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The symbol pulsed once, dim and sickly.
Lysander shifted infinitesimally, hand dropping towards his sword hilt.
“Hold,” she murmured. “It’s only the ritual.”
Idonea placed both her hands flat on her thighs and drew a long breath in through her blood-smeared lips.
The Current surged through the circle, through her blood, pulling at her ribs like invisible fingers.
The mirror fogged, a flicker cutting across the glass. Then a disturbance she'd not expected. Her pulse staggered.
Someone was blocking the daemon’s signature. A witch’s energy.
The glass of the mirror cracked.
Her eyes flew open. The ritual was broken, but she still had to seal it.
She pressed a drop of blood to the flame. It snapped out with a hiss, releasing a puff of grey smoke.
Idonea swayed.
Lysander moved instinctively, but halted just short of touching her. “What happened?”
The beginnings of a headache throbbed in her head. “Someone is masking the daemon.” Her nose itched, and she wiped her hand across her nose, coming away with a trace of blood.
His jaw tightened. “Someone here?”
She lifted her gaze to him, the Current still dancing behind her pupils. “I can’t be sure. But we must be getting close. Too close.”
He bundled up the device. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
Her legs vanished underneath her. One moment standing. The next not.
Lysander darted towards her, catching her underneath the shoulders.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
Her eyelids were heavy, and she struggled to keep them open. The ritual shouldn’t have drained so much of her energy.
“Sleep is in order.” She pressed her hand against her forehead. “Before my head splits open.”
“Agreed.” Lysander steadied her onto her feet.
With Lysander’s steadying presence behind her, she went back up the stairs and straight to the bedroom. She collapsed onto the bed, the scent of blood clinging in the air.
“You’ll stay?”
His voice was soft. “Of course.”
Chapter 20
The cold had come in overnight. It pressed against the windowpanes from the outside and against the back of her neck from the bed. A beam cracked overhead. The cottage had been settling around her for days. Tonight it sounded louder.
Her head ached. The ritual had taken more out of her than she'd admitted to Lysander the night before. She lay on her back and watched the silver veins of Lodamante in the beams. They caught what little light came through the curtains.
She thought about the pulse.
In the chamber below the larder, when Kitsa had been teaching her to tune to a space, there'd been a thrum. Older, Kitsa had called it, without naming the thing. A heartbeat beneath the floor that belonged to neither of them. Idonea had sensed it once and lost it when the lesson moved on. It had stayed at the back of her mind since.
