“I think so.”

Her eyes opened as I took her cold hand. The pupils were fully dilated, scaring me. I wasn’t sure if it was from head trauma or my fear. The circle of people around us whispered, and when a smile of satisfaction edged over her pain, panic took me. “Ivy?”

Her hand squeezed mine, and she moved her legs, wincing as she straightened them. She could move, and I remembered how to breathe.

“Marsha and Luke are gone,” Jenks whispered as he hovered by my ear.

Like I freaking cared?

She was trying to sit up, and I gingerly helped her as the heat from the stopped car bathed us. “Little fish,” Ivy said, hair coming out of the bun as she held her middle. “They weren’t after them. Oh God, I think I cracked a rib.”

“Don’t move,” I said, stiffening as a siren lifted into the air. “The ambulance is coming.”

“No hospital.” Her black eyes fixed on mine, and she went whiter still as she tried to take a deep breath. “No safe house. I’ve been marked.”

Marked? Her gaze went to the pain charm around her neck, and she gripped it tight, shocking me. She never used my magic. Avoided it. “You need a hospital,” I said, and she hissed in pain as she tried to turn her head.

“No.”

“Ivy, you were hit by a car!” Jenks had dusted her cuts until they were only a slow seep, but her eyes were dilated and she hadn’t taken her other hand off her middle.

“Cormel,” she said softly, hatred temporarily overriding her pain. “I told you Marsha and Luke weren’t worth all of this. I wasn’t supposed to walk out of that apartment alive. That charm was aimed at me, too. He wants me dead . . . so you . . . will figure out how to save the souls of the undead. The car was a last effort to salvage their plan before going back with failure.”

My heart seemed to catch, then it raced as I looked at the surrounding faces for anyone watching too closely—their eyes holding fear. Ivy moaned as she breathed in my alarm, but I couldn’t let go of it. I couldn’t distance myself. The lethal charm had been aimed at all three of them. If I hadn’t been there to break it, Ivy would be dead and I’d be getting a call from the second-rising morgue.

“I don’t want to become a dead thing,” she whispered, then clenched in pain. “Rachel?”

I closed my eyes. Ivy groaned, her pain doubling as my panic pulsed through her, bringing her alive even as she struggled to stave off death. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t be her scion. But I knew I would if it came to that. Cormel had grown tired of waiting for his soul. If Ivy was dead, me finding out how to return the undead their souls would move way up on my to-do list.