Page 59 of Flames and Blood

He pulls a blanket off the bed, gets it around me one-handed, and lifts me off the mattress against his chest. My head rolls against his arm, and he moves it back without being asked and without slowing down. There’s blood on the arm under my cheek. His shoulder is open where the claw got him, but he holds me on that side anyway.

“You came,” I tell him. My voice comes out slow and far away, and I don’t sound like myself. “My dragon said you would. She never shut up about it.”

“I said I would.”

“I said she was wrong. I said nobody was coming.” My tongue is thick, but the words come out anyway.

“You should have believed her. Hold still.”

I turn my face into his neck because it’s the only part of me that moves. His skin is cold against my face, and I’m burning up against his. I can’t work out why I don’t want him to set me down. I don’t try to work it out. I cling to the front of his coat with the fingers that cooperate with me, and I don’t let go.

“There’s a wall,” I tell him. “Around the whole valley.”

“I know.”

“You can’t get out.”

“I know that too. Quiet now. Save it.”

He carries me out through the broken door. The hallway is worse than the room. I hear it more than see it—running feet, shouting from two directions at once, a door slamming somewhere ahead, and one long sound off to the side that I don’t turn toward.

One of his men goes in front, and guards get out of his way, or they go down and don’t get up. The other vampire comes behind us, walking backward half the time, watching the way we came. Gideon holds me against his chest and moves fast down the middle of it and doesn’t jolt me once. I keep my eyes open over his shoulder, and I watch the doors go past and the horrified faces in them.

A man steps out ahead of us with something in his hands. The man clearing our path takes him off his feet without breaking stride. We go over him and keep going.

“Left at the bottom,” the one behind us says. “The kitchen door. Same way we came in.”

“I know the way,” Gideon says.

“Just saying it.”

Down a back stair, narrow and dark. Through a kitchen with a bubbling pot still on the stove. Then a heavy door, and Gideon turns his shoulder into it. It bursts open, and we’re outside. The lawn I took off from is hard and white under his boots. The sky is full of stars. Away to the right, past the raked drive and the lamps, the gate stands shut across the only road down the mountain.

The wall is still there. I can feel it, a long way off, all the way around us, closed.

“Now what?” one of the others says, and nobody answers him, because there isn’t an answer.

We’re out of the house.

We’re nowhere near out of danger.

Chapter 14

Crowe

She’s solid in my arms and burning through the blanket. Heavier than a woman her size should be, and I could still run all night with her.

I take her across the open ground at the back of the house with Kent on my left and Meyer behind us. The lawn is frozen hard. Behind us, every window in that house is lit, and men are coming out of two doors at once. Somebody is shouting orders that nobody is following yet.

I found her room by walking toward the guards. Four men on one hallway, no guard on any other door in the house, and the rest of it dark. It didn’t take much.

“They’re coming out the kitchen side,” Kent says.

“Let them. Keep moving.”

She’s talking against my neck. Not much of it makes sense.

“You’re cold,” she says. “So cold. That’s not right, is it? People aren’t supposed to be cold.”