Howls of urgency left them once they disappeared into the forest, surely warning the others of the startling danger.
Heart thundering in my ears, I watched Bjørn straighten once again as the claws vanished into his fingers. He took a couple of calming breaths that expanded and relaxed his chest before finally turning. When his eyes connected with mine, they were filled with concern, but they were still the warm amber hue I knew.
Part of me wanted to ask what had just happened to him, but the other part knew all too well…
“Are you alright?” he asked me, and I immediately nodded, remembering the other humans were behind me too.
“Are you okay?” I asked them in return, but they just looked at us, shocked, and confused about what they had just witnessed.
Shit. We didn’t have time for this.
Thankfully, not everyone here had seen the spectacle. The other half of the group was fully invested in Isis. When I returned to her side, I found her unconscious, a long coat draped over her naked body, while one of the men was hitting her chest and blowing air into her mouth.
“What are you doing?!” I demanded.
“It’s CPR. They are trying to save her life,” Bjørn answered, his gaze saying we needed to get Isis out of here because nothing they did could help her now.
“What happened to her?” one of the girls who helped pull them out asked, but I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say.
“Our camp was attacked by the wolves up the mountain,” the Fae lied instead. “We tried running away but one got to her and she fell in the river. The wolf bite ripped her dress as she tried to escape. I jumped in after her, but I wasn’t able to get to her until you helped us. Thank you.”
Agony caught in my throat as I looked at her. Her once shimmery tanned skin was almost an ashy grey, wrinkly, and dull. Her beautiful thick hair was plastered to her head, and her lips had grown bluish in hue. She looked nothing like the Isis I remembered, my Isis.
The wolf bite…
Bjørn’s words sharpened my attention on her body, the shredded skin of her right arm jumping at me. Dismay clawed at my insides. Ryker knew the only weakness he could exploit to defend himself was Isis’ disabled arm, and he had torn through it viciously. Still, she’d bested him, but she had been in the river for so long that she wasn’t even bleeding anymore.
A cough suddenly gripped her, water spilling out of her mouth as she responded to the guy’s treatment.
“We are here for you, Isis,” I assured her, holding her hand in mine. “You are safe now, we are here.”
“I’m calling for help,” the man who performed CPR assured, turning to pull out a radio from a backpack.
“We truly appreciate that, but first, everyone look at me,” the Fae told them, and they all stopped what they were doing to glance at him.
It was so weird.
When my eyes went to him too, I found black veins crawling up his face, his irises turning red.
“Look at Isis,” he ordered without pulling his attention from them, and I lowered my head, pulse racing. “You never saw us here,” he told the humans. “You were camping and three of your friends got rowdy while playing. They fell in the river, but you helped get them out safely. Nothing else happened. There was no woman drowning. There were no giant wolves. You never saw us here.”
“There was no woman drowning. There were no giant wolves. We never saw you here,” the humans replied in unison, seeming entranced by his words.
One of Bjørn’s hands held onto me, while the other gripped Isis’s arm, and the pull into the tunnel of energy came again, taking us all with it.
This time, however, my form remained the same as flashing energy zoomed past us. There was no disintegrating into a million particles, no darkness, no nothingness. I could still see Isis and the Fae, his features twisted by anguish as he regarded her frail state.
He seemed in as much agony as I was for her.
A second later our surroundings materialized, the living room of Dante’s penthouse filling up the space until we were kneeling on the floor with Isis laid between us. The coat still covered her body.
“Isis!” Vanessa rushed toward us, kneeling next to me.
“What happened to her?” D asked from behind us, I assumed with Dante by his side.
“She stayed in the water,” I whispered, the realization slashing at my heart while tears caught in my throat. “The Hunters were on her tail since she bested Ryker. It was the only way she could stay safe. The only place they wouldn’t go in for her.” My blurring eyes lifted to Bjørn. “That’s why you couldn’tfeel her. She was masked by the river’s energy surges until today. The current took her away from them enough that she came out for you to find her.”
The muscles of Bjørn’s jaw jerked violently, telling me he wanted to rip them all one by one for not letting him feel her sooner.
