I fought him until my magic took over, shooting out of me to coat the room in a white glow. The pain shuddered, and I got the tiniest flash of peace from it, so I pushed harder, farther, until the pain stopped again, a blink this time. It gave me a little more strength to my magic, a little more incentive.
The room spun around me, as the magic poured from my body into the room. Then everything went dark, Even the fire banked to nothing on the other end of the room.
Helix released me to collapse on my knees, and I lay face first in a heap on the hot floor, my entire body aching.
Groans came from the platform and I moved enough to turn my face to look. Helix scooped Melinda into his arms and cradled her unconscious form on his lap.
Fin lay sideways, his hair fanning out toward me. I crawled to reach for him. The bond inside me was dull and quiet like an empty hole in my chest. A sob threatened to escape as I kept crawling until my fingers brushed the soft tendrils of his hair. He stirred, rolling over onto his stomach to lift up his face, his eyes seeking mine.
The sob came out, and this time I didn’t stop it. He dragged me forward, so I slid belly first across the hot floor up over the lip of the platform and into his arms. I’d have bruises from one end of me to the other, but it didn’t matter, not with him whole and holding me.
Melinda stirred in Helix’s grasp as Fin sifted his fingers over my hair. I could only watch as she woke and then gently shoved off his chest to sit on her own.
When she seemed recovered her gaze sought mine. “What did you do?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I have no idea. Something happened and I could only think of stopping the pain.”
She nodded, but the tension in her jaw told me she wanted to berate me for my interference. “I don’t know what happened to the knife. Your magic interrupted something, or did something, and there’s no way to know what happened without getting a hold of it ourselves.”
Guilt washed over me. I hadn’t been able to control myself and I may have ruined our one chance at negating Esteban’s blade. No doubt he knew something had occurred and would be trying to fortify against it if we tried again.
“It’s okay,” Fin whispered into my hair, clutching me tighter. “It’s my fault. I should have known you would have felt the pain and tried to intervene. I should have put up a better shield or maybe kept you out of the room.”
I snorted, wrapping my arms around his waist. “As if you could keep me out of anywhere I really wanted to be. What do we do now?”
Everyone focused on Melinda who shrugged.
“Obviously, we can do nothing right now. My magic is depleted.”
I reached out to mine and Fin’s magic and found it gone too.
Helix grumbled from beside Melinda. “Mine is gone as well.” He looked at me. “Whatever you did sucked all the magic from every single one of us.”
His tone had a bite that said he didn’t appreciate being left vulnerable.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did. Everything in me was focused on stopping the pain at any cost. I didn’t even know I could affect someone else’s magic.”
“You can’t,” Fin said. “It’s my magic that can, and since we are bonded you were able to use it in sort of a brute force way to take everyone else’s magic and short circuit the ritual.”
That was something to consider later. Right now, we needed a game plan.
“If I know the Black Mage, and I like to think I’ve got some kind of handle on the way he thinks,” I said, “he’ll be tracing the magic we just did back to us.”
Helix cursed and clutched his head. “The wards are down. All of them. Without my magic, I can’t keep them up.”
Chapter Eighteen
I ROLLED OFF FIN’S lap and let him help me sit beside him. “We need weapons. I assume you have some kind of armory here?"
Melinda waved at Helix. “Show them where it is. Since they got us into this mess, they can help us out of it.”
On that vote of confidence, I shoved up to my feet, my knees wobbling and aching. I remembered hitting the ground hard enough to crack something. Once we got our magic back online, I’d have to be healed, but for now, I couldn’t focus on the dull aches and bruises.
I hobbled forward as Helix stood and fixed his jacket. The bastard. He led Fin and me out of the room and down the hallway to a room on the opposite end. When he flipped on the light, I gasped. It was almost... almost as beautiful as Fin’s armory. The difference was Melinda had likely crafted many of these weapons. They all had slight curves and an elegant design to them that made me think of the fae in the old fairy tales.
“These are beautiful,” I whispered, running my thumb down the edge of a short sword. “You keep it all honed ready?”
Helix grunted. “I try to. She makes weapons when she needs to think and so I end up with hordes of them. Many I’ve sold over the years to pay for her estates, but these were the ones I couldn’t sell or decided to keep for protection. You never know when a stupid mage might shut down my magic.”