Page 131 of Property of Scar

And I reach as hard as I can, not for Astrid, but for Cali.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

CALYPSO

The floor jolts hard enough to nearly throw me off balance. The impact punches up through my boots and straight into my knees, knocking the breath from my lungs as the entire tunnel shudders around us.

My head snaps up just as a crack rips across the ceiling ahead. Not a small one. The kind that tells you something is about to go very, very wrong.

“Shit.”

Dust starts raining down, then chunks of concrete. A second later, the whole section gives way with a deafening roar, stone and dirt crashing into the tunnel in a wave that turns the air thick and gray.

“Move!” Raze’s voice cuts through the collapse from somewhere ahead, raw authority that doesn’t wait for a response. He doesn’t need one because everyone is already moving.

Coil has Ruckus slung over one shoulder, the road captain’s face ash gray, and his leg held at an angle that makes my stomach clench when I catch a glimpse of it. Flux darts ahead in a form that barely looks human anymore, something sleek and low to the ground, threading gaps in the debris that none of the rest of us could navigate upright. Maul is in his wolf form and enormous, a barrel-chested shadow running flank. Wreck takes up the rear beside him, his wendigo bulk punching through any rubble that blocks the path, gaunt face utterly expressionless while the tunnel caves around him like it’s afraid to slow him down. Roxy moves with Raze’s arm locked around her shoulders, her hands alive with magic that flares outward each time another chunk of ceiling tries to bury us, buying us another two feet.

Another five.

Raze never steps more than a half pace from her side.

I am not moving.

I am standing in the middle of collapsing hell, with a vampire draped across my shoulders, and my legs are on fire.

Scar weighs nothing like a man his size should. He weighs everything. His arm is slung across my back, mine hooked beneath his to keep him upright, but he isn’t helping me carry it. His head has dropped forward, chin nearly to his chest, and there’s no tension left in him at all, no adjustment, no instinctive correction, nothing that says he’s aware of where he is or what’s happening around him.

He’s just… gone under.

Completely out of it, like whatever holds him present has been forced down into something deeper than sleep, something that doesn’t respond when I shift him, drag his weight with mine, or try to pull him back into this.

Every step is me carrying him.

Every second, he gives me nothing back.

The pauses between them are the worst. In each one, something in me locks down, and I count, silently, my teeth ground together, waiting for something in him to shift, to give me even the smallest sign that he is still in there.

Come on. Come on. Don’t you dare leave me.

A crack splits the wall to my left and water floods through, cold, black, ankle-deep within seconds. It hits my boots, and my legs scream louder.

I shift my grip on him and move. Every step is a negotiation between my body and the floor that keeps trying to swallow me. My ribs are damaged, at least two, possibly three, and every breath I draw pulls a white-hot wire through my left side. My shoulder, the one that took the wall when Mordain threw me, has gone beyond pain and into a kind of distant, throbbing numbness that I know better than to trust. I am covered in blood that is only partly mine. My hair is matted with dust and something darker, and the tunnel air is so thick with smoke and concrete particles that each inhale tastes like ash.

I haul him forward anyway, because no one else is close enough. After all, the ceiling is still coming down, and because somewhere underneath the animal mechanics of survival, something in me has decided very quietly and completely that this man does not get to die in a tunnel.

Not today.

Not on Mordain’s poison.

Not like this.

A section of wall explodes inward ten feet ahead, about to fall directly on Rhett, and for one gutting second, I think he’s done. Then Bennett’s wings snap open from nowhere, white, blazing, and fully manifested without a trace of the irony he usually wears them with.

Bennett drives himself beneath the collapse and catches it. Concrete groans overhead. Dirt rains down. The entire tunnel trembles around him as he braces against the weight, wings spread and shaking under the strain.

Across the rubble, Rhett hauls himself to his feet. Hellfire burns across his knuckles, his chest is heaving, and blood streaks one side of his face.

None of it seems to matter.