Chapter 16 #2
Before I can apply the paste, he catches my wrist. His grip is unyielding.
I look up at his feral, black-eyed gaze. “Kol, you’re bleeding. You need—”
He doesn’t even look at his own chest. He releases my wrist and jerks his chin toward the wounded warriors groaning on the floor.
“Them.” The projection hits my mind. It is an absolute command. I blink, swallowing hard.
I push down another lump in my throat, turn my back on him, and step seamlessly into the terrifying void Alex left behind. For the next three hours, I do not stop moving.
“Hold him,” Mira barks, pointing to a lean warrior who is bleeding freely from a serrated shadowmaw bite on his calf.
I press my hands down on his thick thigh, using my entire body weight to pin his leg to the stone as Mira applies the stinging paste.
The warrior flinches, his body jerking against my hold, his muscles locking in agony.
Kol steps up directly behind me, his enormous shadow completely swallowing the warrior. Immediately, the warrior stills.
I lean in, dropping my face level with the injured warrior’s.
“Do not move that leg,” I say, my voice a dead, dangerous monotone. “Either you hold still, or I ask Pam to sit beside you and sing the entire soundtrack to Les Misérables, and considering her current emotional distress, it will take at least three hours. Choose.”
He might not understand the words, but he understands the tone. He freezes, his amber eyes wide, darting from my exhausted expression to the wrathful warlord looming directly over my shoulder.
Across the cavern, Pam is kneeling next to Kelvan. She glances over, catches my eye, looks at Kol, and silently mouths: He should be afraid.
Mira’s cracked, blood-stained lips twitch for a fraction of a second. Nobody laughs. The situation is too horrific. But the air in the immediate vicinity eases just a little bit.
It’s the scream that shatters the temporary quiet.
It is piercing, raw, and hysterical. It comes from the far side of the sick bay, where I just left Trecia recovering.
I drop the firebloom paste and sprint. Kol is instantly right on my heels, an inescapable avalanche of muscle.
Trecia is backed into the deepest corner of the rock wall, her knees pulled to her chest. Her eye is wide, unblinking from beneath the bandages wrapped around her face, and devoid of sanity. She is screaming.
A towering shadow falls across her.
Sorn.
He is standing three feet away, holding a waterskin in one hand and a bone needle in the other. He is covered in shadowmaw blood, his chest heaving.
Trecia’s good eye is wide, tracking the seven-foot Drakav, his blood-soaked skin, the dangerous shape of him in the dim light.
Sorn takes a hesitant half-step forward. He extends his hand, offering the waterskin. The dim light catches the sharp glint of his thick claws instead.
Trecia flinches. Her scream pitches higher, shattering into a suffocating shriek. She scrambles backward, pressing herself so hard into the stone wall that I am terrified she will snap her own spine.
Sorn doesn’t just stop. He recoils.
His broad shoulders curl inward, his features warping with absolute distress. He takes a staggering step backward as if she physically struck him, and then he turns and disappears into the dark of the upper tunnel.
I drop to my knees in front of Trecia, purposefully blocking the space where Sorn had been standing. Kol drops into a crouch right behind me, his shoulder brushing mine, forming a silent, impenetrable guard against the rest of the cavern. I keep my hands low, visible, and still.
“Trecia,” I say, my voice soft. “It’s Erika. Look at me.”
She doesn’t. She stares right through me, her entire body shaking so hard the hide wrapping around her head is slipping.
“You’re safe.” I try to project absolute certainty into the empty void of her gaze. “He’s gone. The bad one is gone. You’re safe.”
I repeat the words. Over and over like a mantra. Slowly the continuous scream breaks into panicked sobbing. I reach out and wrap my hands around hers. They are ice-cold.
I sit there on the bloody stone, just holding her. This isn’t something that can be fixed with firebloom paste.
The screams stop. The silence that follows is thick with blood.
The dead shadowmaws are dragged out. Warriors are bandaged and tended to. The women need stability and to know tonight they’ll be safe. Water needs to be filtered, meat roasted, and the sick bay needs to be cleaned.
I don’t sit down. I don’t rest.
Neither does Kol.
He shouldn’t be walking. A wet, grinding sound rattles in his ribs with every breath he takes, the starfield having almost completely swallowed his golden skin now. But he does not rest either.
I grab a clean, damp scrap of hide from the supplies and scrub the worst of the gore off my own face, neck, and arms. Once my skin is raw but clean, I spin around and do the exact same to him.
He stands motionless while I wipe every trace of dried blood from his heavy jaw, his fracturing collarbones, and his chest. The deep, jagged claw gouges on his left shoulder are still wet with dark blood, and I press the hide against them as gently as I can.
He doesn’t pull away when my shaking hands press too hard against his ruined ribs to clean his skin.
He simply watches me with pitch-black, unblinking eyes, his heat a constant weight exactly two inches from my face.
