“I’m takin’ you to the truck,” Silas was saying, lifting me in his arms again. I was naked from the waist up, trembling and sweating and shaking in his grasp, but none of that mattered anymore. Modesty had been burned away in the fire of this moment—like everything else but pain and prophecy.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, not sure if I meant it for him or for myself. “It’s okay, I deserve it?—”
“No,” Silas growled. “You don’t deserve this, you don’t—Goddammit,June, stay awake.”
I was trying.
But everything felt…distant. Like I was floating just outside of my own body, watching him carry me out the door, down the dark hallway and into the night. I could feel the gravel crunch beneath his boots. I could smell the sweat on his skin. I could hear him muttering prayers or curses—or maybe both—under his breath.
“I got you,” he said. Over and over. “Igotyou, June, stay with me—don’t you close your eyes, baby, we’re gonna get you help.”
He laid me across the truck’s bench seat and slammed the door, yanking the keys from his back pocket with tremblinghands. His face was bloodless. His breath came in ragged pants.
“You’re gonna be okay,” he said again, though now it sounded like he was trying to convince himself. He slid into the driver’s seat and gently rested my head on his lap. “You’re gonna be fine.”
I believed him.
Even with the pain surging up my arm. Even with my vision going dark at the corners. Even with the terrifying knowledge that I might not make it to a hospital before this poison carved its way through me.
I believed him because I had to.
Because it washim.
And as the truck roared to life beneath us and Silas floored it onto the road, gravel flying in our wake, I thought:
The snake didn’t come to kill me.
It came to mark me.
To claim me for whatever was coming next.
CHAPTER 8
Silas
I tookthe curve too fast.
Gravel spat under the tires as I gunned it past the turnoff for the county line, heart hammering in time with the rise and fall of her chest—if I could even call it that. June’s breathing was shallow, wet around the edges. I could feel her burning up in my lap, her bare skin slick with sweat, her pulse fluttering beneath my fingertips like a caged bird.
“C’mon, baby,” I muttered, voice breaking. “Stay with me. Just a little longer.”
The dashboard clock said 8:43. It was forty-five minutes to Perry if the road stayed clear and the truck didn’t give out. That was all I had to work with.
Forty-five goddamn minutes and no goddamn backup.
I grabbed my phone—which I’d thankfully left in the truck in my haste to get June into bed. I fumbled to unlock it, nearly driving into a ditch when the screen blurred. Somehow, I managed to jab the call icon beside Rhett’s name at the top of my contact list.
He picked up after one ring. “Hey?—”
“Put Willow on,” I demanded.
There was a pause, then his voice sharpened. “Silas? What’s wrong?”
“Put her on,” I barked, the words scraping my throat raw.
I heard scrambling, a muffled exchange, then her voice—calm, cautious. “Silas?”
“She’s been bit,” I said. “June…a rattlesnake fuckin’ bit her. She’s burnin’ up, can barely breathe, I don’t know what the hell to do?—”
