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A low growl rumbled deep in Roark’s throat. “Ye gonna tell her to fuck off or should I?”
Jesse released his grip on my hair. “You might be immune, Evie, but you’re not immortal. Can you survive the bloody hole it will leave in your chest?”
Good point, but amid the agony, I felt this…this strange intuition, this certainty. “The nymph won’t hurt me.”
Except it was hurting me now, piercing me with telepathic shrapnel and shredding my insides.
“You guys? Shea called from the recliner. “What’s going on?”
“Keep your arse in that chair, Shea.” Roark jostled me, adjusting his hands to more securely lock my arms at my back.
Jesse squeezed Roark’s arm. “Just hold her there while I get the kit to draw her blood.”
But before he took a step, a battle of white-hot vibrations exploded in my gut, coming from everywhere and nowhere. An ungodly scream tore from my chest.
Roark hugged me tightly, his hand stroking my back and his mouth pressed to my temple. “Bloody hell, love. What’s happening?”
“Evie?” Jesse pushed the hair from my face. “What is it?”
Everything ached, from the roots of my hair to the tips of my toes. I panted, certain the next anguished breath would be my last. “Aphids? Don’t know. Doesn’t feel…right.”
Each burning pinch resonated like the familiar hunger of bugs, but it was indirect. I couldn’t separate the threads. Couldn’t trace them. It was as if I were sensing the aphids secondhand.
I clenched my stomach against the cramps. “Feeling aphids…through the nymph? Could be too far away?”
Roark shushed me with his lips on my forehead. “Aphids den’ harm nymphs. If one bit the other, they both perish.”
In theory. A theory we’d never tested.
Jesse stood beside us, invisible in the dark, and silent except for the scrape of his breaths. He must’ve been torn between staying at my side and going to get the supplies to draw my blood. We were wasting precious time.
As I opened my mouth to hurry him, another jolt of pain iced through me. My back bowed in Roark’s arms, and the scent of blood tickled my nose. That smell…it was more of an out-of-body perception, arousing my stomach, but not my stomach. The nymph’s stomach. And it wasn’t my blood I smelled this time. The intoxicating scent was coming from…
No. I twisted my neck to see the window, squinting through the pitch-black. “Wait!”
Glass shattered across the room.
Something or someone broke the window. The dark room wrapped around me as I sucked in a breath. Then everything happened at once.
The incapacitating pain in my stomach burst a blinding light behind my eyes, wrenching a scream from my throat. Roark’s arms tightened around me, lifting me into a cradle hold. And Jesse’s feet pounded across the floor as he ran toward the broken window.
Before I took the next breath, an implosion of warmth released in my chest. I gasped, trembling all over, as the worst of the pain vanished. Darwin whimpered somewhere beneath me, and electric currents flickered at the edge of my senses. But all of it faded the moment Jesse turned on the flashlight.
Shea stood at the window, blinking against the stark light with a hammer dangling from one hand. Her other arm was poked between the nailed table legs and through a foot-wide hole in the glass, hanging out of sight on the other side. With the nymph.
She stared at the jagged hole without moving a muscle to pull her arm back, her dark complexion paling with…shock? Unthinkable pain? Was the nymph eating her arm off?
“Shit!” Jesse tucked the flashlight under his arm and grabbed her shoulder, slowly easing her free of the broken shards.
Would she pull back a bloody stump? Would the nymph try to crawl through and attack Jesse? Why couldn’t I feel the nymph anymore?
The moment her arm was free, Jesse dragged her away from the window.
I pushed against Roark’s chest, my body shaking in terror. “Put me down.”
Instead of releasing me, he carried me to them with the clickity-clack of Darwin’s claws at his heels and took the flashlight from Jesse. Then he redirected the beam on the mocha-skinned arm held in Jesse’s hands.
Cuts from the glass left bloody grooves across her skin, but none of the gashes looked deep. What curdled my stomach was the puncture on the inside of her wrist.
It was the size of a nail-head, perfectly round, and welling with dark red blood. The kind of puncture made by the tip of a speared mouth.
Shea’s eyebrows dug together, the whites of her eyes stark in the light still illuminated on her arm.
Jesse moved the beam to the empty window and returned it to her arm. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
A grunt rumbled in Roark’s chest. “Were ye dipping into me whiskey, woman, and blowing out your mental capacities?”
“No! I had to…” She shook her head, confusion drawing down the corners of her mouth. “I don’t know. I didn’t think. I…I just had to go to the nymph.”
