If there was some kind of malevolent will driving the Outsiders, it might have made a mistake with the Hungers.
Because ultimately, they needed mortals in order to exist.
And the more of us they ate, the more like us they would become.
The Hunger’s attention focused even more intently upon Thomas.
Done,it purred.
I closed my eyes, especially the third one, breaking the mental connection. Withdrew back entirely into my physical form.
Exhaustion hammered into me, weariness as thorough and nauseating as anything I had ever experienced. I staggered forward to a knee, my head spinning. Dropped my staff. Started crawling for the nearest edge of the greater circle.
And then my arms failed, too weak to keep holding me up, and I dropped onto my face on the green crystal.
My body didn’t want to do it, but I forced it to extend one arm, slapping my palm down on the stone floor. I dragged myself a few inches closer to the circle’s edge. And I did it again. And again. My whole world became that single, driving purpose. Get closer. And closer. While my strength faded.
And then Lara was there, blood slightly too pale to be human on her lower lip, one eye swollen from her impact with the chamber’s walls, hauling me up and getting a shoulder under mine.
“What do I do?” she demanded.
“Circle,” I gasped. “Get me to it.”
Lara dragged me the last six feet without hesitation, and I summoned up enough of my will to slam my hand down across the outside of the circle, shattering its containment.
There was a howl of energy unleashed, a wild torrent of wind. Theexpensive ritual candles were consumed utterly in a flash of flame that whirled and spilled up into the green crystal ceiling in a column of blazing light, disappearing into the stone with a thunderclap of cracking rock and a rattle of falling bits of broken crystal. The white shape of the demon on one side of the infinity symbol vanished, blurring back toward Thomas’s fallen, still form.
I didn’t know what was going on anywhere else. I didn’t have the energy to care.
“Thomas!” I sputtered.
Lara dragged me to him, set me down briskly but not roughly, flipped my brother onto his back, and felt for a pulse.
“Hunger is back in him, healing,” I gasped.
“No pulse,” Lara reported harshly. “He isn’t breathing.”
“Buy him time,” I said. “CPR.”
Before I’d finished saying it, Lara was checking his airway, tilting back his head, and started going to work on him, pinching his nose shut, sealing her mouth on his, exhaling heavily, then leaning back up and placing the stacked heels of her hands in the center of his chest. She did twenty or thirty solid compressions, then began again at giving him more breath.
CPR is physically demanding to do. Like, really,reallydemanding. You have to be in shape yourself to breathe and pump blood for two. You have to push not quite hard enough to break ribs, but hard enough to compress the heart and lungs beneath them and get blood oxidized and moving. For a minute, then two, then three, Lara kept it up like a machine.
Mab’s voice rang from the stone walls, sharp and clear, “Thomas Raith! Choose! Liveforthem or diewiththem!”
Tears started from my brother’s eyes.
He didn’t move, didn’t draw breath, but he could hear. He was exhausted and broken and dying, but he could still hear her.
“Thomas,” I said. “It’s me, man. It’s me.” I collapsed beside my brother and forced myself to place my right hand on the crown of his head while Lara kept working. God, I wanted to collapse. I wanted to sleep.
But not yet.
“Thomas,” I breathed, gathering up the scraps of my will, focusing them together, reaching out to make the mental connection with my dying brother. “Thomas,” I repeated. “Thomas.”
I felt a dizzying sensation as I reached out to bridge the space between Thomas’s mind and my own and found myself in near darkness, lit from above as if by a single, distant star, upon a surface of cold black stone. Steady, rhythmic thunder came from some unimaginable distance. Then a faint rush of warm wind.
Lara.
