Chapter 99 My Love For You
"Get onto the platform,” Bastian said and pointed at the second platform.
It sat close to Grace's, it was close enough that the people lying on both could have reached out and touched one another, and Maddox looked at it then at Bastian then lay down on it without being asked twice.
“It is going to hurt, I assure you. Maybe not physically, but it’ll hurt regardless.” Bastian said as he had begun to bind Maddox to the stone platform using rope and a little bit of magic, so he wouldn’t break free and end up disturbing the spell.
“You’re sure you want to do this.” It was more of a statement than a question. Maddox looked to his side at Grace and felt his resolve steel further because the veins on Grace's legs had reached her hips and the visual of that was making him grow more impatient.
“I want to. Now hurry up with it. Please.” Maddox looked at Bastian with eyes that told him to do everything he could in his power to save Grace. Anything at all.
Bastian stood between the two platforms and looked at Maddox with the expression of a man who had made a decision and was not at peace with it.
"I need you to understand one more time what this means," he said. "If the person casting this is stronger than you, you will not simply fail. You will die on this platform and Grace will die with the curse still in her body and I will have two corpses in my back room instead of one."
"I understand, now begin!” Maddox said.
Bastian looked at Maddox for a moment then sighed, “We can only hope you are stronger.”
He exhaled through his nose, long and slow, and reached for the knife on the side table.
He took Maddox's right hand and turned it palm up and Maddox felt the blade draw a line from the base of his index finger to the heel of his palm, deep enough to be significant, and he winced once and then held still. The blood welled up immediately, dark and fast.
Bastian pressed his thumb into the centre of the wound and held it there with enough pressure to keep the flesh from beginning its natural healing, which was the specific problem with wolves. Their injuries closed too fast.
He moved to Grace.
He drew the same line across her palm, the same depth, and Maddox watched Grace's hand bleed without being able to do anything about it and found this harder to look at than his own.
Due to the already growing curse, Grace’s own wound was painstakingly slow to close and that was satisfactory for Bastian. He positioned himself between the two platforms with one hand extended toward each of them, not touching, hovering above the wounds with his palms facing down. He closed his eyes.
The muttering began low. So low that Maddox, with his hearing, had to focus to separate it from the ambient silence of the room. It was not the language he had heard Bastian use before to cut off his senses in the shop. It was different, the syllables carrying a weight and a rhythm that seemed to operate below the level of sound, felt in the chest more than heard with the ears.
Maddox lay on the platform and stretched his neck to look at Grace's body.
The veins were at her hips and had not moved since Bastian started. He watched them and tried to determine if the stillness was the spell working or simply a pause before the next advance and could not tell.
He felt nothing yet. No pull, no drain, nothing to indicate that anything was being taken from him. He lay there and watched the ceiling and felt the blood continuing to run from his palm and felt Bastian's thumb maintaining the pressure and thought that perhaps this was going to be simpler than it had been described.
And then his vision went.
Not dark, not black, not like closing his eyes. It went blurry at the edges first, the ceiling above him softening at the perimeter of his sight, and then the blur moved inward and the overhead moonlight that came through the circular window became something imprecise and ringed with a halo that hadn't been there before, and then the ceiling itself seemed to tilt at an angle.
Maddox lay his head back down flat against the platform.
The world was spinning. Not violently, but the long slow spin of something fundamental being pulled out of its axis.
Maddox thought it strange that it didn’t hurt like Bastian said it would, it made it harder to track and harder to brace against because pain gave you something to push against and he was feeling nothing.
Then he felt it, and he cursed because he had concluded too soon.
The muttering above him had changed. Bastian's voice had risen from barely being audible and was building, the rhythm of it faster now and more insistent, the syllables compressing against each other as though the pace of the chant was in competition with something.
Something was draining him, he felt his life force being sucked out of him with fervor.
Maddox felt terrible. Whatever was sucking his life force was doing so viciously, like they were determined to take it. Maddox felt it being pulled out of every part of his body that he’d begun to convulse on the platform, struggling against the bindings to sink his teeth and claws against whatever it was that wanted to take from him.
He was a wolf and it was in their instinct to fight for their survival, for their life. And whatever this is was actively trying to take his life from him. He had begun to growl, his claws and fangs appearing and retreating.
And in a part of his brain that was still partially sane and not consumed with pain and the need to fight, Maddox understood. This was a competition with whoever was on the other end of the curse being placed on Grace right now, in competition with their life force and their will, and the power behind whatever hatred had made them do this.
Hatred that could not hope to surpass the love he had for the woman beside him.