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I went to respond, but he offered me a wink before closing his eyes and slumping forward. The tattoos on him moved as they had in hell, like living things creeping along his skin before they dissipated.
Seeing him there not moving, not laughing, with no marks on his skin, felt beyond wrong.It wasn’t Hunter, not the man I knew, the one who never missed a chance to make a stupid joke or innuendo.
After almost a minute, I started to fidget. I couldn’t stay still, couldn’t stop my brain from spinning, from thinking about all the things that could go wrong.
What was taking so long?
Why wasn’t he back yet?
When I went to complain, a sickening, gasping, choking sound came from inside the protective lines.
Hunter fell backward, arching up, eyes open but empty, as if he still weren’t there but was reacting all the same.
“What’s happening?” I asked, my eyes wide, needing someone to explain.
“I don’t know.” Grant moved his hands, then whispered words to himself. Instead of anything happening with Hunter, however, the symbols on the ground brightened as if he’d just strengthened the protections instead of doing anything for Hunter.
I walked over to Grant and shoved him, breaking his concentration. “Do something!”
“Like what? Hunter is the only one who can travel like this. I can’t pull him back, can’t do anything but make sure whatever is attacking him doesn’t break through and getusnext. He’s smart, though, and if there’s a way he can fight this, we have to trust he will.”
I turned back toward Hunter, to where mist escaped his open mouth, seeping from him and into the protected circle.
Mist?
I went forward, but the line stopped me.
I couldn’t cross it, but I was pretty sure I knew something it wouldn’t stop…
“Don’t you dare,” Grant said, warning in his tone that I one hundred percent ignored as I shifted into my reaper form and passed the barrier.
“Damn it, Ava,” he cursed as I turned corporeal again on the other side.
Mist filled most of the circle now, cold and threatening. I crouched beside Hunter and set my hands on him. His skin was freezing, and still he twisted, his chest heaving as if he couldn’t draw air.
I closed my eyes, trying to do what I’d done with Troy, with the other immortals, when I’d reached inside and removed Lilith’s influence. I foundnothinginside Hunter, though. I couldn’t find his soul—or whatever he had—couldn’t find the shard of something else, the piece of Lilith she’d left behind before. Instead, a leash sat, like a dead body tethered to a soul that was elsewhere.
Which struck a terror inside me I had no idea could exist. Was Hunter dead? He couldn’t be if he were still moving, right? Despite all the things I’d seen so far, zombies weren’t real.
Please don’t let zombies be real.
Instead of worrying about that—I wasn’t ready to consider zombie hellhounds—I followed the leash, just as I had before when searching for souls, like I’d done to start this whole thing with Rachel’s body.
At the end of that trail, I fell head-first into the void. The first time it had happened, it had knocked me out.
That had been so long ago, though, like a different person. That had been an Ava running from who she was, someone who hadn’t accepted herself.
Iwasn’tthat woman anymore.
And I had things that mattered to me more than my own fears, now.
So when I fell into that abyss, into the freezing, endless darkness, the silence and the ocean Gran had described, I didn’t let it strip me of my wits.
I screamed into it, following the trail Hunter had left, no matter how deep it took me, no matter the crushing darkness, or the way I couldn’t breathe. None of that mattered.
There, at the point I wasn’t sure I could push through, I found him—nothing but twisting, writhing smoke. The world took shape, dim but forming around him as if darkness cleared away.
A stone floor sat beneath us, mist rolling across it like thick fog, and just beyond Hunter’s smoke dragon, a woman with dark hair stared at us.
