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Now her eyes seemed to have trouble focusing. While she mulled it over, she grabbed the whiskey bottle and filled her own glass. “You think it’s not fair?” she asked.

“Iknowit’s not fair.”

“Do you know what I think isn’t fair?” she said. “That there are scarcely a thousand of us left, while there are billions of humans.Billions. They’re like those cicadas earlier. There’s so many that each creature is worth very little. The Infernari are only culling from humans because there’s an imbalance.” Seeing my unamused expression, she added, “I have nothing against cicadas. But you don’t worry about cicadas, do you? You only worry about the rarest creatures... creatures you would callendangered.”

To compare people to cicadas...

I wanted to shout at her, but I held back. She didn’t understand.

“Try losing the two people you love most in the world,” I said, working my jaw, “try doing that, Lana, and tell me every life isn’t precious.”

She held my gaze. “You think I haven’t lost the people closest to me? My father—dead. My mother—dead. My native clan—wiped from existence.

“But it’s more than that,” she continued. “Being a healer... Every time an Infernarus falls, it hurts... right here.” She pointed at her heart. “I’m connected to all Infernari through their blood; they areallfamily to me, and no, I can’t imagine what losing a mate must be like—I haven’t been mated yet—but there were years during the civil war where I thought I would die of grief. To me, Infernari are everything; they are precious, they are my soul and blood, and I would die to save them... like you would for Nicole and Joy.”

I stilled at their names.

She had never spoken their names before. I hadn’t even realized she knew them.I’dnever told her.

Brad must have.

Strange that she remembered when she didn’t even remember what the A stood for in USA... she remembered the names of my wife and daughter.

That realization sat strangely in my stomach.

“You know,” she continued, “your ancestors used to make blood sacrifices to us; they used to worship us. We were gods to them.”

She was talking about the Aztecs, the Incans, the Germanic tribes of Old Europe. “Yeah, and those civilizations got wiped out for a reason.”

“We alsocaredfor them,” she said. “We were like shepherds, you were our flock.”

“So you were slaughtering us like sheep,” I muttered.

“Infernari die if they don’t use magic,” she said. “For us, it’s like breathing.”

We were at an impasse.

She was terrified of losing the last of the people she loved. I had already lost mine. But we were the same, too.

“You said you’re connected to Infernari through blood? What do you mean?” I asked.

Her hooded eyes took a moment to focus on me, now showing the alcohol. “Their blood flows in my veins, my blood flows in theirs—so when I heal myself, I’m really healing them.”

“So that’s how you do it at a distance?”

“Uh-huh.” She sucked on the rim of her glass.

“You share blood... What, always?”

She eyed me. “Only when I want to,” she said enigmatically.

“So you’re bound to protect me, you’re bound to protect your species... tohealthem...” I trailed off, unable to look away from her sad eyes, which flickered under the lights like iridescent abalone shells, matching the faint glimmer of her hair. The background murmur of the bar suddenly fell away—leaving just us, just me and this beautiful creature, alone in our own little bubble of grief.

Bound to each other.

“And you want to kill my species,” she finished for me, “which means my only hope—”

“Kind of a Catch-22, huh?”