I step toward the tunnel entrance and a huge arm bars my path. He plants his feet like stone pillars, physically cutting off my line of sight to the harsh daylight outside.
I spin on my heel.
“Kol.” I tilt my head back, glaring straight up into his face only to stop dead in my tracks. A lump rises in my throat as I look up into those pitch black eyes. He doesn’t blink. A warning growl vibrates continuously against my sternum.
“Sit down,” I demand. “You’re bleeding. Your bones are fracturing.”
He doesn’t speak. Instead, his sprawling hand snaps out, grabbing a thick fur discarded near the fire pit. He throws it over my shoulders, burying me under the pelt.
“I’m sweating,” I say, shoving at the dense fur. “And I’m not the one bleeding.”
His calloused hands clamp over my shoulders. He wrestles the fur in place, his thumbs swiping across my collarbones. The intense heat radiating off his skin sinks through the pelt, straight into my shaking bones.
“We have to check outside. There could be wounded warriors—”
His black eyes track frantically over my face, as if searching for fresh violence. As if searching for Alex’s fate on my unbroken skin.
“No.” The projection drops into my skull like an anvil and I frown. How am I hearing him? This isn’t the first time that—
“Erika.”
Jacqui is standing ten feet away, her face smeared with a mixture of sand and dried blood. She is dead-on exhausted. But her gaze is razor sharp.
“I can’t check outside,” I tell her, my voice rising. I gesture at the looming wall of black-skinned muscle caging me in. “He won’t let me within thirty feet of a tunnel.”
Jacqui stares at me. “Stop.”
“I can’t stop. There could be men bleeding out in the dust out there—”
“Erika. Stop.” Jacqui closes the distance and grabs my wrist. Hard. “Stop moving. Just stop for one second.”
I clench my jaw.
“You’re shaking,” Jacqui says flatly. “You’ve gone white. You’re about to drop.”
“I’m fine.” The words crack down the middle.
Jacqui squeezes my wrist. “Go sit down.”
The back of my throat burns. The cavern suddenly feels devoid of oxygen.
“Later,” I choke out.
“I’m holding the main floor,” Jacqui replies, dropping my arm. “Go.”
I turn abruptly. Kol moves with me instantly, his searing heat snapping back into the center of my periphery. I keep my chin tucked to my chest. Past the central fire pit. Past the blood-soaked sleeping mats. Into the suffocating dark of the rear tunnel.
A narrow fissure splits the rock wall. I wedge myself inside. I hit the jagged stone back-first, sliding straight down until my knees crack against the dust. Kol fills the entrance. His broad shoulders block the cavern light. We are sealed in absolute blackness.
Both my hands slam over my mouth.
My chest heaves. Hot, blinding tears pour out, cutting fresh tracks through the dust and blood caked on my cheeks. I shake hard enough to rattle my own teeth.
“Alex,” I choke out against my palms.
My lungs refuse to expand. The oxygen will not come.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp, my brain short-circuiting. “I should have been faster. She’s gone, she’s gone—”
Kol watches me. He is bleeding from a deep claw gouge across his ribs. He is swaying on his feet, the black starfield actively burning out the last of his gold patches.
But his black eyes do not leave my face.
Then he drops to his knees.
His sprawling hands flank my waist. He hauls me bodily off the stone, dragging my numb frame squarely into his lap. My face smashes into the solid, ridged wall of his chest. Thick arms instantly wrap around my back, consuming me.
His skin is a literal furnace but the heat is comforting. It sinks directly into my freezing marrow, overriding the frigid air of the deep rock. Overriding the fear.
I bury my forehead into the curve of his shoulder.
He shifts, forcing his dense thighs tight against my hips. He rests his jaw squarely on top of my head, locking his face into my hair. The thick column of his throat begins to vibrate.
A low, continuous rumble kicks up deep in his chest.
The purr travels straight through the starfield skin, into my ribs, into my blood.
The panic behind my eyes instantly shatters. My shaking stops. My pulse slows, dragged down by force to match the rhythmic thud of his heart.
The friction of his thighs bracketing my hips sends a sharp, brutal spike of arousal dropping straight to my core.
My brain is screaming that we are sitting in a devastated cavern. My body ignores it, focusing solely on the dominating, feral heat vibrating against my stomach.
I press my face into his thick neck, wet tears soaking into his starfield skin.
He holds me so tight my ribs ache with his every breath.
“We’ll get her back,” I swallow the words against his throat.
He doesn’t lift his head. He shifts his jaw, pressing his forehead hard into my collarbone.
“Yes.” The projection hits my brain.
The small stone he gave me presses into my hip through the fabric of my pocket.
I am done fighting this planet. I am done fighting everything. I close my eyes. I breathe in the dark musk of his skin. Because there is only one word I have for him, too.
Yes.
His arm abruptly tightens, pulling me higher against his chest, as if picking the thought straight out of my blood.