Nibsy’s eyes widened a bit. “You’ll be back,” Nibs told him. “You’ll bring Leena back.”
Dolph was glad for the assurance, but he wasn’t going to depend on it. Pulling his cap low over his eyes, he began to walk in the direction of the terminal. He ignored the stiffness in his leg, as he always did, and lifted himself up the wide steps that led to the entrance of the bridge. Once he was above, he kept away from the thin columns of lamplight on the planks of the walkway. Using the shadows for cover, he moved quickly despite his uneven gait—he’d lived with it for so long now that it was part of him.
The hired carriage was pulled to a stop before the first tower of the bridge—just beyond the shoreline. Below, three figures emerged. One reached back to pull out the fourth. Even from that distance, he knew it was Leena. He sensed her affinity—familiar, warm, his. But she was hanging limply between her captors. He felt the weakness of her magic, too, and when he got closer, he saw what they had done to her, saw her bruised face and bloodied lip. Saw her flinch with a ragged exhale and struggle against the men as they started to pull her toward the tower, toward the Brink.
His blood went hot.
Dolph, like every other Mageus in the city, knew what would happen when a person with the old magic crossed that line. Once they stepped across the Brink, it drained them. If the person was lucky and their affinity was weak—closer to a talent than a true power—they might survive, but they’d be left permanently broken from that missing part of themselves and would spend the rest of their life suffering the loss.
But for most, the Brink left them hollowed out, destroyed. Often, dead. So he understood what it would do to Leena, who was one of the most powerful Mageus he’d ever known.
Keeping to the shadows, he calculated his chances of getting Leena away from the men. He could take one down easily enough, even with his leg as it was, and the poisoned blade in his cane could do well enough on the other, but the third? There wasn’t time to go back for Nibs, not that the boy would be much help in a fight.
“Hold her up, boys,” the leader of the three said. “I want to see the fear in her eyes—filthy maggot.”
The two men pulled Leena upright and one gave her a sharp smack across the cheek.
Dolph’s blood pulsed, his anger barely leashed. But he forced himself to stay still, to not rush in and ruin his one chance of freeing her.
Still, seeing another man touch her, harm her . . . His knuckles ached from his grip on his cane. To hell with destroying the Brink. He would destroy them all.
He crept through the shadows until he was almost directly above them. ?Already he could feel the cold energy of the Brink. Unlike natural magic, which felt warm and alive, the Brink felt like ice. Like desolation and rot. It was perverse magic, power corrupted by ritual and amplified by the energy it drained. And like all unnatural magic, it came with a cost.
This close, every ounce of his being wanted to turn and flee. This close, he could feel how easily everything he was could be taken from him. But he wouldn’t let anyone touch her like that again.
The man who spoke lifted Leena’s head by her hair. “There you are,” he said with a laugh when she opened her left eye to look at him. Her right eye was swollen shut. “Do you know what’s about to happen to you, pigeon? I bet you do. I bet you can feel it, can’t you?” The man laughed. “It’s what maggots like you and your kind deserve.”
Leena’s eye closed. Not a betrayal of weakness, Dolph knew, but to gather her strength.
That’s my girl, Dolph thought as Leena muttered a foul curse. Then she opened her unbruised eye and spit in the man’s face.
The man reacted instantly. His hand flew out, and Leena’s head snapped backward at the force of the blow.
Dolph was already moving. He hoisted himself up onto the railing and busted the streetlamp with the end of his cane. Like prey that sensed a hunter nearby, the men below went still as the light went out, listening intently for the source of the disturbance.
“What are you waiting for?” the leader shouted, breaking their wary silence, but his voice had an edge of nerves to it that wasn’t there before. “Drag her over.”
The men didn’t immediately obey. As they hesitated, their eyes still adjusting, Dolph switched his patch, so he could see with the eye already accustomed to darkness. The bridge below now clear and visible to him, he dropped soundlessly from the walkway above. He ignored the sharp ache in his leg as he landed on the leader, knocking him to the ground and plunging the sharp blade concealed in the end of his cane into the man’s calf. The man let out a scream like he was being burned alive.
That particular poison did have a tendency to sting.
As the leader continued to scream, Dolph turned to the next man, but he was already struggling against some unseen assailant. With a sudden jerk, he went still, his eyes wide as he slumped to the ground. Jianyu appeared, seemingly materializing out of the night, and gave Dolph a nod of acknowledgment as they turned together to face the third man.
The only one left seemed too paralyzed by fear to realize he’d be better off running. He was holding Leena in front of him like a shield.
“Leave me be or I’ll kill her,” he said, his voice cracking as he blinked into the dark.
Dolph stepped steadily toward them as Jianyu circled around the man’s other side.
“You were already dead the moment you touched her,” Dolph murmured when he was barely an arm’s reach away.
The man stumbled back, and Leena took the opportunity to struggle away from him. But he was too off-balance and his hold was too secure. Instead of letting her go, the man pulled her with him as he stumbled back, away from Dolph and toward the cold power of the Brink.
Without thought for his own safety, Dolph reached for them, but his fingers barely grasped the sleeve of the man’s coat. The fabric ripped, and the man—and Leena—fell backward into the Brink.
Dolph knew the moment she crossed it, because he felt her surprise and pain and desperation as keenly as if it were his own. The night around them lit from the magic coursing through her, draining from her. She screamed and writhed, her back arching at a painful-looking angle. Her arms and legs went stiff and shook with the terrible power that held her.
The man holding her screamed as well, but not from the Brink. When she began convulsing, he dropped her and ran, disappearing into the night of that other shore, where Dolph couldn’t follow.
But Dolph’s eyes were only for Leena. He watched in helpless horror as her body shook with the pain of her magic being ripped from her. He moved toward her, pushing past his own bone-deep fear of the Brink, but when his fingers brushed against the icy energy of it, he couldn’t make himself reach any farther.
“Leena!” he shouted. “Look at me!”
She slumped to the ground, drained but still moaning and twitching with pain. He could no longer feel her affinity.