31. Chapter 31
31
W hen Maxwell sucked in a rattling breath and turned his head toward her, a flare of hope burst in Rebecca’s chest.
It died the next second as he coughed with a wet, spluttering sound and a spray of blood erupted from his open mouth. He gasped for air again, and groaned. “I…”
“Stop.” She finally brought herself to reach toward him again. “Don’t talk. You’ll just make it worse.”
“I don’t think it can get any—” Maxwell coughed again, the blood now speckling his lips and dribbling from the corner of his mouth.
“Stop talking, Hannigan,” she snapped, almost feeling like she’d regained her wits and control of her own body so she could deal with this. “That’s an order.”
The light in his silver eyes sputtered as he gaped up in her in surprise. She hoped it wasn’t in pain. After what she’d just watched, Rebecca couldn’t imagine his nerves were working the way they were supposed to. Pain receptors experienced the numbing effect of shock, just like the mind, but if he was feeling it…
She couldn’t think like that. Not here. Not yet.
With no idea where the worst of the damage was, Rebecca settled her hands gently over his chest and hoped it was the right place. “Just hang in there. I can fix this. You hear me? I’m gonna fix this.”
Like she knew he would, her Head of Security obeyed her orders even now and didn’t say a word. But the way he stared at her, the light in his eyes already fading and his mouth slackening more by the second, told her what his words didn’t have to.
He didn’t believe she could fix this. He was ready to give up.
Rebecca refused to entertain the idea he’d already seemed to have accepted. Not while there was still something she could do about it.
Weapons fire continued all around them, though the constant rapport had lessened, the sizzling crackle of conjured magic and spent attacks having faded in the air. Rebecca ignored it all, even as vehicles screeched and groaned, Shade operatives shouted at each other, and the air filled with terrified cries and wails of agony.
The only thing in her awareness now was Maxwell lying beaten and bloody and broken on the ground in front of her.
She had to fix this, She had to save him. She would accept no less.
Centering her focus on his body beneath her outstretched palms, she called on her Bloodshadow magic to help her do what she couldn’t on her own.
Maxwell’s chest rose and fell in short, wheezing bursts with the telltale wet crackle of fluid caught between each inhale and exhale, and still, he stared right up into her eyes. Unblinking. Unflinching.
As if she could still pull him back from the brink and it would be as if nothing had happened.
Her Bloodshadow magic flooded through her, shooting from her core and racing down into her hands before the deep golden light of her special brand of healing came to life in her palms. Then came the heat—the searing burn of her lineage doing what it did best to eat away at the damage and the death as if that were what sustained her.
But the rest of it never came.
No crackling stench of burning flesh beneath her hands. No charred skin. No agonizing pain of death and decay giving way to repurpose itself into new life and vitality.
In mere seconds, the golden glow in her palms faded and sputtered out.
“No…”
This couldn’t be it. There had to be more. She knew there was more.
She’d tapped into it once before, and those wounds had been far deadlier than Maxwell’s.
But she hadn’t managed it alone that first time decades ago, and she couldn’t do it alone now. Even for Maxwell. The damage was too great. A shifter’s inherent healing alone could never work quickly enough to undo all this in time. She needed more.
“Rowan!” she screamed, still hovering both hands over Maxwell’s chest and fighting desperately to bring up the Bloodshadow healing she knew could set this right. “Rowan! I need Rowan! Somebody fucking find him, now !”
“Rebecca,” Maxwell wheezed, the words muffled through thickening blood bubbling at his lips as he held her gaze.
“I told you to shut up,” she barked, far more harshly than she’d intended, but she would hurt the shifters’ feelings and his pride a thousand times over if it meant saving him from this.
She couldn’t lose him. Not now.
“Rowan!” she screamed again while more golden light sputtered beneath her palms but failed to do what she wanted. Failed to be enough.
Pounding footsteps approached her from behind, followed by a sharp, hissing inhale.
“That was a mistake,” Rowan blurted. “I never meant to—”
“Help me,” she snarled, refusing to pull away from Maxwell’s gaze for fear it would be the last time he ever looked back at her. “He won’t make it if you don’t help me!”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course. I’m here.”
Fighting back the tears she knew would come if she let herself think of anything beyond the very small chance she still had to make this right, Rebecca took a deep breath and steadied her hands over Maxwell’s chest, refusing to look away from his silver eyes already fading dangerously while Rowan knelt in the dirt behind her.
Then she felt the heat of Rowan’s chest pressing up against her back before his arms snaked around her waist on both sides, but he didn’t hold her. No, that wasn’t the point of this.
Instead, he stretched his hands out along either side of her until the gentle grounding and unbearably powerful weight of his palms settled atop the backs of her hands.
Powerful and unbelievably tempting, the heat of his palms and his arms around her promising something that could no longer be hers and hadn’t been for over a century.
When Rowan finally stilled around her, she knew he was ready.
She called on her Bloodshadow magic again, tapping into it deeper and more powerfully than she ever had but for the one time she and Rowan had worked together just like this. To save a life.
The Bloodshadow Heir’s unimaginable force strengthened, fueled and intensified by the Scion of the Blackmoon Clan. Two starkly contrasting powers unifying as one to create what neither of them would ever be capable of creating on their own.
The first stage of that damned prophecy that had sent all the elders of the Tha’rossa Clans into a zealous frenzy when they realized its fulfillment in their youngest generation. In Rebecca Bloodshadow and Rowan Blackmoon together.
The power only Rowan had surged around Rebecca and through her, his chest now like a furnace against her back, his palms on her hands like blazing coals.
He gave her everything she needed for this, and she took it without hesitation. Without shame. Without resentment of the past or fear of the future.
