All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [38]
“Sarah!” She managed to focus on him for a moment, only to have him throw her across the room. “Is there anything you can do?” he demanded.
She landed on … Oh, goddess. She shrieked, because for an instant, in her state, she was on her father’s corpse again. There was blood on her hands. Was it his blood? Then the reality came clear, and it was Kristopher lying still and silent on the ground, a ragged wound from Michael’s knife in his chest. It hadn’t been a heart blow, and the Arun magic wasn’t quite as poisonous as a Vida’s, but it was killing him slowly nevertheless.
She had to draw out the magic. She could do that. Her powers didn’t work the same now as they used to, but they weren’t entirely gone. She …
She glanced up and found herself staring into wide, frightened eyes. Sarah’s heart wasn’t beating, but someone else’s heart was racing, pounding, matched by her ragged breaths and the trembling that rippled across the surface of her skin. Nikolas shouted something, and the girl stood and bolted out of the room. Sarah started to rise to follow.
Nikolas grabbed her by the arm and hit her, the blow hard enough that it might have broken her neck if she had been human. Now it was barely enough to get her attention. He snapped, “I swear, if you let my brother die here—” He broke off and shook his head sharply before saying, apparently to himself, “You’re going to hate me for this.”
What did he—
She couldn’t complete the thought. He grabbed her, and then his fangs were in her throat.
And it hurt. The buzzing across her flesh turned to wildfire, and her blood turned to lava. The white noise of the world turned to screaming, and the voice behind the screams was hers, until Nikolas threw her away again.
He staggered under the power he had just stolen from her, but he had more practice. He had ripped apart her giddy drunkenness, and now she existed in a cold reality where all she could see was Kristopher’s form.
She put a hand over the wound and tried to reach for her magic. Vampiric power wouldn’t help her with this. She needed a witch’s power, but her Vida magic had fled deep inside, hiding from the new blood.
“I tried to get him to feed,” Nikolas said. “That helped when Elisabeth nearly killed us, as if her blood combated her magic. But he wouldn’t. I fed for him, on the witch who had attacked him, but I couldn’t even get him to take blood from me.”
She nodded. The power was already too deep inside Kristopher for him to rouse enough to feed. Sarah didn’t know if she could find her Vida power in time to pull Michael’s power from the wound, but Nikolas was right that such power could be drowned with more of the same—normally by taking blood, but there were other methods.
“Come here,” she said. She didn’t have to say why or ask permission. As soon as Nikolas was near enough, she put her left hand on his throat. He tensed a fraction but did not draw back, even when she pulled at his power. He clenched his jaw; she knew it hurt, what she was doing, but she also knew that Nikolas would never argue against any measure that might save his brother.
Besides, he had taken her blood; he could hear her concerns in her mind. He knew perfectly well that she didn’t know how to control her magic anymore, and that she could easily mangle his power through clumsy fumbling, killing both or all of them.
She used herself like a wire to funnel power from Nikolas into Kristopher. She transferred to Kristopher the power Nikolas had taken from Michael, which would temporarily fool the magic of the knife into thinking this body was not an enemy but a friend. It wouldn’t completely heal him, but it would slow the damage, like a shot of epinephrine delaying a fatal allergic reaction.
Only when she had given as much power to Kristopher as she dared did she put both hands on Kristopher’s chest, one over the wound and one over his heart. She closed her eyes and struggled to find the blade’s magic, which she knew almost as well as her own. She and Michael had grown up together. They had trained together.