Bryce

“Did that work? Bryce, are you awake?” I heard Thea’s panicked voice as my consciousness slowly came back to me. Everything ached and my muscles felt weak. It reminded me of the time that I had joined a new gym in college and pushed myself too hard in order to impress the attractive trainer I had been assigned. It hadn’t worked, and I was stuck in bed, barely able to move for most of the next day.

“Yeah, I’m awake… or getting there, anyway.” I answered as I slowly opened my eyes and took in the surrounding room. The walls were covered with posters of attractive people posing and bands whose names were written in an aggressive unreadable font. The bed I was lying in had a warm, silky-soft comforter and was covered in way too many pillows. It was definitely Thea’s, and speaking of the devil, she was sitting beside the bed in a chair with a worried look on her face. “What happened?”

“Rose asked you to lend her your mana, and you agreed, then she took it all with no regard to your health,” Thea explained.

I was about to ask how, but then I realized and let out a sigh as I dropped my head back onto the oversized pile of pillows. “Dryads are a type of fae.”

“Yeah, and not only did you drink her tea, you also ate her cookies, and then you made a deal with her,” Thea chided. “Bryce, a dryad doesn’t end up on the lower planes because she’s nice and friendly. We’re lucky she didn’t take more than just your mana.”

“I know, and I’m sorry that I didn’t listen to your advice,” I conceded. “It’s just that… I don’t know. I wanted her to like me, or at least trust me, and I knew that if I refused her offer, then that wouldn’t happen.”

“Babe, I don’t care what Rose thinks of you.” Thea’s worried expression shifted into a tentative half-smile. “Hells, I’ve never cared about what Rose thinks of anything. She’s Esme’s surrogate mother, not mine, and if she decides that you’re not suitable for me, then fuck her. I literally couldn’t care less. Besides, I…” Thea trailed off and the half-smile that had started to form disappeared entirely.

“Thea, what’s wrong?” I asked, turning onto my side to face her and reaching for the hand that she had been resting on top of the comforter.

“I think I’m going to kill Rose, or at least try to.” I was going to say something, but Thea exploded into a panicked explanation. “I don’t want to, or at least I don’t think I want to, but every time I think about it… I just remember how it felt seeing you fall the way you did and I just…” Thea slowly shook her head as she stared down into her lap and the temperature in the room rose steadily.

“Thea, look at me,” I demanded, and she hesitantly met my gaze. When she did, there was no sign of the mischievous golden light that usually hid in the darkness. Instead, her eyes were an inky black void that seemed all-consuming, and she was crying. “I’m right here with you. Do you understand? I’m not going anywhere. What Rose did, she did to protect Lilith, and she didn’t hurt me when she did it.”

“You’re lying. I can still tell, even when I’m crying.” Thea chuckled softly and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “She hurt you, Bryce. Even if she did it for a good reason, she still hurt you.”

It was true. She had hurt me. My meridians had healed from when Daelin poisoned me a couple of months ago, but the scars were still fresh and Rose hadn’t exactly been gentle when she drained my mana.

“But I’m fine now, and while I might be sore for a few days, I’ll recover. Besides, it’s like you said, Rose could’ve taken more than just my mana, a lot more. But she didn’t. Instead, she took the quickest and safest path to get what she wanted while leaving us behind to protect the manor.”

“The wards are up, it doesn’t need—” a loud crashing sound came from somewhere inside the building and both of us turned to look towards the door.

“What was that?” I asked.

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“I don’t know, it sounded like it came from downstairs.” Thea got up from the chair and cracked the door open to peer through. “I don’t see anything… wait here, I’ll go check.”

I wrestled with the pillows and blankets in order to climb out of the bed and follow her. There was no way I was letting Thea investigate alone while her emotions were this raw. She glared at me as I left the room before holding a finger to her lips to indicate that we should be quiet. I nodded, and we walked down the hallway to the top of the stairs to look down into the receiving area.

“I don’t see anybody, but it sounded like it came from the kitchen,” Thea whispered back to me. “Follow my lead and try not to agree to give them all of your mana.”

She smirked at my glare before carefully descending the stairs, and I rolled my eyes at her before following. Thea probably wasn’t going to let me live that down for a while, but I’d much rather have her teasing me about it than have her feel like it was somehow her fault. Especially if things went poorly when she inevitably confronted Rose about the whole thing.

When we reached the ground floor, Thea approached the closed kitchen door and looked to me. I nodded, and she slowly pushed it open. Only to reveal a familiar demon squatting on the ground while hastily putting pots and pans back into a cabinet.

“Wrynn? What the fuck are you doing in here?” Thea asked. The kid almost jumped out of his skin before hastily turning around to stare at Thea, wide-eyed.

“Ms. Thea! I thought you went with the others to rescue Ms. Lilith from Raith.”

“No, Bryce and I stayed behind to hold down the fort.” Thea glared at Wrynn. “Wait, how did you know that we think Raith has Lilith?”

He smirked back. “I didn’t know, but you just told me.”

“I did not!” Thea argued. “I just—wait, what were you doing in that cabinet?”

“Uh, which cabinet?” Wrynn closed the cabinet in question and pressed himself against it. “I don’t see any cabinets. Where am I? Is this the kitchen? How did I get here?” He was looking around in feigned wonder, and I couldn’t help but chuckle at the kid’s antics.

“You were getting into my stash!” Thea shoved the kid aside and opened the cabinet before reaching in to pull out a mostly empty bag of individually wrapped… chocolate bars? They were actual, honest to the gods, chocolate bars. “Dammit Wrynn, you barely left any for me.”

“You were gone! We all thought you were dead!”

“So you ate all my chocolate?” Thea asked, holding the nearly empty bag up to the boy. “You didn’t think that was like disrespectful or something?”

Wrynn shrugged. “Didn’t want them to go to waste.”

“Come here, you little shit!” Thea was about to jump at him, but then stopped short as we all heard the front door open.

“Are they back already?” I asked.

Thea shook her head. “They’ve barely been gone for fifteen minutes.”

Fifteen minutes? It should’ve taken significantly longer than fifteen minutes for me to regain enough mana to come back to consciousness after being completely drained. I quickly checked, and found that I was sitting at just over twenty percent, and something very important was missing.

“Thea, what happened to our pact?” I asked.

“I couldn’t adjust the amount of mana that you were giving me while you were asleep, so I had to end the pact in order to get you to wake up.”

Of course, the damn approval system I added after Thea kept complaining about me taking her mana away to gain an advantage during… well, during certain activities. It meant that if I wasn’t awake to approve the decrease, then she couldn’t give me my mana back in an emergency.

I quickly wrote up the same contract we had before, but adjusted that clause and set the current mana exchanged to ten percent. We could still request changes to the amount of mana Thea was receiving, but approval was optional and could be overridden.

Thea didn’t even read the contract before signing it and I felt the drain as my mana flowed into her.

“Wrynn, wait here until I say so. Don’t come out, no matter what you hear.” She pushed the bag of chocolate into the boy’s chest before stomping her way out of the kitchen.

“I’d recommend you listen to her on this,” I suggested. “If that isn’t Rose returning, then it’s probably bad news.”

Wrynn nodded wordlessly, and I recited the short incantation to summon my sword as I followed Thea out of the kitchen. What I found when I walked through the door made me regret not also reciting a shield spell along with about a half-dozen other beneficial enchantments. Because three demons and an honest to the gods ice elemental stared back at the two of us.

“Seriously, Pip? After all that we’ve been through together?” Thea asked, as she summoned her own sword and brandished it towards the insectoid demon. “I was already having a bad day, and now you're really going to make me kill you?”