Page 99 of Peacemaker

Chapter Thirty-Three

My Sacrifice

I cut through rifter after rifter, searching for Shane. Amias stayed close to me—maybe he knew I’d need him.

My werebull had glanced at Silverlight, then at Amias, and then went back to running his powerful horns through the rifters.

I caught a glimpse of Jade Noel, once, and Alejandro.

Like a whirling ninja, fast, slick, and lethal, Alejandro fought, doing two things no human should have been able to do. Putting down rifters, and staying alive.

Minutes into the fight I was covered with blood—some of it mine—but I barely felt the wounds. I screamed Shane’s name whenever I could.

He never answered.

But then…

Minutes later—or hours, I couldn’t be sure—I found him.

I found my hunter. My heart.

He lay in a dark heap against the brick wall of a real estate building, and Clayton, feverishly wielding his black-hearted sword, stood in front of him, doing his best to protect his fallen friend.

And he was being overwhelmed.

When Clayton saw me, the look in his eyes went from despair to relief and back to despair. The rifters were trying to get to the fallen hunter’s blood, and Clayton wasn’t going to let them touch him. But as soon as I looked at Shane, I knew.

“No,” I shrieked, and then the bloody, battered half-giant was beside me.

He dropped to a knee and lifted his fist. “Go on,” he said. “I’ll keep them from you for as long as I can.”

Clayton got out of his way, running with me to my motionless hunter. I slid Silverlight away and fell to my knees. “Shane,” I cried. “Oh, God, please no. Shane.”

But Shane was gone.

I hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye.

I’d known it was coming, hadn’t I? I’d known. I’d felt his looming death the way I felt my heartbeat.

I held his head to my breast, unable to accept that he was dead even as I stared down at his bloodless face, his half-closed, empty eyes, his broken body.

They’d killed him. Not even Silverlight had been able to stop them.

She hadn’t belonged to him, and she hadn’t been able to save him.

Angus dropped down beside me and Clayton, his face pale, eyes filled with grief. He said nothing.

I heard Leo’s power crack the pavement, and I heard rifters scream, but it was all distant and dim and did not really matter.

My hunter was gone, and my heart went with him.

Then, Himself fell from nowhere, or the sky, or wherever he’d been, his landing so violently abrupt that I heard his bones shatter.

He groaned, that ancient man, then gestured, surrounding our little group with a shimmering, hazy circle that felt like electricity dancing across my skin.

“I can no longer isolate the city,” he said. “When the sun comes, so will the humans. They will move the surviving humans out, and then they will destroy Red Valley while the rifters sleep, hoping to contain the monsters. They will not succeed.”

I said nothing, but I couldn’t take my stare from his face. I held Shane a little tighter and listened. There were no other choices.