Page 60

From Bad To Worse

“Domina…”

I’m far down the hole of sleep—I haven’t slept well in forever it seems like, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open a second longer.

I sat with Reven the rest of the first day we returned from Tyndra and through much of the night, only to be shooed to my room by Tziah at some point. The next morning, I worked close to three hours trying to shore up the Shadows’ cage.

After that, I spent the entire day going flat-out. Mostly checking on my friends, but a good deal was also meeting with our viziers and leaders. For the most part, I’m being kept out of all the plans, but they still need to know what I can do to be part of various elements. It was an exhausting dance of questions with no rhyme or reason, and me trying not to let my curiosity win.

That’s why I don’t hear the first time someone attempts to get my attention. At most, I manage an annoyed frown and an unintelligible mumble, probably for them to go away. I’m too sluggish to specify. Somewhere in my mind I’m vaguely aware someone wants me awake.

But when that person shakes my shoulder and calls “domina” again, more urgent this time, the state I left things in when I fell asleep rushes back and I shoot out from under my thin layer of sheets to stand in the center of my canopied bed with both knives in my hands, ready to kill whoever has come for me.

The servant, Nhalin, stands with her hands up in horror, pale and trembling.

For a tension-filled moment or two that’s all we do. Stare at each other.

On a groan, I jerk my hands to my sides. “Don’t worry. You’re safe.” I slip my knives back into their sheaths while mentally kicking myself in a hundred different ways.

She’s still staring like I’m about to slaughter her and then go after her family, so I aim for joking. “That’s a new habit of mine I really should kick.”

I guess that’s not very funny, because she doesn’t laugh.

We look at each other for several uncomfortable moments before I sigh. “Was there a reason you woke me?”

“Oh.” She gives herself a visible shake as if she needs to wake up from a nightmare. “You asked to be notified if—”

“What happened?” Vos? Reven? Hakan? Tziah, at least, woke up before I tried to sleep. Or is Eidolon here? Or…

“The Shadowraith is awake.”

She hardly has those words out before I’m off the bed. I’ve taken to sleeping in clothes appropriate for combat, just in case, so I don’t have to bother with changing before I bolt from the room.

Reven’s awake.

He’s one suite down from mine—technically family rooms, not guestrooms, but this is my bondmate. He is family.

My hand is on the knob when Nhalin calls out, “Domina, let me at least announce you.”

“If you think I’m waiting to be announced you might want to seek a position with a different domina.”

A twinge of guilt hits for that one because it’s not her fault that I’m like this, and she does look a tiny bit stricken at my words. But at the same time, if she’s going to be assigned as my handmaiden then she’d better get used to me quick.

When I burst into Reven’s room, I fully expect to see him lying in bed, maybe a healer leaning over him. None of that is what I find. In fact, the room is completely empty.

I whirl on Nhalin. “Where?”

“I don’t know.” She looks around frantically as if he might manifest any second. “I went from here straight to your room when I was instructed to, and that was only moments ago.”

A guttural yell rends the air.

Oh, goddess. I know that voice.

“Vos.” I rush past.

Vos’s suite, one he’s sharing with Hakan, is only two more doors down, and the sound of agony only gets louder the closer I get. I don’t have to burst through the door because it’s wide open. Inside, I find out for the thousandth time what true pain looks like.

Vos is lying in a bed with only a sheet covering his bare body at the hips—a blood-soaked sheet. An Imperium woman I’ve never seen before stands over his left side where the gaping wound that used to be an arm now doesn’t look so much like meat that has been ground as it does meat that has been scorched. The buttery glow of her hands tells me she’s responsible for the change.

Reven is sitting at Vos’s side, his back to me, clasping his friend’s remaining good hand. Tziah paces back and forth, tears trickling down her cheeks and lips pressed together so tightly even her dark blue skin turns pale. Cain leans against the wall, looking a little green under his bronzed skin.

Pella, meanwhile, is seated in the chair next to another bed where Hakan still lies unconscious. Her knees are drawn up to her chest, her face buried in them with her hands pressed over her ears. Even over Vos’s screams, little whimpers can be heard escaping her. As an empath, she should not be in here. She has to be absorbing at least some of his pain. How is she making herself stay?

Vos lets out a particularly wrenching yell and every person in the room, me included, flinches.

“Why are you letting her do that to him?” I demand.

I’m halfway across the room when Cain surges off the wall to grab me by the arm. “Easy, Mer.” He tugs me to the side. “Vos will signal if he can’t take more.”

“Mother goddess,” I murmur, trying not to let the screams get to me, too, but they’re filling the room to the rafters. “This is…” I shake my head.

“It’s the only way,” Cain says. He slides his hand into mine and squeezes. “Vos was still losing too much blood. He had to decide between keeping his life and waiting for an Imperium healer on the off chance they could regenerate his arm. He chose this.”

“What is she doing?”

His gaze flicks over my shoulder toward the woman. “She’s forcing the wound to close. Sort of like what would happen naturally, only in minutes. Pain medication won’t help.”

I shudder. How is Vos withstanding that? “At least get Pella out of here.”

“She refuses to leave either of them.”

Stubborn empath.

Vos growls between gritted teeth. “It burns. It—” He goes silent, shaking with the effort to not scream. But the healing goes on.

