“Jez—” Heath said again, tugging at me.
“Our pack is in there!” I yelled, directly in his face.
In the distance, sirens wailed.
His hands clenched convulsively around my shoulders. “We can’t get to them! That bomb brought the roof down—it’ll take search dogs and specialized equipment to find anyone buried under the rubble!”
My lips curled back in an ugly snarl. Inside my mind, an invisible, silken rope tugged me inescapably toward the destruction. “Ican find them! I can find Gage!”
“What?” Heath’s mouth worked silently for a moment. “Jez... no! That’s not how mating bonds work!”
I grabbed his forearms, my newly manicured nails digging into the fabric of his jacket. “I can find him!”
Still, he hesitated.
“Tony’s in there, too!” I shouted. “Goddamn it! If you won’t help, thenlet go of me!”
Heath’s hands released their grip as though I’d suddenly become red hot. I swayed, and would have gone down if not for my clasp on his forearms. He steadied me.
“Let’s go, then,” he said, his face deathly pale. “You’ll have to lead the way. I can only feel that Gage is hurt. Not where he is.”
We were still under one end of the damaged awning. It hadn’t come down on top of us, but getting back to the front doors required shoving through a section that had torn and fallen, draping across the sidewalk like a tent. Part of it was on fire. Heath once again covered me with his body, hissing in discomfort as we pushed past the smoky heat.
The power was out. Heath pulled out his phone one-handed and turned on the flashlight. One of the glass doors had shattered, while the other had blown half off its hinges. There was a gap large enough for me to slip through, broken glass crunching under my heels.
Heath cursed and struggled, forcing his larger body through the narrow space. The mental rope pulling me deeper into the building wavered in and out of focus, its ends fraying. Only Heath’s hand around my wrist kept me from stumbling blindly forward into the darkness before he’d managed to get inside with me.
With a final grunt of effort, he squeezed through. The flashlight panned across the floor, playing over people in expensive evening wear groaning and pushing to their feet. Clouds of gray dust billowed in the beam of light, coating the figures and making them look like ghosts. I coughed convulsively, covering my nose and mouth with my hand.
“Everyone get outside!” Heath bellowed. “Help the injured and get away from the building! Police and fire rescue are coming!”
More phone flashlights flickered on, crisscrossing the grand entryway with yellow beams. People started staggering towardthe broken doors, some of them pausing to help lift others who hadn’t yet risen.
Heath and I pushed against the slow tide of bodies, heading toward the very place that everyone else was fleeing. The wall separating the reception area from the huge, high-ceilinged banquet area had a massive crack in it. The arched double-doorway looked like a photograph someone had torn in half and tried to glue back together, the edges no longer meeting up.
Beyond, the sound of screams and groans of pain echoed eerily.
Heath lifted his phone’s flashlight, shining it past the fractured doorway... and illuminating a scene straight from the depths of hell itself.
FORTY-TWO
Heath
THE BANQUET HALL LOOKEDlike a vision from another planet. The huge event space had taken up the entire center of the old hotel, open all the way to the ceiling of the four-story building, thirty-odd feet above our heads.
