“There’s a type of fae.” He exhaled harshly. “They don’t have corporeal bodies. They’re parasitic spirits, and humans are their hosts. The two most common kinds create shifters and vampires. When a shifter bites a human, its saliva primes them for possession. If there’s a parasitic fae nearby, it’ll try to possess the person.”

I shuddered, feeling horribly unclean. “You’re sure I’m not infected?”

“You’ll be susceptible for a few more days, which is why we’ll test you again. If you were infected, we’d call in a witch to exorcise the fae spirit from your body. You’ll be fine. Lily tested negative too. Mythics almost never get turned.”

“But I’m not a mythic!” I blurted in a panic.

“Mythics don’t get turned because we know about shifters and how to deal with infections. That applies to you too.”

“Oh,” I said weakly. “Right.”

Ezra ran his fingers into his tangled hair. “Aaron, when you fought the shifters earlier, were they … deformed?”

“They had strange wounds, but …”

“Wounds that didn’t bleed, effluvium emanating from them, milky eyes,” Kai listed. “And they were too strong.”

“Shifters are always strong,” Aaron countered.

“We’ve fought shifters before. These were bigger and stronger than I’ve ever seen.” He rubbed his hands together, almost nervously. “I hit one with a current strong enough to kill a bull and the werewolf barely stumbled.”

“Whatever they are, we’ll deal with it.” Aaron’s voice was hoarse again, but not with grief or despair. It was growling fury and the promise of retribution. “We’ll find every one of those beasts and exterminate them.”

Silence fell between the four of us. The healers’ voices rumbled through the infirmary, the words unintelligible. Or maybe I couldn’t understand because my head was slowly spinning, fatigue washing through my limbs like lazy ocean waves.

My brain fizzled. I realized I was slumped against a warm body and vibrations were shivering into my chest. The body was speaking in a low voice.

“This is all my goddamn fault. If Sin doesn’t make it …”

Aaron. I was slumped against Aaron, his arm draped around my waist.

“You always turn into a complete idiot when you come back here,” Kai said with a shocking lack of sympathy.

My eyelids fluttered but refused to open properly. I wanted to tell Kai not to be a jerk but I couldn’t find my way through the haze of exhaustion.

“And you’re a shining example of a perfect son,” Aaron fired back in a hiss. “You couldn’t handle your family at all so you ditched them for mine.”

“And you were delighted to have a buffer between you and your dad,” Kai growled. “But I never led anyone into danger just to prove how—”

“Kai.”

Ezra’s quiet voice silenced the electramage, and my eyelids fluttered again. That was a tone I rarely heard from Ezra—not a quiet, silk-smooth murmur but an unyielding snap of steel.

“Aaron knows he screwed up,” Ezra continued. “He’s not fishing for sympathy and he doesn’t need a lecture. Our job is to help him fix this.”

The other two were silent.

“You’re right,” Kai conceded. “We’ll figure out this shitstorm together.”

“Thanks,” Aaron said, gruff in that “manly emotions” way. His arm briefly tightened around me. “I think she’s asleep.”

I wasn’t, but now seemed like a bad time to reveal that.

Something shifted under my legs and I felt a hand on my knee through the blanket. “She was in bad shape. You got her back here just in time.”

Ezra’s voice, close by. My legs were across his lap. When had that happened?

“Sometimes I think we push her too hard,” Kai murmured. “For all that she avoided training at first, now that we’ve started, she’s giving it everything she’s got, and I can’t …”

“Can’t help but push her even harder,” Aaron finished. “She’s too stubborn to sit on the sidelines. Since we can’t keep her away from danger, all we can do is help her get strong enough to survive.”

Ezra’s hand tightened on my knee. “We can’t lose her.”

My lungs hitched at the quiet determination that had joined the implacable steel in his voice. Strangely, his words echoed the ones I’d uttered to Sin that morning. I can’t lose him.

“You two will need her,” he added more softly.

A heartbeat of silence. It was heavy, aching, layered with things I didn’t understand.

“Ezra,” Aaron whispered. “Don’t …”

He trailed off. No one spoke.

“Have you talked to your father yet?” Kai asked, his tone deliberately neutral.

“Not yet,” Aaron muttered. “I only saw him briefly. He’ll corner me once I’m back at the manor.”