This was the only way, and she wanted nothing but for this to work the way she knew it could for Maxwell. To save him.
She was nowhere near ready or willing to let him go.
With no more than a shift of her thoughts turned toward her Bloodshadow healing, the deep golden glow returned to Rebecca’s palms, lighting up Maxwell’s unevenly rising and falling chest as he struggled to draw breath into his failing lungs.
She wouldn’t look away from him. She couldn’t.
She couldn’t let him go. She would not see the cost of her failure.
She watched him like this, holding his gaze as her magic—mingled with Rowan’s to be strengthened by it tenfold—coursed through her and into the shifter.
Her hands grew unbearably hot as their golden glow brightened to an almost blinding degree, illuminating the outline of Maxwell’s body until it grew beyond even that, rendering him invisible beneath the blazing glare.
Then she felt her healing magic pouring into him, burning away the brokenness that could never be undone. But it could be pulled away to reveal and call forth the newness and the life beneath.
Maxwell grunted, his eyelids fluttering. Then a low growl escaped him as the heat in her hands continued to build until it was now on his flesh. Burning into him, layer by layer, to strip away shredded muscle and shattered bone. All of it burnt and flaked beneath Rebecca’s power until the shifter’s growl morphed into a vicious snarl.
And still, Rebecca kept going.
The scent of charred flesh and singed hair and burning fabric filled the air around all three of them like a smoky shroud.
The worst of Maxwell’s injuries burned away, sloughing off his body in dry and blackened flakes, already having singed clean through his shirt to leave behind nothing but charred, tattered rags.
She thought she heard the shifter screaming beneath her magic. Then again, it could have been Rebecca screaming. Or Rowan.
It didn’t matter now, anyway. There was no stopping until this was finished. Until she knew she’d done whatever it took to save him.
Then, as suddenly and surely as she’d known Rowan’s power was there to help her begin, she knew now that it was over. That it was finished. She’d done all she could, and there was nothing more.
The golden glow in her palms winked out like a burnt-out light bulb, bringing with it the return of her awareness.
Maxwell cried out, though whether in pain or relief was unclear. It didn’t matter.
Rebecca might have cried out too before she dropped her hands into her lap, her muscles trembling from fingertip to shoulder blade.
Rowan gasped and fell away from her, scrambling off to the side as if he could no longer bear to be so close to her after such a thing.
The last few wisps of acrid smoke tinged with the horrifying scent of cooking meat rose from Maxwell’s chest before dispersing into the air.
When Rebecca came back to herself enough to realize it was over, that she’d done everything she could, she nearly threw herself at the shifter lying there motionless, his eyes closed and his shirt nearly burned away. Only new pink, healthy flesh exposed. No more gaping wounds. No more blood. No more deadly injuries she hadn’t seen before and couldn’t see now.
“Hannigan?” she panted before reaching out to gently take his face in both hands. “Come on, talk to me. I know you’re there. Come on… This isn’t it.”
He didn’t move, but Rebecca couldn’t accept that was all she would get for her efforts. That this was the end for him. For them .
“I know you’re in there,” she whispered, leaning over him with his face in her hands until their noses were inches apart. As if she could see through his body and into him. “I know you’re fighting it. You’re not done. I won’t let you be done. Maxwell, please …”
The raw, desperate gasp when he finally drew breath—his chest expanding fully without the gurgle of punctured lungs and internal bleeding—almost made her cry out in relief.
“Thank you,” she murmured breathlessly, then finally lowered her hands from his face.
When his eyes fluttered open, the silver glow within them was brighter and more full of life than she’d ever seen. His gaze settled on her and captured her all over again in their intensity.
A sharp laugh escaped her when she reached toward him, meaning to examine him not for signs of what she’d missed but for proof that she’d succeeded, then immediately thought better of it.
They weren’t alone. Rowan was still here, and there were surely others watching by now too.
Why did it even matter what anyone else saw right now, when, if she and Rowan had been a second slower to act, Maxwell Hannigan probably wouldn’t still be here at all?
She couldn’t answer that question, but she was more than content to accept this major win despite how close they’d just come to utter defeat.
“That was…different,” Maxwell said through a grunt.
More tears burned behind her eyes, threatening to well up. For a moment, Rebecca was tempted to let them, but they weren’t completely in the clear. Not yet.
She was still Shade’s Roth-Da’al. They were still on mission, and there was still plenty more to do before the night was over.
Still, she couldn’t help a wry, exhausted smile. “If anything still hurts, you better tell me what it is right now.”
Maxwell licked the blood from his lips and looked surprised to taste it there.
“Everything still hurts,” he croaked, “but whatever you did…”
“It was worth it. And I’d do it all again.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, and that was when she knew—with more certainty than the sensation of her magic healing him from the inside out could ever give her—that he would be okay. Eventually. Given time.
She’d pulled him back from the brink, at the last second, and he would be okay.
Rebecca couldn’t tell if he reached for her hand first, or if she reached for his, but the shocking jolt of this still unknown connection between them flared to an almost painful intensity as their fingers connected and intertwined.
By the Blood, at this point, nothing else fucking mattered.
Nothing else existed. Rebecca was content to leave it at that and stay in this moment for an eternity, just like this.
But of course, it didn’t work that way.
She started when another weight settled on her shoulder, gentle and hesitant but real and impossible to ignore.
Then Rowan’s lips were at her ear. “I need to talk to you. Just for a moment, Rebecca. Please.”
She recognized her own wildly disproportionate flair of irritation and anger after the Blackmoon Elf’s simple request, but knowing it didn’t change the severity of her reaction.
After all this, after everything he’d done to screw up their operation tonight in true Rowan fashion, after almost getting Maxwell killed , he now had the balls to ask her for a private chat now ? Seriously?