Blake
The man falls to the ground in a flurry of goose down, black nylon, and a shower of glass at the very second royal warriors burst through my office door.
I can’t breathe. My lungs strain against the torrent of panic driving every move I make as I whirl to the warriors storming the room and shout for them to subdue the stranger, but I can’t hear my own voice over the rapid thunder of my heartbeat in my ears.
My daughter is lying lifeless on the carpet of my office. The same office she grew up in, spent entire days rolling my crystal spheres across the carpet and racing around on Soren’s shoulders. I see her like that now–a child.
Rage storms my senses. My roar of fury threatens to splinter the windows as my knees hit the ground by her head. I reach down, trying to gather what’s left of her in my arms.
Kenna bursts into the room, breathless, her silver eyes wide and frantic as she reaches my side.
“HELP!” I shout, clutching Skye to my chest. “Kenna!”
“Lay her down!” Kenna is white as a ghost, paler even than her clinic robes and apron. Several of her assistants rush in after her, all witches, all in the same white robes that match the pallor of their cheeks when they see her, my child, in tatters. “What happened?” Kenna rushes out, turning frantic eyes on mine.
I can only shake my head and look in the direction of the unfamiliar man currently being dragged to his feet and pinned to the wall by four of Maeve’s guards.
The second Skye’s burst of magic erupted through my office at the palace, I knew something was wrong. I sent out an alert through the mind-link before she’d even come into view, and when she did, and I saw all that blood… and her throat… and him….
I snarl involuntarily, gripping Skye’s practically lifeless body. Kenna shakes my arm, sinking her nails through the fabric of my shirt. “Let her go. I need some space. Look at me, Blake. Look–look at me!”
All I see is red. Red blood. Red rage knocking me sideways and turning me inside out. This is my baby. I saw her come into the world and take her first breath.
That rage turns to a twisting, gnawing kind of anguish that makes me want to tear the world to shreds, and I can’t fight it.
“Look at me. I’ve got her. You need to back away before you kill everyone in the room.” Kenna grips my arm again, squeezing.
The man being held against the wall suddenly comes to with a groan and jerks against the hold of the guards, who shove him against the wall with force in return. His eyes open to slits, then wider, a startling, deep blue, and lock on mine.
Seconds move like hours. His eyes widen in recognition, and he begins to frantically jerk against the hold of the warriors, snarling and hissing with fury, then stills when he sees Skye on the ground.
His eyes soften. His expression goes slack. The fury and confusion behind his expression shatters into… something I don’t understand. Not at first.
Kenna smooths her hand over Skye’s chest before she reaches for her ravaged throat, her healing powers drifting over Skye’s skin. I already know it’s not going to be enough to save her life.
“I can keep her heart beating, but she needs to be moved down to the clinic and stabilized as soon as possible. Lucy, call down to the clinic and have an operating room prepped immediately,” Kenna rushes out, and more witches circle around us carrying supplies and towels to sop up the blood that isn’t soaking into the carpet.
Because there isn’t any. It’s gone. Almost all of it.
I’m still looking at the man. At his grimace of concern. At his pointed fangs.
“You fucking monster!” I snarl, and all hell breaks loose.
Shouts of alarm echo around the room, but I have a one-track mind when my fingers curl around his throat and squeeze, all of my strength locked on keeping him pinned to the wall where my bookshelves used to be. I don’t remember moving. I have no memory of letting my daughter go and slamming into him so hard that his eyes momentarily roll back in his head, but I did, and now he’s coming back to reality, and his eyes aren’t on mine.
He takes a strained breath, his gaze honed on my daughter. Skye’s legs twitch. It’s the only part of her within view as the healers kneel all around her, but when Skye lets out a tangled breath and groans, then screams in panic and pain, he jerks again, desperate, his eyes widening.
“Skye? Skye, honey, it’s me, it’s Kenna! You’re safe! Look at me, sweetheart, it’s me. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Skye is panicking, trying to fight against the hold of the nurses.
“Skye, you need to calm down. You’re very hurt. Look at me, Skye. You need to stay as still as possible. We’re doing everything we can.”
My daughter whimpers, jerks, then goes quiet. The tension in the room crackles for several seconds before she comes to again and rushes out a pained breath.
“Calm down, honey. You have to calm down.” Kenna looks wildly at her assistants. “We need to move her, now!”
The man tries to break out of my hold, his eyes desperate, locked on Skye.
I shove him again. “Don’t fucking look at her!”
“She’s not lucid,” Kenna explains to her assistants. “She’s hurting badly. Is the operating room ready? We need to go. I don’t have time to wait–”
Skye’s scream of pain and fear explodes around the room. Even I’m temporarily useless against the sound. It burrows into my chest, erupting into a sharp, aching kind of worry only a parent can feel, but I hold fast to the monster that did this to her.
“What the fuck is going on?” Maeve shouts from the doorway, Soren catching her arm before she can enter, but her arrival is lost in the first word Skye manages to say.
“A-Alex?”
“I’m here. Skye, don’t–don’t try to talk,” the man, Alex, apparently, says on a strained breath. Instinctually, I tighten my grip on his throat, and he grunts, unable to take a deeper breath. He doesn’t even look at me nor fight it. He’s looking at her. He’s not even blinking.