Footsteps clacked against the floor and Aaron’s arm tensed around me. I dragged my weary eyes open as Healer Austin stepped into the curtained room, her scrubs splattered with dried blood. She pulled her glasses off, wearily wiped the oversized lenses with a tissue, then slid them back on.

“She made it through the healing. The danger has passed.”

All four of us let out heaving sighs. I pushed off Aaron and sat up straight.

“Permanent damage?” he asked tersely.

“Some scarring. With careful treatment over the next twelve hours, she shouldn’t develop a limp.” Healer Austin hesitated. “I just completed the test for were-fae infection.”

A chill ran across my skin.

The healer settled her bleak stare on Aaron. “Tell your father he needs to summon a witch immediately.”

Chapter Eleven

“If I have to drink one more revolting potion, I’m going to steal a car and drive back home.”

I grinned at Sin. “Will you stowaway on the ferry too? Also, you’ll drink the potions if I have to pour them down your throat.”

She laughed, the angry red lines on the side of her jaw stretching. Healer Austin had promised those cuts wouldn’t scar, but some of her other injuries … those would scar.

“That’s the Tori I know and love,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “Thank you for not treating me like I’ve turned to glass. Aaron has been fussing all evening.”

Pink suffused her pale cheeks. Aaron, Kai, and Ezra stood twenty feet away—where I’d banished them after Aaron had adjusted the blanket around Sin’s shoulders three times in ten minutes. We were all beyond relieved that she was alive, but I had to draw the line somewhere.

Scattered around the three mages were a dozen academy alumni. I recognized more faces now—the trio of assholes who’d insulted Aaron yesterday, two mythics from Aaron’s morning run, and four combat mages who’d helped find Sin. Three of them had been looking at Aaron all judgy-judgy in the infirmary.

Yes, I was absolutely making a mental list of the jerks in case I got an excuse to punch them later. Though, from what I’d seen so far, I’d be karmically safe punching any of the alumni. They all seemed like jerks.

Behind the mages, a stone retaining wall rose six feet, creating an elevated perch from which Tobias and Valerie were observing. Cast into silhouette by the warm lights of the house, the two Sinclair mages seemed regal and mysterious. I wondered if I’d look that cool if I went and stood with them.

“Are you ready for this?” I asked Sin, nodding toward the upcoming spectacle. I didn’t know whether it would be a spectacle, but I was kind of hoping.

At the edge of the sunken garden where we waited, our professional exorcist was setting up for the ritual that would take place at midnight. The woman was, according to Tobias, the best of the best. No mere witch was enough for the Sinclair patriarch.

Instead, he’d called in a renowned druidess.

I watched her curiously, searching for any similarities to the only other druid I’d met. She was tall and thin, in her mid-thirties, with ash-brown hair that flowed down to her butt. I couldn’t see any tattoos, but maybe that was a dark-druids-only thing.

Her fae familiar fascinated me. All I could see was a weird shimmer, roughly the size of a person, that reminded me of the way light refracted through water. The shimmer trailed after the druidess, never more than a few feet away.

My thoughts drifted to Hoshi. I’d given her a vacation while I was away from home. She could find me anytime she wanted, but she was off doing her own thing. Who knew what that thing was. Despite spending months with the fae, I had no clue what the life of a sylph was like. Communicating through shared mental images was limiting.

The druidess, one Josephine Pisk, had drawn a large circle, added various ingredients around its perimeter, and lit a fire at its center. As smoke curled into the still night air, she tossed a handful of leaves into the flames. The smoke twirled into corkscrews. Neat.

She stepped out of the circle and approached us, her long skirt swishing. Her shimmery familiar followed.

“We’ll begin in a few minutes,” she said as she joined us. “Do you have any questions, Sin?”

“Do I have to do anything?”

“Nope. Just sit in the circle. It will take about …” She trailed off, eyes narrowing. Her stare lost focus, then she gave her head a tiny shake. “Five minutes and I’ll be able to confirm that you’re fae-free.”

Sin blinked in puzzlement over the druidess’s odd pause. “Thank you.”

“What do you think about the weirdness with the werewolves?” I asked. “How they had those creepy wounds and were bigger and stronger than usual?”

“Tobias was telling me about that.” Josephine glanced at the forest. “It could be a particularly powerful strain of wolf spirit, or … yes, I know!”

I rocked back on my heels, startled by her exclamation. “Sorry?”