Hunted (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Six)

poison along its length, and these were pulsing and delivering more of the manticore’s evil shit into my flesh. I had to remove it before the poison overwhelmed my ability to break it down; I was barely keeping pace as it was, fighting to keep the muscles of my right side unlocked and my diaphragm from freezing up. I slipped into Canto V of
Purgatorio
, and the rhythm of it existed outside the pain and the contractions and the havoc being wrought on my system:
                  
Là ’ve ’l vocabol suo diventa vano,
          
arriva’ io forato ne la gola,
          
fuggendo a piede e sanguinando il piano
.
    Yes. In purgatory, souls burn away that which afflicts them and, passing through the crucible, become whole again. Bind the thorn to the back of the sofa and ignore the fact that you can’t blink or move your eyes and your throat is closing and your organs are edging toward failure.
                  
Quivi perdei la vista e la parola
          
nel nome di Maria fini’, e quivi
          
caddi, e rimase la mia carne sola
.
    And as the poetry flowed through that part of my mind, calm waters next to burning shores of my agony, I could concentrate on my goal and craft the proper binding, croak it past the swelling tissues of my throat, and feel the thorn retreat from my arm, flying a few yards to sink into the back of the sofa. The pain dipped for a brief moment, as a burn will when ice is first applied, but it returned soon enough, as the already savaged muscles on my left side tore and contracted and my tissues continued to swell. I could conceivably fight offthe toxin now and break it down if I had enough magic to fuel the healing, but I was running low and had to access the earth’s energy buried underneath the marble floor. Sticking with Dante but skipping to Canto IX, I recalled a passage that spoke of marble and sundered stone, an appropriate backdrop for what I wished to do.
    The marble floor did not have the same security bindings I had seen on the walls of the back bedrooms; it was plain marble, malleable to sufficient force, and that was probably because Midhir couldn’t imagine anyone trying to escape his pleasure dome. I spread out my hand, fighting its desire to curl into a fist, and focused my mind on the swirled-milk pattern underneath it. The marble was dolomite rock with very low silica content—primarily calcium-magnesium carbonate that I unbound in a microscopic area and then strived to reapply as a macro to a larger area the size of my hand. My voice gave out, however, and I coughed in the middle of the unbinding and had to start over. I gasped for breath and the pain nearly intruded into my calm headspace, but the poetry kept flowing.
    Trembling and wincing, I carefully tried again, and this time the macro took hold. The marble underneath my hand became brittle as it broke down into its component minerals, and I could pull it apart, chunks of calcium and carbon and magnesium. I had to reapply the macro binding one more time because the first hadn’t gone deep enough, and that drained my bear charm completely. Without magic to fuel my body’s war against the venom, the poison raged through my veins and I could feel it destroying me, burning and at once paralyzing. My muscles spasmed involuntarily and my giblets howled to me of their torture; I imagined I could hear my liver and spleen screaming a duet, taxed far beyond their ability to filter the blood. I clutched another handful of crumbling marble out of what was now a shallowhole, tossed it away, and managed to scoop one final handful before my fingers seized up completely and wouldn’t let go. At the same time my diaphragm locked in place, which meant I had already drawn my last breath.
    The bare earth was there, underneath my hand; all I had to do was supinate my forearm, twist my wrist so that the back of my hand could make contact and draw energy through my tattoos. But my biceps wanted to flex and curl my hand away. Shaking and twitching from the effort, I attempted to roll my wrist clockwise. The pull of my biceps actually kept my hand down in the hole, the meat of the palm braced against the edge.
    I strained but couldn’t do it—a simple rotation of the wrist I typically performed without thinking was now impossible for me with all my will put into it. But there was some give in a few of my longer muscles along the uninjured side of my back. I threw my left shoulder as best as I