Page 52 of Transfiguration

Con froze, his heart squeezing with a biting pain that felt like he was dying. “Sam…” Luca… He choked on the thought.

“Sam has taken Luca to ground,” Gabe said. Con blinked through stars of bright light and pain to search for him. Con was in the arboretum at Seiran’s house. It was Kelly’s house too, but Con always thought of it as Seiran’s space as the entire plot of land pulsed with earth magic. Gabe stood in the kitchen, beyond the door that led out into the brightness of the day, arms folded across his chest, but staying out of the direct light.

Jamie, Kelly’s husband, and Seiran knelt at Con’s feet. They threw a towel over Con’s nudity, but he hurt everywhere. Patches of his skin blackened, others blistered and red, angry. His feet felt severed from his body, but no pain was as deep as the one in his chest. He wheezed for air, his lungs sounding filled with rocks.

Seiran looked up, frowning. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“No,” Jamie agreed grimly.

Kelly sat with Con’s shoulders and head half in his lap, arms wrapped around him, strength belying his small size. Pillar of Water power, the cooling touch easing burns he didn’t realize he had. Jamie and Seiran were trying to heal him.

“Do you have some sort of anti-spell on you?” Seiran asked.

Con blinked at him, blank to the meaning of the words.

“Con?” Kelly asked, filling Con’s vision with his mess of blond hair and bright eyes backdropped by the brightness of the day above the giant windowed space, his touch light on Con’s face, trying to give him focus.

“Hmm?” was all Con could manage. He still couldn’t breathe, his heart and soul aching too deep to function.

“Do you have a spell or rune that keeps others from using spells on you?”

“Yes,” Con said absently. It was a handful of runes that were a mix of anti-tracking and anti-offense spells, acting like a mirror that bounced others off.

“Can you turn it off?” Kelly asked. “Please?”

Con thought briefly of the runes, imagined the glow vanishing as he snuffed the spell out like a fire. He gasped at the renewed pain that brought, not physical, but emotional, like they ripped his heart out and crushed it over and over.

“That was it,” Jamie said. Power trickled over him, reknitting flesh and making Con’s skin crawl with the sensation of other people’s magic.

“Where did he learn this stuff? Did you know he could shift in like ten seconds? We aren’t even close to the new moon,” Seiran said. “I can’t even change that fast.” The physical pain eased, flowing away and tugging Con into sleepiness, though his heart still felt like it had a dagger in it. He recalled Luca pinned to the door like some sick display.

“… third-degree burns,” Jamie was saying. “I’ll need to remove some of the skin to get it to regrow. Let me see if I have something to ease the pain. His lungs are going to be a problem.”

Kelly’s grip tightened and there were warm tears falling on Con’s face as Kelly bent over him, both holding him down and hugging him at the same time. “I’m sorry, Con.”

“Sam?...Luc-”

“To ground,” Kelly whispered.

Would that help? Sam was young, too young to sire a vampire, though he was crazy powerful, so maybe his age didn’t matter? They’d been sharing blood over a decade, Sam and Luca. It would have been enough for any human to turn vampire, but not a body that damaged. Being blood bound to a vampire couldn’t save a human from cancer or a really nasty accident. Luca hadn’t been human to begin with. Would that be enough to give him a chance? What if he did transition, but it was wrong? Con knew sometimes the revenant would rise instead of the human.

“This is going to make you feel lightheaded,” Jamie said from somewhere, but Con felt nothing for a while, floating in a sea of emotional pain, his heart barely beating rather than racing. He didn’t know which he preferred. There was inescapable physical pain, but it existed as though in a bubble, floating and occasionally brushing him with a hot and blistering edge, and then fading back to a twinge.

Time passed, and he didn’t dream. Each time his subconscious sought to focus on a memory, he shoved it away, replaying the runes within the larger symbol over in his mind. He would need to track them somehow. He planned to find every one of those monsters and make them pay.

Small hands caressed his face, and he wondered if it was Bella, but he remembered her backpack, he still felt it grasped in his fist, as if they’d been unable to pry it from his unconscious grip, so that meant it couldn’t be Bella. He blinked into the light again, seeing a small familiar face with dark eyes and a pop of cinnamon-colored hair.

“Kaine?” He mumbled, feeling like his lips were heavy.

“It’s okay, Uncle Con,” Kaine said. He ran his small hands over Con’s face, delivering a strange calming sensation with each touch. An echo of warmth expanding, pain easing.

“Bella…”

“You’ll find her,” Kaine said.

“Sam and Luca…” their names made his heart lurch again.

“Shh… I feel them,” Kaine whispered.