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I didn’t know why she was crying or what kind of daydream she’d just had. I wasn’t as good with emotions as Gaian was, but I clutched her tighter so she wouldn’t thrash around so sporadically.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“They … they want babies!” she shouted, her cries becoming louder and completely controlling her body. Her breathing became heavier, her voice raspy. She looked around frantically. “They want babies!”
“Who wants babies?” Gaian asked her.
Instead of answering him, she jumped out of my arms and looked around the forest, shaking her head. Strands of her brown hair whipped around under the moonlight. “We need to stop them. They want the babies.”
Gaian peered over at me, and I looked right at him, unsure of what was going on and what Sina really meant. At the moment, there were only a couple of baby pups in our pack, but if anything had happened to them, someone would’ve contacted Calder.
“Which baby?” Gaian asked. “What are you talking about?”
She ran her hand through her hair over and over, making it messy. And then she tugged on it, hard, as if she was punishing herself for some godforsaken reason. “Gods, I should’ve known. I should’ve fucking known! Where … where is that woman? That’s why the vampire wanted her.”
“Which woman?” Gaian asked.
My body stiffened. “The pregnant woman. Hellana.”
Sina ripped herself away and sprinted through the woods toward our pack houses. She knocked on every door until she found the one that smelled the most like Hellana. Stopping in front of the door, she stared up at the second-story window.
“This woman …” she mumbled to herself, shaking her head again. “She must be a Paragon, just like me. I didn’t realize it before, though they must’ve only taken Paragons. That’s all my father ever wanted—Paragons—so he could rule the world.”
She clutched the door handle, but Gaian grabbed her wrist. “You can’t just barge into somebody’s house, Sina. They—”
Once she pulled herself away from Gaian, she snatched the handle again and yanked on it hard. The door trembled in her hold, and then, finally, she ripped it open and right off the hinges. Without calling to see if Hellana was even home, Sina sprinted up the stairs to the bedroom.
Unsure of what Sina had seen, I walked up the stairs behind her until she started to scream at the top of her lungs. When I rounded the staircase and glanced into the hallway, Sina dropped to her knees in front of the master bedroom.
“No!”
Gaian and I sprinted toward her and looked into the bedroom. My stomach dropped, my mouth drying. Hellana lay on the bed, muffling her sobs with a pillow over her mouth and clutching her stomach, which bled profusely.
At the waist, her clothes had been ripped and stained with blood. And when I took a closer look, the flesh on her stomach was ripped apart, and her baby was gone. Completely and utterly torn out of Hellana’s belly.
76
the plea
sina
I wishedthat this wasn't real. I hoped it was all a dream.
Hellana lay in her bed with a gash, big enough to tear out a baby, in her stomach. Blood soaked through the blankets, sheets, and mattress. I scrambled to my feet and stumbled toward the bed, collapsing on the side of it and taking her in my arms.
“Get Thayer!” I screamed, knowing that he wielded magic to heal wounds. He had done it for me with the engraving he had cut on my chest for the Crispen Pack so many weeks ago. “Someone, get Thayer!”
“On it,” Darius said.
Tears streamed down my cheeks.
If what I saw was real—and it was based on Hellana’s baby being stolen—then Mom really was alive. She was raped and forced to bear children so that evil, vile man could create an army of his own brainwashed soldiers.
“My baby!” Hellana shouted, her cries shrill.
“I’m going to do everything that I can,” I whispered to her.
I didn’t want to give her false hope that I’d find her baby alive because I had seen what they did in my daydream. The process happened quickly—so fucking quickly. If they had her baby, they could’ve killed her by now.