Skye cries out in pain again, and the witches start moving, preparing to allow the guards to pick her up, but when her face comes into view… she’s looking right at this bastard, her eyes still cloudy with the death that came so close to claiming her.
Alex stops trying to get out from beneath my hold. He relaxes, his eyes suddenly glossy with relief and… this doesn’t make any sense. He did this to her. He’s covered in her blood–I can smell it. He’s drenched in all of her blood.
I shove him hard, and he gasps at the sensation of my forearm pressed sharply against his ribs.
“Dad!” Skye cries out, but her voice is muffled by another cry of pain that slices through the air and threatens to bring me to my knees.
I don’t bother to ask him who he is.
I grip his face, my fingers digging into his forehead, and when he shouts in agony, Skye screams, “DAD! DON’T!”
I’m swept into his mind–carefully, thoughtfully, deciding it will be better in the long run, when he’s in a cell beneath Maeve’s palace, if his mind stays in one piece, but I know what I’m looking for… and find it.
Him, on the ice, hunting. Hunting for her. He’s desperate, sprinting into the darkness, then slows when he sees her.
Broken.
He falls to his knees, unable to remain upright, then sees the shadow unlatching itself from my daughter’s neck, and Alex’s mind goes a sharp, brutal red. Everything beyond that is a deadly kind of rage. No imagery, just feeling. He killed something out there, brutally, showing not a single ounce of thought or mercy. He didn’t think twice about it either, like he was driven by instinct, and that instinct was to kill.
And it wasn’t Skye. It was for her.
I pull myself out of his mind, swaying, bracing my hand against the wall by his head.
Maeve is at my side, gripping my arm, shouting at me, but I can’t hear a word she’s saying.
I open my eyes and look right at Alex.
He won’t look at me. Even in a haze of my powers, he’s looking at Skye, watching as guards carefully pick her up to carry her down to the clinic.
“Call her mother,” I tell Maeve groggily, panting. “Tell her to go to the clinic.”
“What the fuck? Blake, this is my castle, you fucking prick. What happened? Who is…? Who are you?” She snarls, turning her anger on Alex, who’s watching in panic as Skye fades from view, and the chaos in the room settles like the shimmering glass covering the carpet.
I grip Alex’s shirt and drag him off the wall, tossing him into one of the armchairs in front of my desk. He tries to rise, but I motion for him to stop, holding his gaze.
“Sit down, and tell me everything.”
“I want to go with her,” he says bitterly, flashing his teeth, those fangs.
“Sit. Down.”
He doesn’t move. He’s eyeing the door, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. When his upper lip pulls over his teeth again, Maeve’s lips pop open for several seconds before she shuts them tight and shoves past me to the stationary phone on my desk, which she fists, frantically dialing a number.
“Don’t get up,” I command, softer this time.
“I want–”
“I take it this isn’t the monster that did that to her?” Maeve cuts in, staring at me expectantly.
“No. This is the boyfriend–”
“Husband,” Alex corrects with force.
Maeve and I stare at him. I’m not sure what this feeling is, but it’s new. I’m not sure I like it.
“She’s my wife.” The feeling shining behind his eyes is something I know all too well, however, and it guts me. For a split second, I imagine the moment I found Marianna in her old townhouse, guarding the stairwell, battered and broken. I imagine those days spent in the clinic, thinking I was losing her to a curse.
I see that same kind of despair in Alex’s eyes now.
“Sit,” I say a third time, adding, “Please.”
Soren snorts a laugh from the far side of the room. “I’ve never heard you say that before.”
“I didn’t realize you were still here–”
“Misty? Listen, I need you in Moonrise right now. Yes. Yes–It is an emergency, yes. Bring Sydney. Cole, too, probably. Who am I kidding? Bring the whole fucking cavalry.” Maeve hangs up the phone and turns her attention to Alex, who isn’t sitting and looks like he’s about to make a run for it. “You’ll get lost immediately. Don’t even try.”
“Where is she?” he pants, wincing as the clouds part, and sunlight streams through the windows. I watch him with overt curiosity. I don't even bother to hide it.
Soren paces into view, frowning at Alex, then me and his mate. Then, he makes a show of closing every curtain until Alex hisses out a breath in pain and shakily sinks into an armchair and hangs his head in his hands.
“Marianna is on her way to the clinic,” Maeve says in a near whisper and leans her thigh against the side of my desk, arms crossed neatly under her chest. “She asked why I was the one mind-linking with her and not you.”
“I’ll handle it after I’ve handled this.”
“Ryatt is on his way.”
I close my eyes for a moment, mouthing a silent curse.
“Arthur, too.”
“Goddess-damnit, Maeve.”
She shrugs, totally unperturbed. “We have a vampire in Eastonia. And, apparently, he’s your new son-in-law.”
Alex looks up at us, pale, like the past hour drained him of life, if that’s even possible for his kind.
“She’s pregnant,” he says quietly, but the statement explodes through the room. Soren whips around, and Maeve braces a hand on the desk.
“What?” The word leaves my lips before my brain finishes registering the news.
Alex’s eyes meet mine and hold. “She’s pregnant.”