Page 118 of Seared Fates

My body taut as a wire, I wait for an attack. Emma might be weak, but she’s got two powerful spellbooks now.

Summer’s grip tightens.

Rurik’s fingers twitch.

The door swings open, hitting the wall with a bang, shattering the silence, and the vampires race in with fangs out. Moving like deadly shadows.

I expect screaming, the noise of a fight. Blood.

What I don’t expect is for Rurik to stumble back, his shoulder hitting the doorframe. “What the fuck…” he rasps.

Sen swears in Japanese.

“What is this?” Vidar snarls.

Confused, I struggle to stand with Summer’s help and within a faded pink bedroom, sits Emma.

Or what used to be her, that is.

She’s slouched in a filthy bed, covered in blood, vomit and other splattered bodily fluids. Her once full body is skeletal, cheeks gaunt, and eyes sunken. Like she’s been starved for years, not days.

Almost every inch of her is covered in black boils, leaking a viscous yellow goo.

The two spellbooks—one being the First Tome—are discarded on the floor as if she threw them away in anger.

“P-please…” Emma reaches out a bony arm, her wet voice pleading. Desperate. “Help me…”

“Vidar?” Lucero’s head snaps to his Maker. “What the fuck happened to her?”

“It doesn't matter,” Vidar growls, steeling himself. “Emma, give Kai his soul back!”

“T-take it,” she creaks, throat swelling like a bloated toad. “Please, ta-take it from me…t…the thing h-has poisoned me.”

Emma waves listlessly to herself, and I notice there’s a small centre of her chest that has no boils, glowing a faint purple.

“It's because Kai is half-demon,” Summer says, voice edged with impatience. Emma’s emaciated jaw drops as realisationcrystallises in her dark eyes. “And demon blood—or soul, in this case—is poisonous to mages.”

A cool sting slides across my neck. My gaze travels down. Confused, I see an obsidian blade gripped in Summer’s ringed hand.

Vidar’s head snaps to us, eyes growing in fear.

“Summer?” I whisper.

She sighs, sounding resigned. The blade not moving an inch.

“I really wish you had given me the spellbook, Kai,” my friend says.

Chapter forty-two

Vidar

It’d take a single second to grab Kai.

Enough time to stop Summer from slicing his throat open?

What if I save him, and Summer attacks Emma? His soul will be gone forever.

Too many questions. Too many possibilities where I lose him.