A new anger bubbles up inside of me. None of this is fair. That this happened to Vos. That we have to be here at all. That everything I do just leads to more suffering.

I close my eyes against the emotion and will myself to settle. It doesn’t work. The choked sounds Vos makes echo through the darkness behind my lids and fans the flickering flame.

The sound of feet on the floor has me opening my eyes. Tziah has run over to the bed to shake Reven by the arm.

“No,” he says. Unrelenting. Emotionless.

She shakes him harder.

“No, Tziah. He hasn’t—”

Tziah hits Reven in the shoulder with a fist, trying to make him put a stop to it, but instead of shoving her away or growling at her, he stands up, putting himself between her and Vos, and lets her pound away ineffectually at his chest.

Cain drops my hand and shoots across the room, wrapping his arms around her from behind, pinning hers to her sides. His chin on her shoulder, he whispers words in her ear. I can’t make them out, but I can imagine. He’d do the same thing on nights I’d stormed into the desert in a whirlwind of emotion, even though I couldn’t tell him what was bothering me because of who and what I was. I’m glad he’s here to do the same for her.

Tziah doesn’t calm, exactly—more like she collapses into him. She makes no noise, because she can’t without hurting us and especially Vos, but her sobs shake Cain’s body.

Reven turns back to Vos, his voice steady. “I’m here, brother. I’m here. Hold on. A little longer. You can do this.”

I don’t know if he’s saying those things because he hopes that’s what Vos needs to hear, or if he remembers their friendship, thanks to the goddess. All I know is that underneath the horror of what Vos is going through, those calm, kind words dissolve my anger, leaving me with an aching heart.

“There we go,” the Imperium wielding her power murmurs. “Getting closer.”

We all peer intently. The blood flow has stopped and yet he’s still thrashing about. The woman snaps, “Someone hold him down, damn it.”

Instantly, bands of shadows wrap around Vos’s body, pinning his one remaining arm to his sides and banding his legs together, trapping him on the bed. Tziah turns and buries her face in Cain’s shoulder, unable to watch, while Vos’s shrieks are something only nightmares are made of.

Those screams abruptly cut off and he goes limp, head lolling to one side.

The Imperium woman sighs. “He passed out,” she says. “Thank the goddesses.”

“You might want to consider who you’re thanking,” I say, bitterness at the root of my tone.

“Not now, Meren,” Pella barks.

The force of her words snaps my spine rigid with hurt and guilt. Pella and I have a thing, but it hasn’t been angry or mean in a while now. She’s right, though. Now is not the time.

Thankfully, it doesn’t take the Imperium long to finish what she’s doing after that. Although it doesn’t look all that finished to me when she drops her shaking hands and says, “Done.”

Sure, the wound is closed now, flesh drawn up taut over the stub of his shoulder like a drum, but his ebony skin bubbles and folds over itself in ways that don’t look right. Worse, there are patches of white mixed with patches of angry reds and purples through which I can see pulsing veins, as if they’re close to the surface. I’m afraid he’ll start bleeding again at any second. That wound isn’t healed all the way.

“If you have a way to keep him sedated for the next day or two, do it,” she says. “By then, his remaining pain should be manageable.”

The woman looks just as green as Cain did when I came into the room. No doubt she’s going to have to rest quite a while after that. Tziah sits on the edge of the bed, staring at Vos’s face as if he might wake up any second, and Cain stands by her, hand on her shoulder. Pella lays her head on Hakan’s bed. It’s up to Reven to shake the woman’s hand. “Thank you for your service today. Have you been paid?”

She nods.

“Then please go with our gratitude and rest.” He nods at Nhalin, who takes the woman from the room.

I realize as they go that I’m shaking with emotions—a whole jumble of them I can’t even begin to pick apart. It wouldn’t help anyone in this room to see it.

Pushing away from the wall, I edge toward the door. “I’ll just go check on Tabra,” I say, hitching my thumb in that direction.

I pause in the empty hallway to close my eyes and breathe through my nose and tell myself that my friends are going to be okay. That me losing it isn’t going to help them.

“Hey.”

I open my eyes to find Reven standing there.

“You’re awake,” I say. Then wince, because that’s obvious.

He smiles a little, but it’s reserved.

“You look like you’re okay?” I say next. I should have asked sooner. Goddess, why am I so bad at this? What I want to do is wrap my arms around him, but I don’t think he’d want that, so I force a calm I’m far from feeling.

“I’m fine.”

“What did she do to you?”

He grimaces but pulls it into a crooked smile. “Gave me a big damn headache is what.”

Which isn’t an answer. “She told me she was fixing your memories.”

Reven goes eerily intent at that. “She did?”

I nod. “She said it would take time.” I search his face for any hint of what’s going on in his head, but he’s giving me nothing. “Do you remember anything at all yet? I mean, you only just woke up.”

He’s slow to answer, thinking it over, but almost like he’s choosing what to tell me. “I remember being shed the first time. Vos and Tziah. Getting them to the Shadowood. It’s like watching it all in flashes.”

Remember me faster. I don’t say it out loud. It wouldn’t be fair to him. “You should rest.”

He shakes his head. “I’d rather come with you.”

Why don’t I trust it? Is he only out here to keep close and make sure I’m not being overrun by evil?

“Okay,” I finally say. And head off toward Tabra’s room with Reven prowling along beside me.