Blood Bound Read Free Page B

squealed in protest.
    That second oath was our freedom. It couldn’t truly sever the ties binding us, but it prevented us from tugging on them. In the second oath, Anne, Kori, Elle and I had sworn never to ask one another for help, because once asked, we were compelled to do everything within our power to aid one another. Which, we’d learned the hard way, could only lead to disaster. And resentment. And expulsion from school. And arrest records.
    “I’m sorry. I really am,” Anne insisted, tucking one coppery strand of shoulder-length hair behind her ear. “I know you probably don’t believe that, and I can’t blame you. But I truly had no choice. Will you help me, Liv?”
    “Hell no, I’m not going to help you!” But as soon as I said the words, breaking my oath to her, the pain began. It started as a bolt of white behind my left eye, shining so bright that everything else seemed dim by comparison. When I closed my eyes, the light sent pain shooting through my skull, and in less than a second, it was a full-blown migraine. Then came the muscle spasms—a revolt of my entire body, the consequence of going back on an oath signed voluntarily and sealed in blood by a child who’d turned out to be the most powerful Binder I’d ever met.
    Defaulting on an oath sealed by an amateur—or even a weak professional—could put you in the hospital. Defaulting on an oath sealed by anyone with real power and/or training could kill you.
    First, your brain sends warnings in the form of pain. Migraines. Muscle cramps. General abuse of the body’s pain receptors. Then it starts turning things off, one by one. Motor control. Bladder and bowel control. Sight and scent. Hearing. But never the sense of touch. Never the nerve endings. They remain functional so you can feel every second of your body’s decision to self-destruct.
    I’m a little fuzzy on the order of betrayal by my own internal organs, but among the first to go are the kidneys, liver, gallbladder, intestines and pancreas, any one of which would probably kill you eventually. Then the big guns. If you hold out long enough, you’ll lose respiratory function, then circulatory. And without those, of course, your brain has only minutes— minutes —for you to try to think through the pain and humiliation and decide whether you’re going to stick to your word, or die breaking it.
    Most people never get that far. I’ve never gotten that far, as evidenced by the fact that my heart continues to beat, in spite of several times I would have declared it broken beyond repair. But everyone has a limit. A point past which you can’t be pushed.
    “Please don’t do this, Olivia,” Anne said, when my fingers began to twitch on my desk. A second later, my legs began to convulse, banging against the bottom of the pencil drawer, but I only stared at her through the ball of light in the center of my vision, breathing steadily through the pain. “I’m not going to take it back, Liv,” she insisted, leaning forward on the couch. “I can’t. Not this time. Will you help me?”
    Her repetition of the original request escalated the process, and I gasped at the pain deep in my stomach. I couldn’t identify it, but I knew what that pain meant. One of us would have to back down in the next few minutes, or the last thing I saw would be her bright green eyes, full of tears and regret, and her stubborn lips sealed against the sentence that could make it all go away.
    “ Please, Liv,” Annika begged, and this time her voice came from behind me. Water ran in the bathroom. A second later, she leaned my chair back and laid a cold, wet cloth over my eyes and forehead, and my hands twitched violently in my lap. “You don’t even know what I need you to do.”
    “Doesn’t matter,” I gasped, helpless to keep the rag from slipping down my face. Until I gave in to the compulsion to help her, I would feel nothing but the systematic shutdown of my entire body. But still I fought it. She had