Page 226 of The Huntress and The Four Horsemen

Pollock listens as if I am recounting some sacred epic with hands clasped behind his head. His gaze occasionally turns to take in the emotions covering my face. At times, the faintest smile touches his mouth, but also a frown when I speak of danger.

Hours pass unnoticed.

At some point, sleep claims him. I follow not long after, entering a dream state where I find my Eliora waiting for me.

I’m not sure how much time passes, but when I wake, it’s all at once. It is not from sound, but a shift. A bone-deep sense of wrongness and the scent of copper in the air. That of blood.

My eyes snap open to find Nexus standing at the shattered window, her head poked through. Her breathing is ragged, each inhale hitching as it costs her something.

For half a second, my mind refuses to understand what I’m seeing. Then I move. I am off the bed before I am fully upright, crossing the room in three strides. My bare feet slide through something warm.

My hand finds her neck. It comes away slick. Dark. Sticky.

Blood sheets down her side, dripping from her to the hardwood in thick, steady drops. The curtains are stained with it. The floor is painted. The air metallic.

Deep gouges mar her hide — wide, jagged furrows torn through flesh as if something enormous tried to carve her open. The wounds are not clean, not natural, and were definitely not made by anything that walks this Earth.

“She’s been attacked.” My voice sounds distant.

Eridessa is at my side instantly. Pollock is right behind her. Eridessa’s fingers clamp around my arm. She asks me something in a panicked voice I do not have an answer for. Nor can I answer the question Pollock throws out an instant later.

“Where is Lila?”

“Why isn’t she healing?”

Dread coils low and heavy in my stomach. Nexus lowers her head toward me. Her pale eyes—those impossible, luminous eyes—plead with mine.

My throat tightens. She should be healing. The fact that she isn’t has dread coiling low and heavy in my stomach.

Testing what I barely understand, I press both palms to the largest wound. Heat stirs beneath my skin. I also turn to my brother as I draw my powers to me and tell him to use his gift. “Search her mind. Find out what happened to the woman she was carrying when she fled here days ago.”

Light fractures outward beneath my hands, thin at first, then brighter. I force it forward, channeling life, my life, into her torn flesh, and pray to God that this works.

To Be Continued…