"Just missing someone," I mumble, feeling weak for admitting it.
"Who?"
"Lillian. She was my caretaker. She…kept me sane."
She did a hell of a lot more than that. Lillian was my teacher, guardian, confidante, and the only person I had in my life for a long time. Amadeus put her in charge of my upbringing when I turned five years old, and she was the only stable thing I had to anchor myself to. Without her, I would never have made it this far.
Not seeing her these last few weeks has been weird as fuck.I worry about her, especially because Amadeus knows he can use her to threaten me.
Crypt starts to say something, but a sudden burst of splitting pain in the center of my chest makes me choke, squeezing my eyes shut as I grip the edge of the table. I try to keep myself composed, but I can barely breathe as the familiar agony starts to expand in my chest.
Fuck.
Horrible timing, as usual.
But unlike usual, I'm not dealing with this alone. A warm, gentle hand squeezes my thigh.
"Crane," Crypt rasps. "Get her out of here while we create a diversion. Come on, dragon."
"On it."
"Maven?" Kenzie says, worry coloring her tone. "Is she okay? What's going on?"
What's going on is that my insides are imploding, and oxygen has ceased to exist.
I'm abruptly in someone's arms. Blinking my eyes open, I can vaguely make out that Silas has me in his lap, his jaw clenched tightly as he appears to be waiting for something.
"May, are you?—"
"Don't draw attention to her," Silas warns Kenzie quietly.
I hear Baelfire snarl nearby and blink blearily over Silas's shoulder in time to see the dragon shifter send Crypt flying into a table. Food flies everywhere, and glasses shatter. Students yelp as they try to get out of the way.
"Fucking asshole!" Bael roars dramatically, effectively drawing the attention of every legacy in the dining hall.
Crypt picks up the nearest chair and throws it at Baelfire. It smashes to pieces against his back, but the dragon shifter is barely fazed as he tackles the Nightmare Prince, destroying another table while nearby legacies scramble away. Several pissed-off hirelings approach, shouting at them to knock it off.
In the chaos and destruction, Silas lifts me up and races from the dining hall, taking the nearest exit. Two legacy hirelings posted outside the door yell after us, telling him to stop. But a blast of white fills my vision before suddenly, Everett is right behind Silas.
"Do you have it?" the professor demands as they turn a corner.
Have what?My world is turning watery.
"Yes. Let's pray this works."
Silas shoulders his way into one of the school bathrooms, his panic-stricken scarlet eyes dropping to me. I want to tell him to calm down since this happens all the time, and it's really not that fucking big of a deal, but the acute pain is making my vision darken, and I have no air to speak with.
He passes me to Everett, who cradles me like I'm made of spun glass. Silas reaches into a pocket void, a common spell thatstrong casters use as an invisible storage space. He withdraws an elixir bottle full of colorless liquid and…a giant fucking needle.
Oh, joy.
In general, needles don't bother me because they're too much like miniature rapiers for me to not like them—but I was constantly injected with experimental magical mixtures for months on end while Dagon was toying around with my biological makeup. If Silas plans on sticking me with that thing, I'll make sure it ends up in one of his gorgeously taut ass cheeks instead.
One of them says something, but the words are too warped to make out. Finally, everything fades away as my soul falls out of this plane of existence.
There are no images sent from Amadeus this time. Just cold oblivion.
My condition made itself known immediately after I entered the mortal realm. The first time I expired and revived like this, I assumed it had something to do with the necromancers getting too ambitious when creating me. There's only so much a human body can take when being turned into a monster, so I decided it was just a fluke in my design.
