The Horde.
My heart rate picks up, and the murk starts to clear.
The Horde.
And then my mind seems to reboot, and it all clicks together.
The. Horde. Is. Sending. A. Team.
I pull in a sharp, steel-edged breath as adrenaline floods me, and I sit up, ignoring the cords attached to my body that strain against the sudden movement.
Shit.Shit!I can’t be on The Horde’s radar. The blood brokers and the Tainted were bad enough.The Hordeis the equivalent of jumping from the frying pan into the mouth of an angry churning volcano or—you know—a fucking fire-breathing dragon.
I force my eyes open, blinking furiously against the sudden light that overwhelms me.
Sunlight.
Something I haven’t seen or felt for months.
Operating on pure panic, I give myself no time to marvel at the bright heat. My eyes immediately start to water from the staggering illumination. I wipe at them with a shaky hand as I try to decipher the blurry images surrounding me. The first thing I can make out is the plastic tubing leading away from my arms. Fear instantly throttles me at the sight, and my mind transports me back to my cell despite my other senses telling me I’m not there anymore.
Fright crawls up my throat and I claw at it, desperate to keep it at bay. I frantically search for Wistan. I know that evil bastard is lurking somewhere nearby, just waiting for me to be conscious enough to carve new tally marks in my skin. I don’t see him anywhere and confusion sweeps in, followed quickly by relief when I recognize that I’m in a room. A sterile-looking room. Alone. Which is odd, but it’s not a cell. Not a cage. I’m not tied down. They always tie me down when they’re going to bleed me.
I expand my senses, searching for dampeners in the room or anything else designed to weaken me. That fucked-up brand of magic has been a staple in every cell the blood brokers have kept me in from the moment I first woke up in one, but I don’t sense anything here.
My gaze darts back down to the cannulas in my arms and the small tubes attached to them. More ease trickles through me when I realize they aren’t robbing me of blood, but rather feeding some kind of clear fluid into me. I take in the silent machines to my right and left, the bed I’m sitting in, the simple sheath covering me, and belatedly I put it all together.
I’m in a hospital.
I’ve seen them in movies, and a few members of the pack we trade with back home have talked about being treated in one, but I’ve never experienced it myself. I’ve always been careful not to go anywhere where my blood might be exposed.
I connect the clues of my environment with the whispered, fuzzy conversation I was in the middle of earlier, and my heart simultaneously leaps and plummets.
Somehow I survived my fall.
The blood brokers don’t have me again.
And The Horde is on their way.
A brittle, groggy groan slips out of me, and I force myself to swallow down another as I swing my feet around to the side of the bed. Surprisingly, I don’t hurt anywhere. Where there should be agony, there isn’t so much as an ache. For someone who smashed through too many layers of branches to count and then shattered themselves against the hard ground of a merciless mountain, that shouldn’t be the case. I should be suffering from debilitating pain, and yet all I am is stiff.
Probably because I’ve been lying in this bed for too long and now my bones are in no hurry to leave it. Aside from that though, I feel surprisingly okay. Nowhere near as strong as I was before I was taken, but certainly more robust than I have been in months. Then again, I felt closer to death in my cell than I did falling off a cliff, so that’s not saying much.
“There’s our fighter,” an animated voice warbles as a lanky man strides into the room.
I startle, shocked by the invasion of noise and the sudden appearance of the stranger. My alarmed thoughts shoot straight toThe Horde. I was very young the last time I met a dragon male face-to-face. They’re colossal. Something this guy is not. So unless The Horde recently stopped wearing scale armor and started wearing baby-pink scrubs, this guy isn’t one of them. He must work here.
The male’s bright brown eyes twinkle softly with intelligence as his gaze bounces from me to the flashing machines standing sentinel on both sides of the bed. I scent his magic before its tepid touch brushes lazily across my senses. It’s not dark, it doesn’t smell spoiled, he’s not Tainted, but he’s—without a doubt—sorcai.
The presence of any kind of Arcane magic has my instincts and reactions once again at war with my rational mind. Without second-guessing why, I leap at the stranger. Before he can so much as gasp in surprise, I yank the IV from my inner elbow and wrap the tubing around the male’s neck. I pull as hard as I can until he’s grasping frantically at the coiled plastic, his face turning a welcome shade of deep red.
My arms tremble with the effort, even though this puny sorcai is making his death far too easy. I feel better than I have in ages, and yet I can still feel the effects of what the Tainted have done to me over the last four months. I pull even harder on the IV tubing, but all too quickly, the fight and strength start to drain out of my limbs.
I growl in frustration, angry that underneath the burst of strength and adrenaline I just had, I’m still frighteningly frail, still so hollow. I search for my dragon as I force the sorcai to his knees. His long fingers desperately claw and slap at my arms as pained gurgles bubble out of his mouth.
Worry plumes through me when I still can’t reach even the faintest hint of a dragon inside. I’m accustomed to being blocked from the power and the ability to transform, but I used to be able to at least sense it stretching under my skin. Now there’s nothing. It’s been like that since I was taken, and I worry I’ve been cut off for so long that it’s gone for good, and I don’t know if it can come back.
Maybe only part of me survived the last four months.
