My teeth grit against the agony of the effort. I push and push and push until the current I’ve created washes me and the beast held in my daggers onto the rocky beach. We wash up next to Phantom, and I roll off the thing, flopping onto my back and heaving air into my lungs in great hungry gulps. I close my eyes for a second, but Phantom is there, licking my face.
“Get up now, Eloise. Now!” my Grams’s voice snaps.
I obey, but it’s difficult. My ribs hurt, and I’m bleeding from the back of the leg. Something hot oozes over my chin, and I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. Blood. My nose is bleeding. I’ve overused my magic. That explains the dark spots circling in my vision.
Fighting the urge to lie back down. I lean over the thing that attacked me, bracing myself on its side. The closest to anything from earth I can compare it to is a salamander if salamanders grew as large as whales. Two tusks protrude from its lower jaw. That must be what impaled the back of my leg.
I plunge my dagger into its belly, praying that I’m right and the earring is inside the beast and not on the floor of the lake under where I met this thing. I cut and cut and cut. Guts pour out around my feet. Quickly I open the creature’s stomach.
The earring washes across the stones in a burst of fluid.
I slide both my daggers back into their sheaths and snatch it from the rocks. The dark spots swirling in my vision grow larger. I sway on my feet.
“Hurry, darling!” Phantom urges.
The star archway forms only a few feet away from me, and the fox tugs me by the pant leg toward it. On wobbling legs, I sway toward the opening and launch myself over the threshold.
Back in the silo, there’s a collective gasp from the observers when they see me and I toss the earring into the box in front of Lazarus. I don’t see Valeska.
“Did I win?”
The floor bends up to slap my cheek, and then everything goes dark.
35
Heart of Darkness
DAMIEN
I smell the blood before I see it. Eloise stumbles through the archway and tosses my mother’s earring in the box. She’s beaten Valeska back to the silo, but something’s wrong. Blood streams from her nose, and her face is white as ash. More blood pools around her bare feet. Where are her boots? Why is she soaking wet? And where is all that blood coming from?
She collapses to the stone just as her name appears on the mirror, declaring her the winner.
As the vampires who’ve bet on her howl in victory, I break apart and re-form by her side. “Eloise? Eloise?” She’s too pale. There’s so much blood.
She doesn’t respond, but she’s still breathing, thank the gods. I move to pick her up, and the hand I scoop under her knees meets gushing blood. With some repositioning, I locate the source—a puncture wound in the back of her left thigh—and set her down again. Tearing a strip off the bottom of my shirt, I make a tourniquet for the wound. Thank fuck her nose seems to have stopped bleeding on its own. Another bloody spot under her rib reveals itself to be from an abrasion and not an open wound.
Lazarus’s already-wide eyes seem to pop out of his head as he leans over us both. “She needs a healer, Damien!” he whispers.
“Where?” Night Haven’s healers practice vampiric medicine. She needs a human doctor. But according to the old law, we’re not allowed to leave Night Haven.
Lazarus shakes his head. He doesn’t know. Panic flares behind my breastbone. It can’t end this way. I can’t lose her like this.
Marabella appears in front of me, shaking me by the shoulders. “Get her back to the house. Now!”
“She’s hurt. She needs a doctor,” I growl.
The madam rolls her eyes. “There’s one at the house, Damien. How do you think we care for forty human women down here?”
The second archway flashes and Valeska steps through, grinning with the earring in hand. I don’t wait around for what happens when she finds out she’s lost. I take off for Marabella’s, flying through the palace, through the marketplace, and up the stairs into the house.
“The doctor,” I scream at the woman manning the front desk.
Alarm sparks in her eyes when she sees Eloise, and she points to a plain white door at the end of the hall behind her. I hug my mate to me and carry her through a waiting room of vampires whose fangs drop and nostrils flare at the scent of her blood. When I reach the unmarked door, it’s locked. I move to kick it down, but Front Desk Girl runs up behind me with her badge.
“Sorry.” She opens the door for us, and we all go through. “Dr. Everline! There’s an emergency!”
A squat human woman in a lab coat saunters around the corner, takes one look at Eloise, and thrusts her coffee into Front Desk Girl’s hands. “In here, man.” She gestures wildly at an examination table through a set of automatic doors.
