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I immediately realized his eyes were glazed, probably from venom. It’s possible Brick got him with another syringe filled with vampire-strength tranquilizer, too.

In any case, he’d been bitten badly, somewhere in the course of his fight with his sire. A violent tear, presumably from Brick’s fangs, had gouged out part of Nick’s neck. Blood flowed in clumped lines down from the seeping flesh, darkening the top of his shirt, which had been yanked open at the neck, again, likely by Brick.

Nick stared only at Jem.

“God, get out of here,” he managed in a croak.

Jem’s jaw hardened.

Brick broke out in a delighted laugh. “It’s all so wonderfully messy, isn’t it? You can see it, can’t you? When you look at them? You can see how they are the same?”

I blinked, confused.

I refocused on Brick, but he was no longer looking at me.

He was staring at Jem and the girl––looking between them, really, as if comparing one to the other. I glanced at Black, and saw him doing the same. So was Jax, and Mika, and every seer who had made it down to the cave floor by then.

Bewildered, I followed all of those stares and also gazed at the two seers, one middle-aged, the other a child, one male, the other female.

That time, I went into the Barrier to look at them, using my seer’s sight.

At first, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing.

Theiraleimiwas completely wrong.

Jem’saleimi,in particular, which I was far more familiar with than I was with Aura’s, looked totally different than how I’d ever seen it before. I’d examined Jem’s light from the Barrier multiple times. I’d done it during jumps, when he’d wanted me to verify this or that thing he’d found. I’d done it when he’d been injured, or in shock, or he’d been shielding me, or I him. I’d done it when we were fighting something in the field, side-by-side.

I’d never seen it look like this, no matter how agitated or angry or afraid he’d been.

It was like his light had been pulled halfway out of his body.

Stranger still, all of that off-kilteraleimiof Jem’s was somehow completely enmeshed with the girl’s. Theiraleimiwas visibly entangled to the point where it was difficult to pull them apart, to even tell which part was the girl and which part Dalejem.

As I continued to watch, the two of them seemed to be fighting over the different parts of their living light, too.

Sparks occasionally erupted, or detonated like small explosions within those clouds of purple, green, gold, and blue. Complex light structures shivered and hit into one another, rotating strangely or sliding erratically from Jem’s side of the light to the girl’s, only to rotate back around to the other one of them. Long, snaking strands of light wound between them, as well, almost like they were attempting to strangle or take over the other’s life force.

“What the fuck is she doing to him?” I asked in shock.

Gaos,Jem had been right.

He’d been right about her all along.

The girl wasn’t what we thought. She wasn’t this benign victim who’d simply become an avatar for Jem’s paranoia and fear. She was some kind of parasitic monster, and she was killing Jem. She was somehow stealing or siphoning off his light.

I hadn’t even known such a thing was possible.

Brick laughed at my question, however.

He grinned down at Nick in his arms, still with the wooden stake pressed firmly to Nick’s chest.

“How confusing this must all be for you, my dearest boy,” Brick crooned into Nick’s dazed eyes. “How very very confusing. Which of them do you save? Which of them do you want? Do you save neither of them? Both? Do you keep them apart and assign some sort of visitation rights for the two halves of the year? I don’t think they were ever meant to live in the same place at the same time, do you…?”

Brick raised his eyes. He smiled maliciously back at Jem.

“It seems to have made your darling Dalejem a bit batty, hasn’t it?” Brick observed. “Or is that purely the girl’s influence, do you think? Was she batty already and you’re only seeing it mirrored in him now, as well? Or were they both batty all along?”

I blinked and stared.