I need to get rid of this, I thought. Find some way to eject all this essence before it built into something completely unbearable. As it was, I was starting to feel a little like I’d felt before the one and only panic attack of my life—jittery, andoff, and one small trigger away from falling apart.
Ary could clearly tell I wasn’t telling her the full truth, but she didn’t push it. She probably just assumed that I wasn’t dealing with the present situation very well—which was also plenty true.
“Well, come on then,” she said. “Let’s get you to bed for a little while.” She tilted her head, eyeing the boy. “Is he…?”
“His name is Jex,” I told her. And then, softly, “We don’t know where Jex’s family is right now, so I’ve been letting him stay with me.”
She nodded. “Talon will find them.” She stepped in front of me, crouching down so she was at eye-level with him. “Don’t worry, Jex. You’re safe with us in the meantime. Do you want to come back to our home for a little while? Get some food and some sleep while we look for them?”
The boy glanced up at me with his big, innocent eyes, almost as if he was silently asking for my approval. I’d never had anyone look to me as any sort of authority figure before, so I hesitated a moment before saying, “You should come with us. Of course.”
And that was all it took.
Somehow the three of us made it beneath the Hill to the crew’s lodgings without any of us collapsing from exhaustion. I told Jex he could sit on my bed while we found another mattress for him, but the moment he hit the blankets, he passed out, collapsing into what I prayed would be pleasant dreams.
“It’s all right,” I told Ary. “There’s plenty of room in the bed for me, too. Go get some sleep.”
She didn’t need to be told twice.
And I curled up next to Jex, brushing his dark hair out of his eyes before pulling a blanket up over us both.
But despite my exhaustion, sleep wouldn’t come.
Every time I closed my eyes, I just saw those dead, broken bodies. Heard the screaming and the weeping.
And theshiverinside me was relentless. I felt jittery. Like I’d just had half a dozen espressos. I couldn’t lie still.
How do I get rid of this?I fingered the pearls on my wrist, but I wasn’t going to risk taking them off and releasing some sort of uncontrolled blast.
Eventually, the shaking was so unbearable that I climbed out of bed. I needed tomove.To walk it off, or…I didn’t know. Just dosomething.
I paced back and forth across the small room, shaking out my hands in front of me. I made ten laps, twenty,fifty…but it didn’t work. Nothing worked. Theshiverstill rose and fell in waves, rarely reaching true pain but remaining consistently, agonizingly uncomfortable. Like the handful of times I’d experienced restless leg syndrome—only this was throughout my entire body.
I didn’t know how much longer I could bear it.
And just when I was about to scream with the relentless agony of it all, I heard familiar voices in the corridor outside.
The brothers.
I raced to the door and threw it open.
“If either of you evenconsider—” Octavian’s rumble cut off the moment his eyes landed on me.
Something’s wrong.I knew it the moment I looked at them. I could see it in their eyes, their stances…
My gaze raked over them—Octavian, Radven, Alastor—searching for injuries, for some physical indication of what had gone wrong, but they were all in one piece. Disheveled and bruised and even a little bloodied in places, but otherwise alive and whole.
“What happened?” I asked. “Did you find him? Did you…” I couldn’t even bring myself to utter the wordkill, not after all the death I’d seen tonight.
“We found Mordren,” Radven said.
“We should have killed him.” Octavian was practically growling. “We should have cut the bastard down before he even had a chance to open his mouth.” And I saw it, then, brief though it was—the glare he shot his brothers. Like he was mad atthemfor some reason.
“What happened?” I pressed again.
“Mordren has gone to make trouble elsewhere,” Radven said. “It’s out of our hands now.”
“He just…left?”
