“I’m breaking out of the circle, but the rest of you need to keep holding hands,” Claudia said. “I have one more spell to try.”
There was a hush, and then Claudia started
her rhyming spell. She walked around the outside of the circle. She held a cup underneath each pair of joined hands, pricking their fingers and dropping the blood into a cup as she spoke.
The candles grew brighter, and the flames flashed higher, but I didn’t feel the fizzle of magic along my body like I had with the first spell. And it certainly wasn’t doing anything to Tessa. She was still sleeping, but her breaths were shallow as if the weight of the magic was too heavy on her chest.
I set her on the ground and laid down next to her. I watched her chest to make sure I didn’t imagine it, but with every breath, she moved less and less. The time between breaths grew more and more apart. And then they stopped.
“Stop! Stop whatever you’re doing. It’s not working. She stopped breathing.” I pressed my ear to her chest, but I didn’t hear any thumping of her heart. It’d stopped pumping.
I had a second of sheer terror—a fraction of a second—before I started CPR.
God. We’d been here before. I’d been here before. But I didn’t want to be back here.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Breath. Breath.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Breath. Breath.
One. “Someone do something! Help me!”
Three.
God. Please. I can’t lose her now.
Five.
Breath. Breath.
I heard the murmurs of my friends as they debated what to do, and none of it mattered because I had to keep her blood flowing and oxygen moving in and out of her lungs.
“Bite her.” Chris’s voice was firm, clear, decisive. “Bite her now.”
I didn’t stop what I was doing, but I heard what Chris said. “What? You hated that I bit her without permission. I—”
“Bite her,” Claudia said. “Her wolf needs you. Renew your bond. It’s the only thing left to try. Renew the bond and feed her your strength. And while you’re doing that, we’ll renew the spell that linked us all together. With all of us here, we should be able to defeat whatever magic this is.”
Renew our bond. Cement it again.