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I heard a hum from my left and ducked. She sailed overhead with an angry shriek. The next time, she came at me from the back. I didn’t move fast enough. Damp dirt clung to my clothes and my hair, but I didn’t let her get a grip on me.
She was stronger when she could use those wings of hers to pin to something, so that was the thing to avoid.
With every pass, I was getting better at dodging her. Sometimes I could hear her coming, sometimes I couldn’t. But when I couldn’t dodge her, the trick was to keep twisting and writhing until I was back on my feet.
Not going to lie, it was fucking exhausting. And twice, she caught me as I was still dragging myself up off the ground, driving me right back down.
But I wasn’t about to give up and release the hold I had on my emotions. I didn’t have to win this fight. I just had to hold out long enough for him to get his part of the job done.
Awareness tingled up my spine an instant before Anya smashed into me again. Only this time, I was airborne. We probably only flew backward for a second or two, but it felt like an eternity.
At least until that flight came to an abrupt end with a brilliant shock of pain exploding through my back and chest. My feet hit the ground with a jarring thunk, but I didn’t fall.
How the hell am I still standing?
My next ragged breath was torture to draw, and I coughed it right back out, along with a warm, coppery wetness that coated my tongue and dripped from the corner of my mouth.
Uh oh.
I pressed my shaky fingers to my lips and pulled them away, staring in disbelief at the red staining my skin.
Danger, Will Robinson.
Anya’s cackle registered somewhere in the swirling, panicked mess of my mind, but it faded away when I got a look at what was going on beyond the blood on my hand.
Was that… I tried to move. Pain ricocheted inside me, shooting from my chest to my fingers and toes, and back again.
Sure enough, one of the gnarled tree branches was sticking out the right side of my chest.
Well, shit.I meant to let my head fall back against the tree’s trunk, only it didn’t have anything to fall back against. I was just hanging out, dangling from a dead tree limb, doing my best imitation of a marshmallow on the end of a skewer.
And damn, did it hurt.
It wasn’t the same kind of pain I’d felt fighting off Petra’s shadow, but it was up there in terms of intensity. It blurred my vision and made it hard to focus. Anya was saying something, her taunting tone coming through loud and clear, even if my brain refused to process her words.
I really couldn’t make sense of much, but I was present enough to realize I needed to keep my goddamned walls up. If Hook caught wind of what was going on, he would drop what he was doing.
Not happening.
He needed to take care of Petra so my brother would be safe.
I coughed again, spitting up more blood, and biting back a whimper when the movement sent another shock of agony through me. Even a mush-minded idiot like me knew coughing up blood meant bad things for my future.
And from the way the pain was fading, that future wouldn’t last too much longer.
Which left me with only one real choice to make: I could hang out and die as the world’s worst tree ornament, whining about how much it hurt, or I could at leasttryto fight.
Dragging my clumsy feet beneath me, I clutched the end of the blood-soaked branch sticking out from my chest.
“I choose violence,” I croaked.
I had enough time to think this was exactly the kind of stupid thing Hook had told me not to do before I pushed with my feet and pulled with my hands, dragging myself forward.
“Fuuuuuck!” Black spots didn’t just dot my vision, they flooded it. Fire licked through my chest, racing down my spine, making my feet and legs tingle madly.
One more push. That’s all I need.
I blocked out Anya’s voice—it wasn’t like I was listening to her bullshit anyway—and psyched myself up to try again. All I had to do was keep her busy, and the best way to keep her busy was to keep fucking moving.
