"Heal her," Silas demands as Everett lowers Maven onto one of the sickbeds, adjusting the blanket with shaking hands to cover her naked upper half. "Now."
The healers exchange glances but quickly gather around Maven to look for signs of injury. Their proximity to my mate sets off my dragon's temper, and he lashes out against my control, wild and savage.
Mark her. Claim her. Covet her.
I grip the side of my head as splitting pain rocks through it, trying to fend off the shift he tries to force. The stupid lizard doesn't understand that now isnotthe fucking time to pin Maven down and mark her as mine. I really need to kill something before he strong-arms me into crossing her lines even more than I already have. Or worse, if he forces me to shift when I'm too close to her and she ends up getting hurt.
When the agony of refusing a shift finally recedes from my muscles, I see one of the healers reaching towards Maven and snap, "Don't fucking touch her. She doesn't like to be touched."
"We have to check her vitals. I promise we'll be very careful with her."
That promise doesn't help. I'm still filled with distress when the healer checks for her pulse, a frown pulling at his lips. He then leans down as if to press his ear to her chest, which has my dragon seeing red.
But before the healer can make contact with Maven, the Nightmare Prince emerges into existence beside us, grabs both healers by their necks, and vanishes in the blink of an eye. So do they. And when Crypt reappears from Limbo, both healers are dead. One still has his eyes frozen wide open in acute horror as if before he died, he saw shit that broke him. The other looks like he was slashed to threads and bones.
It all happened so fast that I'm still processing. Everett looks equally stunned, but Silas snarls, "What the fuckare you doing? We needed them to help Maven, you psychotic bastard!"
Crypt kicks aside one of the corpses, his face murderous as he stalks toward Silas.
"No, what areyoudoing? Where's your overdeveloped sense of paranoia when we need it? She told me to let no one heal her. It wasn't a polite suggestion, Crane. She must have a reason to avoid the healers here, so I don't fucking trust them. You shouldn't have, either."
"I wasn'ttrustingthem. If they made a wrong move, I would have killed them just as quickly," Silas seethes. "But now look at her. She's notbreathing, Crypt—she has no godsdamned pulse! My magic refuses to interact with her, so what are we going to do now? Did you think of that before killing people who could have potentially helped her?"
I go numb. Maven isn't breathing. She has no pulse. Which means…
"He made the right call," a gentle voice says, interrupting their furious argument.
We all look over as a familiar white-veiled figure steps forward, entering the old gothic chapel from a concealed entrance near the old pew. I blink at the sight of the prophetess who was at the Seeking, realizing she must be one of the people from Galene's temple that Iker Del Mar had mentioned would be here.
What was her name again? Pay-Pay? Pie?
"Prophetess Pia," Everett greets her, his tone formal but guarded. He glances at the dead bodies on the floor. "About this?—"
She waves off his concern with an elegant, white-gloved hand. "As I said, your incubus made the right call. I fear they would have learned something about your keeper that would have been reported to the Immortal Quintet right away. Now, step away from her. I will take it from here."
It's odd not to see her face under all that white fabric. But even though I'm wary as hell about this mysterious prophetess, my inner dragon goes uncharacteristically quiet and calm as sheapproaches, as if he has no problem with her being around our mate.
Fine. I'll trust the asshole's judgment for now. But if she harms a single fucking hair on Maven's head, there will be one more corpse bleeding on the ground.
Pia laughs lightly, her head turning in my direction. "A guard dragon, are you?"
Fuck.
She's a mind reader—or a seer. Something like that.
The others must come to the same conclusion because Silas grips his bleeding crystal tighter, and Everett stiffens. The Nightmare Prince's eyes narrow as he watches Pia sit on the bed beside Maven, her hands hovering over my mate's chest but making no contact. A faint light radiates around Pia's hands, but otherwise, there's no obvious magic happening.
"You have no aura," Crypt notes in a precarious tone. "Every living thing has an aura."
She doesn't reply, moving her hand over Maven's head. We all watch in tense, perplexed silence. Finally, Silas rounds the bed to see Maven's face better, and his brow furrows.
"You said the healers would have learned something about her and reported it to the Immortal Quintet. What did you mean?"
Pia's tone is gentle. "You already have your suspicions about her nature. And the incubus is much closer to the truth."
My gaze darts to Crypt. "What the hell is she talking about? What do you know?"
Crypt doesn't even acknowledge my question. Clearly, he's not about to tell us anything.
