“Jace?” Jasmine whispered.
I slammed myself into the door, trying to get to her. Pain lanced through me, and I dropped my head to the bars, groaning.
The bite throbbed, and I touched it lightly. Was it because I was injured that the darkness was taking me? Or had it been slipping over me all day? What I attributed to stress could have been the darkness.
Fucking hell! I should have seen the signs and done more to protect her.
Her fault, rumbled a voice in my head.
I was slipping away. I was disappearing. What were they going to do when I was fully gone? The pack? Jasmine? Already,I felt the blame toward her growing. Soon, it was going to overcome me entirely. I couldn’t think straight.
But I had to tell her. If I were slipping, then this might be my last chance.
My head jerked up, and I fought through the anger. Jasmine had stepped out from around Owen. He and Renz both held her as tears slipped down her face. I felt the darkness rising in me, heavy and brutal, and reached past it to the core of me. To the feelings that had been growing stronger day by day.
“Jasmine,” I choked out. My tongue wanted to throw curses at her, but that wasn’t what I wanted. “Whatever happens…I love you. And I’d rather die than hurt you.”
And that was the last thing I knew.
Chapter 22 - Renz
The next day was utter chaos. We were woken up at the crack of dawn by panicked voices outside, only to learn that Jace’s fall to the darkness had somehow managed to spread all through town. Owen and I spent the whole day trying to calm people. We had a pack gathering at the temporary shrine, but even with the priestess’s support, we didn’t get very far in calming things down.
From there, Owen and I handled everything outside of the office, with Jasmine having to pick up the slack from behind the scenes. The priestess and the nuns were continuing their research. Half of our seconds were already in prison, and with half of the alphas there now, too, things looked grim.
A week passed. I came back to the office after a long day of trying to resolve conflicts. Tempers were flaring, and I’d had to step in to stop several attacks on omegas.
Owen had had to go to other territories to pick up pack members who’d attempted to flee. The original plan was to let them go to the city under observation, but two of them were taken by the darkness, and so all of them were brought back.
The pack was under quarantine, and our neighbors were going to enforce it.
“You look exhausted,” I told Jasmine. She was at the computer, but she was hunched over and held her head on the desk.
She looked up, the dark circles seeming deeper beneath her eyes. “I spent the day at the infirmary. A bunch of the medics are sick, too, so I was helping with administering medications and all that.”
Anxiety slithered into my stomach hearing that. “I thought we agreed you were going to stay away from public places when you were alone.”
“I had to do something. I can’t concentrate on anything written or on screens. My eyes feel like they’re going to pop out of my head.” She leaned back and covered said lovely eyes with her fingertips. “They all kept looking at me as though they thought I was the only one who could fix this, but they know I can’t.”
“We will fix it,” I said automatically.
Jasmine lowered her hands again. “I mean, they don’t have any faith in me.”
Renz stepped into the room, shaking his head. He had a fresh bruise on his jaw, and Jasmine shoved back from the deck and rushed to him.
“It’s nothing,” he assured her. He kissed her lightly. “Are you ready to go to the prison?”
Jasmine nodded. We went to the prison every day to talk to Killian and Jace. They were always agitated and tried to attack Jasmine through the bars, but if she talked long enough, they calmed down again. We hoped it meant that they were still aware and able to fight the dark energy.
Today was especially bad. Despite being bound and restrained, both Killian and Jace tried to shift, and they kept making terrible howling noises. It took hours for them to calm down again. By the time Jasmine finally admitted she needed to go home, she was too tired to walk.
We took her home, carried her upstairs, and showered together. The hot water released some of the tension in mymuscles, but did nothing to stop the tight feeling in my chest. We needed to get up early again tomorrow.
When we all dried off and dressed in our pajamas, we curled up together in Jasmine’s bed. The three of us fit better than when there were five, but there was an emptiness in the room. Killian and Jace’s absences were stark, making it feel hollow and incomplete.
Jasmine pressed herself tightly between Owen and me. Her skin was cool despite the hot shower.
“We forgot to turn off the light,” Owen said, hiding his face in Jasmine’s hair. “We’re not going to get much sleep unless you turn it off, Renz.”
