Evermere.
Thank the Goddess. Thank the Moon.
“Seri! Seri, where are you?!”
I tried to lift my head, wanting to see my monsters, but I couldn’t, couldn’t even shiver. The exhaustion was cell-deep, claiming its due, but its due waseverything.
Never this bad. Never in all of Arabesque’s siphonings was I this empty.
Koa bellowing my name. Casimir cradling me. Zane screaming obscenities. Then blessed darkness, welcome and real.
11. Silence Between Heartbeats
Koa
“I’d like to go home now, please,” Seri whispered just before the world folded, crumpled like paper in a giant’s fist.
My body stretched in too many directions. For one breathless moment, I was crushed and weightless at once, my cells scattered across dimensions I was never meant to feel. This wasn’t one of Seri’s clean moonlight paths. No, it was something oil-slick and ravenous that gnawed at the marrow of me.
My stomach lurched as reality snapped back into place, and I fought to orient myself as the world settled. We were back at Evermere, sprawled on the patio under the wisteria.
She’d brought us home. Across hundreds of miles. Damn near took us in the back door.
“Am I dead?” Zane groaned with a splash from somewhere nearby. “Ifeeldead.”
“If you were dead, you’d be quieter,” I muttered, pushing myself up on my elbows.
My gaze snapped to Seri. She lay porcelain-still in Casimir’s arms, her chest rising and falling in shallow, uneven breaths. Her skin had gone ash-gray, her lips nearly blue.
“Night’s teeth!” Zane hauled himself from the koi pond, water streaming from his coveralls. Making a whooshing gesture with his hands, he crowed, “You just ninja-ed us right the fuck outta there, sugar booger!”
My focus was on our beloved, though. This was how we’d found her that first day, minus the bruises. Drained, pale, limp, her skin ice-cold beneath my fingers as I reached for her wrist.
“Serafina?” I whispered.
Casimir had already shifted into crisis mode, assessing her, checking pulse, breathing, pupils.
“What’s wrong?” he muttered. “She hasn’t fainted from shadow walking since her magic replenished!”
All my life, I was aware of the?aumakua, but they had never acted as directly as they did right then, and I suddenly saw dark veins of something wrong, somethinghungry, threading through Seri’s silver aura.
“They’re consuming her.”
“What?” Cas snapped.
“She shadow walked throughcorruptedshadows. She’s—”
“Dark sick.” Cas understood at once and began barking out orders like the commander he was born to be. “Zane, get over here! Ko, carry her inside!”
I slid my arms beneath her, lifting her against my chest, and I didn’t like how light she felt. It hit worse than any battle wound. She’d finally hit one ten last week, but now? Now she somehow weighed less, like moonlight fighting through clouds. I’d been terrified before in my life, but this was different. This wasmy belovedsuffering, and I couldn’t fight whatever was draining her.
As Zane joined us, sloshing and cursing, his eyes locked on our girl’s pallid face, and I could see he didn’t understand what was wrong.
“Think about it, Z. Those shadows had demon cores. They were tainted with Diabolical forces. They would have taken from her instead of carried her,” I explained as we ran. “She was fighting against the shadows even as she used them as a pathway.”
“Just to bring us home,” Casimir finished, his voice tight.
Bring us home? Seri had done far more than that; she’d reached into what could have destroyed her, bent it to her will through sheer determination, and wrapped it around all of us to keep us safe.
