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26
ADDIE
My chest wouldn’t stop bleeding. Even after Maddox cleaned and bandaged the wound, it kept steadily leaking blood. When we stepped out of the bathroom, I noticed the way Hel watched me. Her attention wasn’t on Maddox, for once.
Hel’s attention was on the bandages on my chest.
“It’s not going to stop. Is it?” I asked her.
She gave a slight shake of her head. Her visage flickered, making her human eye go wide with surprise. She looked down at her hands. I followed suit and found her palms semi-transparent.
“My foothold here is fading,” Hel said. “I don’t know how much longer I can stay to help.”
I nearly snorted. Hel hadn’t been helping at all. If anything, she’d been a thorn in my side. Still, I didn’t want to see her go. It meant that things were way worse than I’d originally thought…and I already knew they were really bad.
Shit.
Ryder returned with a hopeful smile. He’d called the Pack. Most of them were on their way, including Ness.
I was about to ask Ryder to send his mate home when I noticed Maddox out of the corner of my eye. The man stood in the kitchen, completely naked with his fist deep in a bag of tortilla chips. He pulled out a handful, shoved them into a bowl of cheese dip and rammed them into his mouth.
A laugh bubbled out of me despite everything we’d been through. Maddox grinned, pulled out one chip, dipped the very tip, and daintily placed it on his tongue. If that didn’t break me, the wink he gave me after certainly did.
I didn’t expect this kind of attitude from him, not after he told me that he was prepared to kill for the community. Who was this man? Where was the brooding Maddox that I’d had in the bathroom?
“Hel,” I said without taking my eyes off Maddox. “What did you see earlier? Tell me before you’re locked out of the world of the living all together.”
But when I turned towards her, there was only empty space. I hoped that she’d left. That wasn’t likely, though. When I cast out my arcana, there were void spots scattered all over the place. Reality was coming undone.
I ran my hands over my face. What started out as a murder case had become a world-ending threat. How did Vi handle this kind of responsibility? The impetuous demi-angel had never been one for responsibility, but she’d handled the apocalypse with grace.
I didn’t know what to do next. We had to hunt down Vince and kill him, so he couldn’t make things worse, but the man had an arcana cancelling aura. Dragons were made of magic. If Ryder fully shifted, would Vince’s aura turn Ryder back into a human?
This was a mess of unknowns. I didn’t want to get my friends involved, but I also didn’t want to do it alone.
“Come,” Maddox said to me. “Eat something. Drink some water. It’ll be good for you, especially if that wound won’t heal. We should grab more bandages, so you can change it frequently. You’re going to need to keep that clean.”
There was little I could do while we waited for the Pack to show up, so I let Maddox pull me into the kitchen and feed me snacks. He dipped a chip deep into the bowl of cheese and brought it to my lips. I opened for him and savored this moment because there was no telling how this might end.
My death was written into the weave of the world. How many times had I thwarted it so far? My time was running out.
Maddox
Stomach full,I should have been able to focus. I spread the map out over the hood of Ryder’s car and marked our infiltration points. All the while, a part of my mind remained on Addie.
She had her friends around her. While she promised that they would keep her safe, I wasn’t so confident. Unless it was me beside her, I wouldn’t know for sure. So, when I made the plans to infiltrate Vince’s hiding place in the quarry, I made sure to put myself with Addie.
I claimed this was to keep a power source near me, because I was the only one who could access arcana around Vince. Everyone believed me. They didn’t notice the way I packed up the map and gravitated towards Addie while everyone else was getting prepared.
“I’m glad you put clothes on just to take them off again,” Addie said with a playful smirk lifting the corners of her mouth.
Vi slapped me on the shoulder. “If he doesn’t die today, he has a promising future as a stripper!”
Morgan, her mate, grumbled something and bent to lift Vi off the ground. He chastised her under his breath as he carried her away. I watched and envied their dynamic. Though Vi was a pain in the ass to everyone around her, Morgan seemed to enjoy the way she poked and prodded him.
They were happy. It was the kind of joy I’d never found with my ex-wife. At the time, I’d thought we were happy. Instead, I’d mistaken complacency for contentment. Looking back, I wasn’t as angry with Paige anymore. She’d deserved better.
And now I had Addie in my life.
