Robert swallowed. “Who’s in the bathtub?”
“A man who got in her way.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Time didn’t mean muchwhen plasma scorched a hole in one’s side.
Petra moved in and out of consciousness. She’d been injured enough times to know, in some slow, hazy way, that she was badly hurt, but the terror that had wrapped its fist around her throat in the belltower drifted away along with consciousness.
Sometimes, she could hear voices arguing. The familiar slam of a metal door. The roar of an engine. Silas’s voice was the most common and comforting noise, though she couldn’t always pick up what he was saying exactly. Mostly she just listened to the cadence of his drawl, not as smooth as normal, but familiar and soothing all the same.
Understanding was elusive. Why she was hurt, why he sounded stressed, where they were going — it all escaped her as shock insulated her from the worst of reality.
Her mind became a kaleidoscope of memory and sensation interspersed with periods of deep, restful darkness. She liked those moments best. They reminded her of how safe she’d felt in bed with Silas, when his shadows were a second skin and his weight settled on top of her.
She thought she recalled being scared of the dark once upon a time, back when her biggest fears were what might be hiding in her closet and hearing her parents argue while she tried to sleep, but now it was a place of refuge. The darkness was as soft as velvet, cradling her with the utmost gentleness, and she trusted it to hold her when consciousness trickled away.
Cigarette smoke and searing agony woke her briefly, but the memory had the uncanny glow of a dream, so she couldn’t really be sure if any of it was real. It would be just like her to dream of the Broken Tooth, of Rasmus and Silas snarling at each other just out of sight as someone unseen sealed a huge, rubbery bandage over her side, of terrible pain.
Certainly it wasn’t the first time she dreamed of wounds, real or imagined. Sometimes she woke up in the darkness before dawn still feeling bruises painting her ribcage, the agony of hunger cramps, and the grim imaginings of what it must have been like for her parents to die their ugly, ugly deaths.
But Silas was a new addition to the cruel landscape of her dreams. She could feel him there, his energy like the weight of a thunderstorm about to break, and somehow she was comforted by it.
Silas was a monster,hermonster, and the only one terrible enough to make the darkness a refuge.
She didn’t make a noise — or maybe she did, dreams being tricky things that they were — but Silas materialized by her side in an instant, his big hands cupping her cheeks.
“Shh. Easy, baby, you’re okay. Breathe through it. You just gotta hold on for a few hours and?—”
Rasmus, his hoarse voice as loud and furious as a bomb blast, bellowed, “If you won’t let the best fucking healer in the territory see her, then let me call my?—”
“No one’s touching her but clan!” Even in her dream, Petra shied away from the rage that crackled in Silas’s roar. “I don’ttrust anyone,anyoneto touch her or know where she is. The only reason I’m here is because I didn’t have bandages big enough to get her through the trip. If one more person so much as looks at her, I’m going to rip theirfuckin’heads off.”
“Shade, have you lost your mind?”
“Yes,” he answered simply, raggedly. “Yes, I have. Can you blame me?”
He sounded so upset. Petra was compelled to reassure him, to tell him everything was all right and to stop yelling at Rasmus, but the dream was slipping away. The edges of her mind went fuzzy again, all soft and warm with darkness, and she was too tired to fight it.
She drifted back into the gentle hold of the shadows, each breath saturated with the scent of thyme, and let go.
Soft sunlight brushed her cheeks, and the fresh, green scent of growing things drifted around her on a warm breeze. The air was almost uncomfortably balmy even under the thin cotton sheet covering her.
Petra tried to turn on her side, her legs kicking to remove the sheet, but she was stalled by a heavy arm tightening around her middle. “Stop fussing,” a sleepy voice drawled from somewhere near the top of her head.
“It’s hot,” she complained, shimmying again.
A deep sigh made her aware of the rest of the body squished against her side — a large, warm body made of sturdy muscle and bristly leg hair. There was some shifting before the sheet was pulled away from her sweaty skin. A heavy hand settled back in the curve of her waist.
“Better?”
“Yeah.” She tried to crack her eyes open but closed them immediately. The room was way too bright for her poor, sensitive eyes first thing in the morning.
Is it morning?
The thought was a stone dropped into the placid water of her mind. Ripples followed.
Where am I? What happened? Who— No, I know that one.
