Page 164 of Broken Souls

I need to hold her.

“Heal her enough to transport. She’s coming with us.”

White light flows around me. My wrists snap back into place. The bones shift back to where they belong. The rest of my wounds are fixed, but all I’m concentrating on is the fact that I can move my hands again. That I can hold my little girl before I’m taken away.

But just as my fingers are about to stroke her little head, Eduardo steps on my hand.I cry out, not from the pain of all my bones being crushed beneath his heel but because I know I will never get to hold my daughter.

I sob as he drags me away from her. I dig my nails into the floor, trying to claw myself back to her. She’s so small and alone.

She needs her mother.

She needs her mother!

But instead, I’m picked up by Antonio and hauled over his shoulder. I beat his back. I scream at him to let me go. I should be doing more. Fighting properly. But my strength, my ability to think clearly is all gone. All I know is grief.

Heart stopping, unsurvivable grief.

And then the world is gone as I’m transported out of the Shadow home.

Fifty-Six

HIM

As soon as the dome falls, Aleric phases me inside the house. I barely got a second to look at the war zone outside, but that was long enough to sear it into my brain. Over a hundred bodies littered our property. Werewolves torn to pieces by grotesque monsters before they themselves were eventually ripped apart. Dead plants lay all around them – so much death where it used to be picturesque. So much violation where there used to be peace. How could Micha have possibly survived?

Intense agony rips through me when Aleric lands inside Mother’s bedroom. I’ve phased half a dozen times in the last hour. My body’s screaming in pain, and I drop to the ground like a fucking stone. All my muscles are on fire. My bones feel like they’re constantly fracturing until they mimic the cracks in a window.

Aleric’s presence is that of a predator above me. You can’t be weak in this life. You can’t do anything that evenseemsweak.

You can’t cry. Can’t go to therapy. Can’t crawl on your hands and knees. But I don’t have the strength to get to my feet. So I crawl towards the heartbeat I can barely detect.

I do it without caring another Boss sees me.

I don’t care about his judgment. The embarrassment. I don't even care that this moment of weakness might mean he turns on our Family later, thinking it is there for the taking. I don’t care about the future casualties.

All I care about is getting to my wife as fast as I can.

I don’t have time to wait for the pain to subside.

So I dig my fingertips into the carpet and drag my spasming body across the room. I pull the door open and crawl through the hall. I push out my senses, trying to detect her heartbeat or just smell her blood.

I detect the latter. A lot of it. She’s near the basement stairs. There’s a heartbeat there too, but it isn’t hers.

Screaming in utter agony, I drag myself towards her presence. I can imagine her lifeless eyes as she lies in a stagnant pool of blood. I can imagine her eyes aren’t even there anymore, ripped out by the harsh rake of a claw across her face. I see her so broken and beaten, she isn’t recognizable to anyone but me. She’s been torn apart. Her chest plate ripped open. Her face gnawed off.

Those images curb stomp me in the back of the head. I drop my face to the ground and scream.

The pain in my muscles and limbs has been replaced with a terrible ache, an exhaustion that’s begging me to give up, to not force myself to see her body. Because deep down, I already know that’s what I’ll find.

Just a body.

Not my stubborn, sarcastic wife.

“Noooo!”

I push myself up. My muscles and bones protest, but I bite through the pain. A hand grabs my shoulder and pulls me the rest of the way to my feet. Ducking under my arm, Rudy helps me stagger down the hall.

More heartbeats flood around the house. One kneels down by the faint pulse that isn’t hers. Two more race down the stairs to the basement – Khalid and Leno no doubt, checking on their girl and dog who should hopefully be there. I can’t sense them through the magic of the ward.