Page 33 of The Bound Zodiac

The bond detonated in my chest. Every part of me flooded with magic so bright it washed out everything else. My veins ran molten white. My bones ached with it. My eyes went blind with it.

I felt all nine of them. Percy’s fury, Aiden’s hunger, Draco’s want. Eris splintered, doubling, slicing and refracting through my mind in endless mirrored lines. Lucas, a thunderstorm held barely at bay. Rowan, gravity incarnate, an anchor wrapped around my ribs. Phoenix, green and gold, warm, a heartbeat that ran beneath everything else. Jamie, oceanic, endless, sorrow and joy tangled up together. Theo, a blade of light, sweeping through the haze to heal the pain, the hurt, the want and the longing.

They collided in my head, and it was chaos, at first. Pure, unfiltered chaos. The raw, psychic violence of nine men trying to thread themselves into a mind that wasn’t meant to hold this much power.

But I held it. I fucking held it. I let the magic surge through me, burn me alive from the inside out, until there was nothing left but starlight and the nine silver threads winding around my heart and my fucking soul if that’s what it was. Sometimes I thought maybe there was a star hiding somewhere inside my body, burning hot and bright and begging for release.

Then, just as fast as the surge had come on, I felt them click into place one by one. Suddenly, it wasn’t chaos anymore. Those silver threads that had been wind and whipping seconds ago were now braided. Suddenly I could feel their shock. Their awe. Their hunger and hope and fear and all that ugly, beautiful want, need, obsession and... something that felt too much like adoration to dwell on for too long.

I opened my eyes, finding that the room was flooded with silver light, so bright that the elders had to shield their faces. My hair floated around my head like a dark halo, every strand tipped in starlight. My feet didn’t touch the floor.

It was impossible to breathe, but I didn’t need to. Every cell burned with power. And in that moment, every single man in that circle belonged to me, and I belonged to them, and I could feel the threads running both ways, through every inch of my body, through every inch of theirs.

I could feel their hands if I wanted to. Their lips, see through their eyes, breathe through their lungs. It was fucking intoxicating.

Starlight poured from my skin, flooding the room. The runes on the floor glowed white-hot. I heard someone curse. Somewhere, far away, I heard Malakai’s voice. “Let her settle it. Don’t interfere.”

I gritted my teeth and rode the current, letting the power burn through me, letting the threads tighten, white-knuckling my way through the worst of it.

A wave of heat crashed through my body making my back arch at a weird angle. Magic pulsed around me in waves, every one of them stronger than the last. The feeling was… fuck. It was like the best orgasm of my life, stretched out and layered with pain and pleasure so intense I wasn’t sure which was which.

My nine men in the circle groaned in unison as the magic punched through them, each one buckling, sweat breaking on their foreheads, hands shaking at their sides. I felt every single reaction in real time, each one echoing down the freshly-forged bond.

When the light finally flickered out, it happened suddenly. My feet hit the floor again, and the chamber went dead silent. I could taste blood in my mouth. Sweat ran down my spine. My body trembled with aftershocks. But I was alive. I was whole. And I was more powerful than I’d ever fucking been.

I laughed, then staggered, and immediately eighteen different hands shot out from nine different directions, catching me before I could fall. The circle collapsed instantly, every single one of them converging on me. Strong arms wrapped around my waist, hands bracing my shoulders, fingers tangling in my hair. I couldn’t tell who was touching me where. I didn’t care.

I could feel them in my head, so clear and bright it was like they were parts of my own body. I was going to cry. I was absolutely, one hundred percent going to have a hysterical breakdown right here in the middle of the cult chamber in front of a dozen robed strangers and the ghosts of a thousand years. How fucking embarrassing. Oh god, I needed to get it together. Noodle would never let me live it down.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

JUPITER

I didn’t cry. I wanted that on the record somewhere, carved into the stone of that chamber next to all the other ancient bullshit, because it took every single thing I had left in me and then some. What actually happened was that my knees gave out, and nine men caught me before I hit the floor, and I made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob and a swear word. Then, closing my eyes, I pressed my head against someone’s chest.

Phoenix. It was Phoenix. “I’ve got you,” he rumbled, caressing my hair with his palm.

“I’m fine…”

“Sure you are.”

“I’m extremely fine. I’m the…ugh… finest.” I wasn’t fine. Not at all.

‘She is not fine,’ Noodle echoed for all ten of us to hear. I felt the moment the Stardust shield jumped in surprise at hearing him in their heads for the first time.

Speaking of Nood… where was the little bugger? I was glad he wasn’t coiled around my neck. There was no telling what that surge of power would have done to him.

The sudden onslaught of thoughts and feelings wasn’t like the Nightfall bond. That bond had come on like a car crash, four presences slamming into me in a single violent instant the moment I woke up in the medical ward. This was a flood. Nine separate consciousnesses, nine distinct textures of thought, all of them pouring into me at once, and worse—so much worse—they were pouring into each other too.

Somebody’s memory of a childhood kitchen. Somebody’s memory of screams, of black writhing masses of dark matter, of a child’s laughter, a mother’s hug, and of somebody’s absolute, incandescent terror.

“Okay,” I said, out loud. “Okay, everybody shut up.”

Nobody had said anything out loud. I shook my head, as if I could shake the murmuring away.

“You have to shut them down,” said a voice at my elbow, and it was Tala, her dry warm palm sliding into mine. “Do not attempt to close them. You’ll hurt them if you slam the door shut and shove them out.”

“That is genuinely the most vague advice I’ve ever received.”