Page 59 of The Human’s Heart

Fuck. Was I on fire?

Why couldn’t I breathe?

Did someone suck all the oxygen out of the room?

Everything hurt.

Everything hurt so fucking bad.

I could sense my viramore getting closer, but I couldn’t move. Everything hurt, and I couldn’t move.

Was I paralyzed?

My eyes kept blinking slowly, my vision blurry.

What the hell was happening?

I choked on something liquidy in my mouth, flecks of something dark flying through the air as I coughed.

What was happening? Why did everything feel like I’d been dipped in acid?

I needed to get off my back.

I tried to lift myself off the floor, and a loud scream of pain echoed through my ears. It took me a second to realize it was my own scream, and it took me another second to notice Zaos’s face over the top of mine.

He was so beautiful, my incubus, even when he was crying.

Wait. Why was he crying?

Beatrix knelt on my other side, but when she reached for me, Zay flipped out. I heard a muffled, “Don’t fucking touch him,” a moment before his pretty black incubus magic whipped out of him and surrounded me in a cocoon.

Then all I could see was Zay and his magic and his beautiful, sad, panicked expression.

I wanted to tell him it’d be okay, but I could barely keep my eyes open, and I couldn’t seem to… to breathe.

Why couldn’t I catch my breath?

I coughed, and more liquid flew. Some of it landed on Zay’s pretty face.

Oh. Blood.

I was bleeding?

My eyes felt heavy, and I heard Zay’s panicked pleas, “Please, Hugo. Don’t go. Stay with me. Please, stay with me.”

Chapter 18

Zaos

Icouldn’t stop the bleeding. No matter what I did, no matter what my magic did, I couldn’t stop the bleeding. It was like blood was pouring from everywhere.

He had a hole as big as my fist in his chest, and I knew without looking that at least part of that hole went straight through his heart.

There were a lot of things I could heal with my magic, but not… not this. How could anyone, anything, heal this?

“Please don’t leave me, isa mezelie. Please don’t go.”

In my head, I heard Hugo’s quiet voice say, “I don’t want to go. I want to stay.”