Page 5 of Cast in Shadow (Drenched in Darkness #1)

5

“Med team! I need a med team!” Charlotte bellowed as she ran. She glanced through the glass wall separating the conference room from the hallway, locked eyes with me, and skidded to a halt. “Senna!” She pounded her bloody fists on the glass once. “Thank fuck.”

The woman was drenched in crimson. It painted her auburn hair and her pale neck, and gave the front of her black tactical gear a gruesome shine.

I moved quickly out the door and followed her back the way she’d come. “What happened?” A new drip of adrenaline seeped into my blood, heightening my focus until I picked up the weak pulse of dying magic coming from down the hall.

“Smith needs help, fast,” she breathed.

“Give me a summary.”

We rounded the corner, and I had to push through the urge to pause and take in the scene. There was so much blood.

“We were extracting the shifter girl when we were attacked. I swear to gods, Senna, half the damn pack came after us.”

Brody glanced up at me from the floor, looking every bit like a warrior, with streaks of deep red smeared across his tanned face. Then he looked down at the young man in his arms. “He lost consciousness about five minutes ago.”

Which meant he couldn’t shift to start the healing process himself.

I sank to my knees and pressed my hands to either side of Smith’s head, wincing at the knots forming beneath his black curls.

My magic went to work quickly, pouring out of me and into him, finding and assessing the damage. I didn’t care about the scrapes or bruises, or even the obvious concussion. All of that would heal on its own once he could safely shift. My magic in this instance was purely triage. I needed to find the most serious damage and do what I could to repair it.

Closing my eyes, I sent another pulse through his nervous system.

It would have been so much easier if my magic worked the way it did in movies. If I could just lay my hands over the cut or broken bone and let it go to work.

In reality, my magic was energy-based, and this part worked best through the nervous system. That meant starting at the head was the quickest way to get things moving, even when I could see the blood leaking from Smith’s middle.

The moment I found the worst of the damage, I opened the gates and let my power flood through his system to that spot. His body ate it up, absorbing it so quickly that I had to fight to keep it from creating a vacuum and sucking the power from me to heal itself.

This was the point in healing where things got tricky. If I lost control of the connection or let him take too much, he could drain me dry. It wouldn’t kill me. At least, I’d never come that close with it. But it could take me out of a fight and leave me bedridden for days .

I eased back on the flow, narrowing it to a steady stream without letting Smith’s system pull everything it wanted. Even with that, the drain was coming on fast. The wound to his abdomen was life-threatening, but it wasn’t just the blood loss that would kill him. It was the damage to his liver. If I couldn’t get it healed before the bile spilling from it poisoned everything around it, he was as good as dead.

I directed my magic to that singular point, opening the flow incrementally, until I felt the last bit of liver tissue repair itself. Then I got to work on the blood loss. By the time the med team loaded him onto a gurney and wheeled him off, I was already fading.

I fell back against the wall, breathing hard, doing my damnedest to stay conscious. “Shay?”

She kneeled in front of me. “Yeah, boss?”

“I’m going to need a little help.”

She grabbed me by the wrists and hauled me up. I wavered once I was on my feet, but she was there to steady me. “You need to lie down.”

“Not yet. I need more on what happened with the shifter mission. Where’s the girl?”

Brody shook his head. “We got her clear of her pack, but then she took off. We didn’t follow because…” He motioned to the blood soaking the hallway floor.

That was the right call. “We need to send someone out to look for her ASAP. If the pack finds her, they’ll drag her right back to the alpha, and there’s no telling what he’ll do to her after our interference.” Black spots dotted my vision, and I leaned more heavily on Shay.

“Brody,” she groaned with the effort to hold me up.

“Sorry,” I said weakly. I wanted to ask why the team hadn’t radioed in when they were on their way back. We easily could have had the med team on standby waiting for them. But my muscle control was slipping from my mental grasp.

Brody moved to my other side, looped my arm over his shoulders, and they half carried me down the hall.

“Where to?” she asked.

“Conference room,” I managed to get out. The words were slurred, but even though I sounded drunk and could feel the drag of my eyelids wanting to close, I was alert. It was a maddening feeling.

They followed orders without arguing, lowering me gently onto the stiff brown leather couch at the back of the long room. That was all it took. My eyelids slipped closed, and I slumped into a familiar paralytic state.

It was always a strange experience, being awake and aware without being able to open my eyes or move my body. I could hear everyone talking and moving around me, feel the pulse and flow of their magic, but I couldn’t do anything.

My body was effectively shut down.

Thankfully, my mind was still whirring with all the new developments. We needed to find the girl and get her somewhere safe, far out of reach of her pack. I also needed to find Megan Navali.

My original plan was to lock the witch up until we could strip her of all her non-essential magical ability and put a block in place so she could never practice again. Now that she’d crossed the killing line, putting her down was at the top of my list.

Then there was Emerson. Not to mention Theloneus and everything with the Brethren. Was Megan the reason Emerson was in my city? Or was he there for something else?

My thoughts circled like that for a while as I absorbed the conversations happening around me. Nguyen and Dennis walked through the mission debrief and communication failure with Charlotte and Brody, but only Shayla took the time to talk to me directly. Bless her heart. They all knew that I could still hear and think when I was in this state, I’d explained as much more than once, but she was usually the only one who addressed me.

