51
My eyes flickered open to the sight of a warm fire and a bed in a tent under the stars.
The last several hours flashed through my mind. Auron helping with the fire and checking my temperature. Quinn bringing tonics.
Pushing up on my forearms, I started to stretch my sore, aching muscles. My shoulders were the worst, wrenched from hanging by my wrists. Some of the healing and pain-numbing substances had begun to work, so it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. In fact, each moment I felt stronger.
I could feel Blake’s presence behind me before I turned.
“Blake?”
“Shh,” he soothed, climbing into my bed alongside me, curling against my back. “How are you feeling?”
The vision of Edith flashed in my mind, and I shook my head, swallowing hard. Tears sprang to my eyes, and he stroked my hair, shushing me gently.
“Shhhhh, shhhhhh. It will be okay. I’m so sorry.” He pressed a kiss to my temple, his tenderness making my chest ache.
“Blake, we need to—”
“No, Rubi,” he cut me off. “Rest. Please, we can talk in the morning.”
I looked down where his arms encased my body and saw him close his fist. Hiding the black Mark. I wondered if he’d been hiding it from the others, if they knew or had seen that our Soul Pairing had failed. Maybe someone from one of the other dominions had experience with the black Marks, would know what we’d done wrong.
I knew we needed to deal with that failure, but something worse was pressing on my chest.
“They have Edith,” I whispered, unable to stop the quiet sob from pulling free.
“What?”
Blake turned me gently to my back, careful not to wrench my already taxed muscles. He loomed over me, eyes shimmering in the low firelight. I felt small then beside him, and part of me wanted to burrow into his chest and close my eyes, pretend I could turn back time and somehow keep Edith away from all of this.
I felt myself falling into the panic of the vision. My breaths came fast as I saw Edith, bound, and myself powerless to help her. Tears streamed down my face and I rolled away from Blake, into a ball as the sobs wracked me, my already raw throat throbbing.
Hope is eternal.
As though Blake, too, could hear Edith’s voice, he rubbed my back, commanding softly, “Breathe, Rubi. Just breathe.” He continued rubbing my back and repeating those words, like an incantation, until my sobs slowed. Eventually I could take a deep, shuddering breath. I lay there, drained, in his arms.
Blake gently rolled me to face him and wiped the tears frommy face with the pads of his thumbs. “Tell me what you mean. Who has Edith?”
“A demon. Something worse than a Thirst demon.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw it. She was bathed in this pulsating light,” I said, pushing myself up gingerly to a sitting position. “Ire showed me—”
“Ire?” Blake gritted his teeth. “What do you mean?”
I met Blake’s eyes meaningfully. “Ire wasn’t working alone, Blake. He had…more power. I could sense it. And he said the Serpent Lord had given it to him.”
Blake hissed, his fists tightening over the sheets. “They were working together.”
I nodded. “He said they had a deal.” Then I explained the vision he’d shown me, describing the demon as much as I could. “I’d never seen one like that. Or heard of it. Do you know what it is?”
Blake exhaled sharply. His gaze dropped to the ground, shoulders tight.
“It’s the Starved.” His voice was raw. “The demon from the Annihilation. The one that killed Zayden,” he said, barely above a whisper. “The one that—” His voice cracked. He swallowed hard and tried again. “The one that ate the Red princess’s soul in front of me. While she screamed as she was dying.”
My heart stopped. The Starved had Edith—all I could see was her soul being ripped away while she writhed in agony, and me, too late to stop it.
