On her feet now, she bent her knees to sprint toward the open end of the alley, but she didn’t get far. A hand closed around her arm, jerking her back into the side of the car. The air burst from her lungs on impact.
A man stood over her, his bronze skin sheened with sweat and his eyes unfocused. Every tendon in his neck stood out in sharp relief and the whites of his eyes were flooded with blood.
“You’re not supposed to go,” he grated, expression wild. His tone was ragged, confused, like he knew what he had to do but notwhy.She had no answers for him, and when he realized that, he began to shake with a convulsive sort of full-body tremors. “You’renot.I need… need…”
Her kidnapper made a stomach-turning animal sound in the back of his throat. He shook his head so hard she heard his neck crack. The movement made a simple gold chain peek out from beneath the collar of his black t-shirt. “Not— I have to— ”
Atria didn’t have time to ask questions or explore the twinge of empathy she felt for the broken creature before her. Baring her teeth, she freed her right hand from where it was trapped against the car andyanked.
The man’s legs were swept out from under him. He crashed to the filthy ground with a howl of outrage, his expression morphing into one of pure animal fear. Atria stumbled away, hands raised. Knocking his head into the asphalt only seemed to piss him off. When she threw him against the brick wall, the crunch of bone was audible even to her weak ears.
And yet he still kept coming.
Ice sluiced through her veins as he began to crawl toward her, his eyes absent of any reason, any humanity. His aura was a shattered mirror. Each piece reflected the pain and confusion of the others, amplifying and distorting the emotions until they were nothing but abstract shapes.
Atria’s stomach bottomed out. He wasn’t going to stop and she didn’t have it in her to kill him.Have to go.She whirled around, one hand bracing against the side of the car, and—
The alleyway disappeared.
Darkness.Nothing below her. Nothing above her. Complete absence of time, space, sensation.
A scream clawed up her throat as terror shut down all non-essential systems. The mind was not built to withstand the complete absence of sensation. Deprived of sound, sight, smell, pressure,anything,it filled in the gaps.
She couldn’t breathe because there was no air. She couldn’t think because there was no escape. She was in nothing. Shewasnothing.
There was no Atria Le Roy, no tether, no Kaz. Everything she was and everything she loved ceased to exist in that all-consuming void. In an instant, she was reduced to nothing but useless, firing neurons against a yawning vacuum — consciousness excised from form, personhood cleaved from context.
Nothing.
“Enough of that.”
A woman’s voice rang like a bell through the dark emptiness. Atria jerked, her body seizing at the sudden return of sensation. The light blinded her. The scent of trash and exhaust made her gag. When had she gotten on her hands and knees?
Spots exploded in front of her eyes as she fought to get her bearings again.It was an illusion. It was just an illusion.
Somewhere close to her, a man grunted, gurgled, and then went quiet again.
“You are very lucky it was me who found you,” the woman said, her low voice hardened with censure. “My boy would have ripped you limb from limb and then left you for the rats. There is not a law or being in this world that would have stopped him.”
Atria struggled to swallow the bile that kept surging up her throat. She never thought she’d be grateful for the smell of trash, but to be able to smell atallwas a relief. So was the bite of the asphalt on her palms, the sweat dripping down her face and neck. Even the explosions of light in her eyes were welcome.
Blinking hard, she swung her head to the right. Who had come to her rescue? Was it a rescue at all, or some fresh horror she had no defense against?
It took her a heartbeat to understand what she was seeing. The man was crumpled on the ground, his bloody eyes closed. A silver-tipped black leather boot pressed down on the side of his head.
Atria’s eyes crawled upward, over a shapely leg clad in leopard print pants and a curvaceous upper body emphasized by a skin-tight black turtleneck, to finally settle on a striking pale blue face.
Delilah Solbourne had come to her rescue.
Atria’s lips parted.Are you fucking kidding me?
ChapterFifty
“You’re not even listeningto me, Nicolas,” Delilah sighed, removing her boot. She crouched beside the man. Grabbing his cheeks with one hand, she turned his head this way and that. Despite her rough handling, the man was completely limp.
Delilah clicked her tongue. Using the very tip of one diamond-encrusted claw-cap, she plucked the gold chain from his sweaty throat and made a thoughtful sound. “Yup, definitely out. Oh well. You can be grateful later.”
One moment the elf was in her own world, apparently oblivious to the woman gaping at her from a handful of feet away, and the next she was balancing on the balls of her feet in front of Atria, her unnerving eyes fixed on her.
