Sophie stifled a laugh, but kept chanting with the rest of the group.
He waited for a few moments, watching the movement grow more frantic. The snakes were tiring, making mistakes. They moved erratically, without the smooth assurance they’d shown before. There were gaps and some of the waves of the curse crashed into one another.
Cleo started the chant again. Sophie was pushing air hard into the middle of the circle, her high sweet voice ragged from effort. They all seemed strained, from focusing their collective will and from chanting over and over.
As one part of Cleo held the chant with the coven, another part of her reached out to the earth. She sought the web of green things, of living things, of hope and balance and life and sheer dumb luck. She gathered some of that energy and pushed it into the curse.
At the same time, Ian spit on the mirror a third time.
The strands of the curse seized and arched off the mirror. It grappled each other, each strand or snake moving frantically to stay on top. They spun around each other so fast they began to blur, no, not blur. They were forming a mass, the strands being subsumed by each other until it was a solid, quivering gelatinous mass on top of the mirror.
“Push!” Cleo yelled. The others knew what she meant, because she felt their energy swell and crash against the mass.
Ian’s hands gripped her shoulders. More than warmth, she found something in there. His energy was tangible to her, and she seized it to help fling it towards the curse, now thudding like a heart.
Ian cried out, surprised, but Cleo ignored it. Ignored everything except shaping all the energy available to her: hers, the green space, Ian’s, the coven. She had never had so much raw energy before and she laughed with the joy of it. It was intoxicating. A part of her whispered to hold on it this, why waste it, keep it, hold it, use it.
Cleo shoved the thought aside to forge that energy into a pike. It launched itself at the thudding mass and as her pike pierced it, she heard a thin, high scream. The pike sliced it in two, and each half landed on the fire below. The fire flared green where the curse touched it, jarring against the clean orange-red. It stank, the smells twisting sour as the flames subsumed it.
That high scream faded, and all that was left was the ringing in Cleo’s ears. Her mouth tasted like copper and her chin was wet. She brushed it with two fingers and the tips of her hand were bloody.
“That can’t be good,” Cleo managed before she blacked out.
Chapter Sixteen
She woke in her own bed. She lay there a moment, breathing, before she opened her eyes. Her hair smelled of campfire smoke and the residual tang of something disgusting. Her eyes opened. Her head felt incredibly heavy, but she managed to tip it to the side at the figure next to her bed.
“Hey,” Ian said softly.
“Water,” she croaked, and Ian held the straw so she could sip awkwardly on her side. She closed her eyes again, and Ian sighed.
She peeked under her lashes. He stared back, not fooled in the least.
“How’s the head?” he asked.
“If someone could just stop the maracas from hitting the front of my skull, that would be great,” Cleo said. Ian didn’t smile. With careful hands, he helped her up. He had the pills ready on the table, along with another full glass of water. A still-damp and streaked rag lay neatly folded near the end of the bedside table.
“How bad was it?” Cleo’s eyes darted towards the rag.
Ian grunted, averting his eyes.
Cleo looked dubiously at the rag and back at Ian. It wasn’t coated in blood. She didn’t think she’d bled that much.
“The blood vessels in your eyes popped. You got a bad nosebleed. It was horrible,” Ian doubled-down.
“That curse was horrible,” Cleo corrected him softly. “Maybe I look a little beat up - hold on, let me say this - but that usually doesn’t happen.” She paused. “Actually, none of that was usual. What made you use your super spit on the curse itself?”
Ian started threading his fingers through her hair. She hummed happily in response. Usually, she wouldn't want to be touched with a headache, but his hand was gentle and it felt lovely.
“Don’t distract me,” she accused him with a small smile.
His lip twitched in response, and his hands kept their steady, soothing rhythm. She’d closed her eyes, convinced he wasn’t going to respond. That was fine. She’d get the truth out of him another time, when she could focus better.
“I’ve never felt that before,” Ian said. “That was magic, wasn’t it? You all gathered your power and used it to drown the curse.”
“Drown?”
“That’s how it felt. Like you were pulling waves of magic and shoved it under. And it just… fell apart under those waves.” He was quiet for a moment. “But I could tell… it needed to change. It needed something from a different direction to make it into… something other. Something different.”
Cleo’s eyes flew open.
“It needed shifter magic,” she said. “It needed a shifter to complete the curse-breaking.” She tried to sit up and found Ian’s hands on her shoulders again, this time pushing her gently back down.
“Not yet, champ,” he said.
She snorted and batted his hands aside. They lingered a moment and Cleo liked that. Even with the headache, she liked that. But she needed a book first.
“I need to go pick up a book,” she said.
“Right now?” Ian asked dubiously. “This very minute.”
Cleo slipped her feet back into her sandals. She was slightly