In the end, after things were settled and the others had made their way back to the infirmary or up to their personal quarters, Nguyen hauled me into his arms and carried me out of the room.

It grated on me that I couldn’t do anything to help anyone when I was in this state, which was why I usually tried a hell of a lot harder to use my healing magic sparingly on others. It was tough to stick to that rule with my teams, though. Their safety was my responsibility.

The ding and hiss of the elevator doors opening let me know we were on Lexa’s private floor in the hotel. We all had rooms up here, each with our own private spaces where we slept, ate, fucked, and generally lived our lives when we weren’t downstairs or out on missions.

The organization had no official rules against fraternizing. With what we did, having someone you could celebrate with when you pulled off an impossible mission, or someone you could vent to when it blew up in your face, was one of the many keys to survival. As long as everyone could act like adults and continue to work together if the relationship went to hell, I wouldn’t deny my people the opportunity to find some comfort within our small circle.

Me, though? I’d never been tempted to fish from the company pool. Even with Nguyen.

In truth, I hadn’t really been interested in sex since Emerson. I’d tried. Half a dozen times in a hundred and thirty years still counted as trying, thank you very much. But all the awkward fumbling and groping just didn’t do it for me, and I’d put a stop to each encounter before we’d ever made it close to sex.

Emerson had ruined me in that respect. The way his touch lingered on my skin could stay with me for days, and no one made me feel anything even remotely close to what I’d felt with him. Of course, that obsession had nearly gotten me killed. That probably had something to do with my aversion to connecting with someone else on that level.

Luckily, with the arrival of the modern age, along came batteries, and vibrators, and a variety of truly clever stimulators that helped me keep my physical cravings at bay.

Don’t get me wrong, there were still nights when I ached for rough hands and rougher sex, but I was getting by just fine on my own.

Nguyen laid me on my bed, took off my boots, and covered me with a throw without a word, but he didn’t leave right away. His rustic magic was hard to miss. I could feel it permeating my space, and the musky scent of his powerful bear was unmistakable.

At least he kept his distance. He’d never stepped even a toe out of line when it came to my wishes not to get involved. Not since the night a decade earlier when he’d tried to kiss me, and I had politely shut him down.

He still watched though.

His longing tinted the air from across the room, and I could picture him leaning against the door frame, watching me in the darkness. A few moments later, with a heavy sigh, he left, locking the door on his way out.

Then it was just me and my thoughts.

It was the kind of downtime I normally would have used to brainstorm and plan, but my mind kept circling back to Emerson. Every time I imagined his blue eyes and big body— the way his heat soaked into me like the warmth of a fire on a cold night—an unwelcome need coiled tighter inside me.

The ache that started with his voice in my head earlier in the night flared back to life, but there was nothing I could do to ease that ache until my magic recovered.

Still, my mind wouldn’t listen. It conjured images of him from the past and concocted new visions of us together in the present day. I desperately wanted to scrub those thoughts from my brain, but they played on, driving my need higher, until the ache in my core grew to the point of pain.

I was writhing inside, torturing myself with dreams of things I could never have, unable to even touch myself for release. When the frustration was enough to make me want to scream, like I might burst into flames right there in my bed, Emerson’s familiar warmth washed over me again.

I felt hands on me that I knew weren’t there, sliding down my neck and chest, and dragging across my hard nipples in just the right way.

My heart twisted.

I can’t do this.

I tried to block him out, but all my defenses were down.

Soft lips chased a line down my abdomen. The sensation was so real I could feel the warmth of his breath on my skin. Except Emerson wasn’t in my room. I was sure of it, because I could also feel my clothes and the weight of the throw Nguyen had used to cover me. But gods be damned, he’d still found a way to get to me.

Rough palms scraped up and down my thighs. The jerk of having them shoved apart was so fucking real, and a second later, the ghost of a tongue raked up my center. I wanted to cry out—needed to—but my body was still locked up tight.

That didn’t stop his invisible touch. Thick fingers ran along my soaking core before sliding into me, filling me in a way that had me torn between the pleasure they promised and how wrong this felt.

Need built with each torturous press of those fingers. He found the spot inside me that lit me on fire, and worked me up and up, his fingers dragging along my inner walls, fanning the flames.

Not like this.

I tried to fight the growing inferno. Hate burned brightly inside me, but that wasn’t the worst of it. No, the worst was realizing why I was so desperate to make him stop. It wasn’t that it was wrong. It wasn’t that I didn’t want it. It was the tiny flicker of truth lurking in the darkness: I wasn’t sure I could feel him like this again and survive another lifetime without him.

But my body refused to see reason. Another deep press, another flick, and my orgasm consumed me. A ripple of power pulsed out of me into the darkness. My eyes snapped open the next second. I felt the scream clawing up my throat and managed to swallow it down to a groan, barely, grinding my teeth so hard my jaw ached. But I had no defense against the tears. They burned, hot and wet, making the shadows in my dark room waver and dance before spilling down my cheeks.

When I could finally move my limbs a few endless seconds later, I tore the blanket off and wrenched myself up, swinging my shaky legs over the side and clutching the edge of the bed even as my body throbbed with my fading orgasm.

“I hate you,” I whispered into the darkness, letting my head hang.

Was I talking to Emerson or myself?

Did it matter?

Either way, I sure as hell wasn’t expecting a response.

I got one anyway. Just a tiny, barely-there brush of soft lips across the back of my neck that may as well have been a dagger to the heart.