Page 54 of A Soul’s Curse (Fallen Souls #1)

Ren touched his forefingers together with his thumbs, using the motion I showed him to signal a trade. “Theo, would you be willing to trade me your soul?”

Ren offered a smile that cut through the haze clouding my mind, like a sunbeam breaking across a frozen morning.

It filled me with a rush of unexpected comfort, thawing the fear clamped around my chest. That warmth anchored me, grounding me enough to accept Caspian’s final request. Although his presence slipped from my body, his living magic clung to me, bittersweet and heavy.

The blue runes pulsing on the knife faded as the pull on my magic eased and flowed back into my body.

“Thank you, Theo. Take care of Gray, will you? I told the ogre he could trust you, and he’s a loyal bastard. And visit Katherine once in a while. Maybe introduce her to some of your friends. Good luck, Theo.”

And with that, the tether connecting Caspian to my magic snapped, the rune on my wrist flashing orange before completely disappearing.

With the knife no longer pulsing with magic, Ren gently remove it from my chest. It didn’t hurt as much as I figured it would. It hadn’t cut flesh, but severed my magic, and since Caspian was the one who took the brunt of that, it left behind only a dense pressure.

“Don’t hate me for this,” Ren whispered before kissing me softly on the lips.

The sight before him was grim. Stella had done a number on Leon, his arm hanging limply at his side with blood soaking into his dark shirt and dripping from his fingertips. Part of his sleeve was missing, revealing four large gouge marks that had ripped open his skin.

“I’ll make a trade with you,” Ren spoke to Leon, his voice strong.

“You want me dead, right? My magic gone? Open up a portal to the underworld right now and I’ll go willingly, so long as you promise me that you and the reset of the Syndicate will leave Theo and the others alone.

Forever. No questions asked. No exceptions. ”

Leon spat a wad of blood on the floor, bracing his good arm against the wall for balance.

Stella’s flower puppet hovered over him, ready to deliver more pain should the opportunity arise.

“Your death for their lives? How noble of you. And what’s stopping me from going back on my word?

You’ll be too dead to do anything about it. ”

“Ren, what are … you doing …” I managed to crawl to my knees, but the magic Caspian tethered to me was still burning, adapting, knitting itself to my very being. I clutched my chest tightly, wishing I could breathe. Ivy was at my side a second later, followed by a stumbling Ellie.

“I can’t force you to do anything,” Ren answered, “but there are others in the Syndicate who question your motives, and just because I failed to bring you down, doesn’t mean they won’t.

And let’s not forget Theo and his friends.

You’ve already angered the New Jersey Devil once, Stella is on a warpath, and Ivy can summon some of the strongest people across the realms. Theo is not your weapon to control.

He’s a light in a world that’s been too dark for too long.

And if you try to snuff that out, you won’t just have him coming for you, and even the Syndicate won’t protect you from that. ”

Leon gulped. “Fair enough.”

Once again, Ren made the sign to signal a trade. Leon flinched as the magic entered his body and settled within him. Ren handed him the knife, and with his working arm, Leon slashed open a magical tear in the Nether before him.

“Ren, please! Don’t … don’t do this! Don’t leave me!

” Ren flinched, but the coward refused to turn around to face me.

My chest tightened, each breath a little more labored than the last. Ren made his decision.

His heart, already cracked open in so many places, splintered even more.

I wanted to scream, to argue, to beg him to reconsider, but the words came out as garbled sounds.

My throat felt raw, constricted by a mixture of disbelief and sorrow.

It wasn’t just the fear of losing Ren. It was the weight of everything we’d fought for, everything we’d built together, coming undone in an instant.

I reached out my hand as he stopped right in front of the bright light about to swallow him whole. I could feel the magic rippling off it, seeping out from the Nether. He took one look at Leon and smirked.

“Unfortunately for you, I still hate you. So if I’m going down, I’m taking you with me.”

He wrapped his arms around Leon, who dropped the knife as he screamed, scrambling to release himself from Ren’s grip. “Markus, do something!”

Markus did nothing but watch his superior disappear with Ren into the afterlife. Ren’s lips moved, and although the sound barely reached my ears, his message was clear as day. The tear in the Nether closed behind them.

“Ren, no!” Ivy helped me to my feet and I rushed over to where Ren had been standing just seconds ago.

I sucked in a breath, taking in the lingering spicy scent of Ren before it could vanish like the rest of him.

I clawed at the walls, the floor, like I could find some secret button that would bring him back to me.

“He’s gone, Theo.” Stella said as her puppet burst into a cloud of petals that floated to the floor.

“No. No, he’s not gone. We can get him back! There’s gotta be a way to get him back!”

“Living people can’t survive in the realm of the dead,” Markus reminded me. “He might be okay for a little while, but that place will eat away at him eventually, both mind and body. Even if you could go after him, you’d suffer the same fate.”

“This isn’t right.” I dropped to the floor, pounding my fist into the hard wooden. Caspian’s magic gave this unfamiliar weight to my limbs, like they had grown stronger and became lighter. “This should never have happened! He didn’t deserve this.”

“No,” Ellie crouched down beside me, holding out her arms to draw me in for an embrace.

I cried on her shoulder. “No, this should never have happened, but we can’t let their sacrifice be for nothing.

Caspian believed in you. Ren trusted you.

Take their gifts and do something with it.

We brought down one member of the Syndicate, but there’s still a whole organization out there wreaking havoc.

Finish what Ren and Caspian started. It’s what they’d want you to do. ”

“May I?” Markus held out his hand, looking directly at my wrist where the Syndicate rune, the one he had place and Caspian had warped into his own, had once been.

He grabbed it, inspecting it with a critical eye.

“Interesting. The rune should have dissolved when Caspian’s presence left your body, but it’s still there. ”

I sniffled. “What? What do you mean? I saw it disappear when I … when I felt him let go. Does this mean he’s still alive?

” I looked down at my wrist. It didn’t look like the rune it once was, but more of a …

red splotch on my skin. Caspian had said he could speak to his magic, and that it refused to be taken by the Syndicate or allow him to die.

He also had tethered his magic to my body, but I had assumed it would have vanished along with him. So why did I still have it?

Markus shook his head. “No. He’s definitely gone. But whatever his magic truly was … He might not have had a soul, but it almost seems like maybe his magic did, and now it’s attached itself to you.”

Ellie and Ivy stood on either side of me, each taking an arm to lift me to my feet.

“We should get out of here,” Ivy said. “Stella took out all the guards, and the music from upstairs will probably drown out a lot of what happened here, but someone will find us eventually. We should leave while we can.”

Stella picked up Leon’s knife from the floor and handed it to me. It was no longer glowing, but I could feel the magic pulsing within it. I held onto it as Ivy summoned Jacob’s ghost. Everyone, including Markus, left the club and the bloodshed behind—along with the last memory I had of Ren.