Before I can answer, the window explodes inward.
Glass scatters across the floor as a body forces its way through, hitting the ground hard and lunging straight for me. I react on instinct, light surging up immediate and controlled as I drive it forward.
Pain tears across my abdomen.
It hits hard and low, dragging through my pelvis with enough force to break my focus completely. The light collapses before it can form and my body folds around the pain as the thing reaches me, crashing into me and driving me backward, its hands clawing for purchase, its hollow pit eyes fixed on nothing and everything at once.
Something rips into my side, low along my ribs.
Colsar comes through the window in the next instant, tearing it off me and throwing it aside before it can latch on again. He ends it quickly and turns as the door shudders under another blow.
"They will break through," he says.
"I know."
I push myself up and the pain returns the moment I do, stronger than before, forcing me to stop halfway through the motion. I brace against the table, my breath tightening as I try to hold myself upright.
My hand goes to my side and warmth spreads beneath the fabric. When I pull it away there is blood.
Colsar sees it. "Asharin."
"I am fine," I say, though the words come thinner than I intend.
He is already beside me. "What happened?"
"I was hit," I say.
The older woman steps closer, her expression tightening. "You were bitten."
"No," Colsar says.
My hand finds the vial without searching for it.
He sees it immediately. "No," he says again, already moving.
I pull it free and drink it before he reaches me, the burn spreading outward at once, leaving no room for hesitation.
"Asharin—"
"Take care of them for me," I say.
The words come clean, carried through the pain without wavering. His face shifts immediately, something breaking open beneath the surface of everything he has been holding since we left the chambers.
"We knew this could happen," I continue, forcing the words through the tightening already building again. "If I was bitten, it could harm them. This was always the plan."
His hand closes around my arm. "Not like this. Not here."
From outside the sound rises again, that vast low groan rolling beneath the wind, and I feel the fear return with it, sharper this time, because he will go back out into that and there is nothing I can do about it and we both know it.
Another wave tears across my abdomen, stronger than the last, dragging through my pelvis and pulling the breath from me.
"The only way to save them is to bring them now," I say.
One of the women steps closer. "She was going to deliver anyway. I saw it the moment she came through the door. Her body had already begun. This only forced it faster."
Another wave pulls through me and this time I cannot stop the sound that follows.
"She is in labor," the older woman says. "If she delivers here she may not survive it, but there is no going back now."
