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I knew I should have been more concerned about these supposed “old gods” and what it meant that they were awake since it was enough to make Arick worry.
But the fact of the matter was, I didn’t give a fuck what happened in the world so long as Dale was in it, and she was okay.
So I had to get her okay again.
With that in mind, I brought her upstairs, got her undressed, and slowly and methodically tended to her wounds.
She stayed conscious for the first five minutes of it.
After that, the pain was just too much.
When I was done, though, I went ahead and dosed her just to make sure she didn’t wake up in agony.
Then I climbed into the bed beside her, wrapped my arms and wings around her, and did what I wanted to do every single moment since the moment I’d Claimed her.
I spent the night with her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Dale
It felt like I was buried underwater. Like I was stuck on the floor of the ocean, and I knew which way was up, but I just couldn’t force my body to swim toward the surface.
There were times when I would feel myself start to push off the ground and float up, but something kept pushing me back down.
And, to be honest, I didn’t really try all that hard. The couple times when I did start to rise, I was acutely aware of pain in almost every area of my body.
So I was happy to be pushed back down, to sit there in the floaty nothingness all around me.
Until, suddenly, the floating stopped, and I was moving upward without warning.
The pain was back, but duller than before, and there was no stopping it anyway, so I had to keep moving upward toward it.
As I got closer to the surface, though, I found something almost as comforting as that sea-floor numbness. And that was a warmth that enveloped me, that warmed me to my core, that made me want to burrow into it and never move.
It took me an almost embarrassingly long time to realize I was so warm because I was resting on someone’s chest.
It took longer still to be aware of the source of the warmth.
Not just the body I was on.
But the wings around me.
Minos.
As soon as his name formed in my head, the memories came flooding back.
The park. The woods. The boys yelling. Marsh likely breaking his back. The demon beating the ever-loving shit out of me. Maggie. Then Minos.
Maggie.
A cry bubbled up and burst out of me at that, making Minos stiffen below me.
“I thought you were ready to wake up,” he murmured, his hand stroking gently through my hair. “Do you want more of the drugs?”
Drugs?
He’d drugged me?
That, actually, that made a lot of sense.
I never would have been able to sleep otherwise, not after all that had happened, all that I needed to deal with.
“Maggie,” I whispered, feeling the sting in my eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said, answering the unspoken question. “It didn’t look good, but I don’t know.”
“Marsh?”
“Broken back, most likely. Boys were in the van.”
“You left them all there?” I asked, hearing the accusation in my voice, so there was no way he missed it.
“You needed help. More than they did.”
“You don’t know that. I needed to—“
“Get yourself some medical attention,” he cut me off. “Those kids, your friend, I’m sure they all had phones. I’m sure a team was there to help them.”
“But it was my—“
“Nope. Fuck that. You’re not doing the blame thing,” he objected, grabbing me tighter when I tried to pull away.
Normally, I would have been successful. But everything was still hurting. And there was a heaviness to my limbs that made me think some of the drugs were still in my system.
“The kids never should have been in the field.”
“If they hadn’t been, you’d be dead right now.”
There wasn’t really any arguing with that logic. But it didn’t make me feel any better.
Death was a part of the job.
We went into it knowing that, accepting that.
But I was a full-fledged demonslayer.
Maggie was just a kid.
She never stood a chance.
It should have been me.
“How was he so strong?” I asked, mostly thinking out loud.
Because now, with some space and time to think it over, it made no sense.
Demons were strong, sure. But that was why God made us stronger.
I mean Minos was the only truly unkillable kind of demon, and I knew I could take him on in a fight if I needed to.
It wouldn’t be easy by any means.
But I wouldn’t have been a helpless pile of pain on the ground, either.
“I have no fucking idea,” Minos said, confirming my suspicions. “He shouldn’t have been.”
“There was a sigil found,” I recalled, trying not to focus on the stabbing sensation in my heart when I thought of Maggie excitedly bringing it up to us, proud to have found a clue. “Right before,” I added.
