side still moving at full speed, and I barely got a shield up in time to absorb the impact rather than take it directly.
The shield held. My shoulder did not particularly enjoy it.
My familiar flanked her while she was pressed against my shield like a mad bitch, and I felt the working he laid on her from behind as a change in pressure against my palms, the resistance suddenly distributed differently. She was caught between us, his working pulling her one way while my shield pushed back from the other.
For a moment it held.
I pushed harder, condensing the shield into something more offensive, driving it forward rather than simply maintaining it, and she gave ground, her form flickering between the wraith state and something more human as the competing pressures forced her to expend energy just to stay coherent.
"How do we kill this?" I said.
"That was what I was trying to tell you!" My familiar was breathing hard in the way he only did when something was genuinely costing him. "We cannot. Spirits this strong cannot be destroyed. Not by us. Not with what we have available." He drove another working into her from behind, and she twisted against it. "The best option is sealing. A physical object or a contained space. But the rune for it is complex; it needs specific materials, and I do not have them here."
"Then we need to hold her until—"
She broke through.