“Max!” she screamed. “Max!”
Her voice shattered me. I reached for her, arms outstretched, fingers clawing at the dark.
“Missy! Missy!”
The blackness of the Oracle’s eyes expanded, spreading outward like a tide. It swallowed the image of my sister inch by inch—her outstretched hands, her face, her scream—until nothing was left but the void. The same void that hung three blocks from my tent, stretching from the ground to the sky.
“No! No! Missy!My little viper!”
“Wake up, Max!”
Hands seized my shoulders. Shook me hard.
My eyes snapped open. The tent. The canvas walls. The faint glow of the campfire outside. Tears streaming down my face, soaking the bedroll beneath my head.
Aelindor knelt beside me. His silver hair fell loose around his shoulders, his eyes bright with alarm in the dim light. He’d come without his uniform coat—just a linen shirt, hastily pulled on, as if he’d felt my distress from the next tent and hadn’t stopped to dress.
He gathered me into his lap. I let him. I had nothing left. I clung to him the way a drowning person clings to the only solid thing in the water. My face pressed into the curve of his neck, my fingers knotted in his shirt, my body shaking with ugly sobs I couldn’t control.
“I’m here,” he murmured against my hair. His arms tightened around me. “It was a nightmare, love. It’s passed. You’re safe. Nothing will get to you. Not while I breathe.”
Then he kissed me. His scent of pine and powerful male blanketed me like a shield. My body heated, hummed, reached for him. He deepened the kiss, as if he could seal every crack the nightmare had torn open and fend off any danger coming toward me.
I tasted salt. My tears. My grief. My fear. And beneath all of it, him.
But cold panic closed around my throat, sealing my lungs. The Oracle’s words haunted me, lodged in my chest like shrapnel.
I broke the kiss.
“It wasn’t a nightmare.” I gripped his shirt tighterand pressed my forehead against his jaw. “It was a message.”
A raw, wrecked sob ripped out of me.
“The Collector has my little sister.”
