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I hadn’t worried about her at all in the previous trials, but this was something different. She was heavily outnumbered. Likely outgunned. I had every confidence in her, but with those odds?
I wasn’t even sure any of us would come out the other side alive, and we had a fuck ton more experience than her, not to mention firepower where she only had blades.
The last of the whiskey in my flask flowed down my throat, and I lit up a cigarette, the last one in the pack, and sneered. “You going to drink that or just stare at it?”
Corvus’ pale blue eyes slid to me with a murderous look before he lifted the short glass from the now-semi-busted coffee table and put it to his lips.
He paused, and I snorted, until I saw why he wasn’t drinking it. Something drew his eye and I followed his line of sight, searching, the shriveled black thing in my chest squeezing ever tighter.
“Ghost?”
Ava Jade stood no more than fifteen feet away, and for a second, I thought I was hallucinating her. Thought she was a phantom come back from the dead to haunt me.
Pale. She was so pale. Her long dark hair dripping wet and hanging in her face. Mascara running to her chin. A bleeding wound in her shoulder. All her weight on her left leg. Her dress in sopping wet tatters.
It was the best costume here, but it wasn’t a costume at all.
I saw it in her face just before it happened and rushed from my seat, off balance from too much drink, but not even that would stop me. I caught her as she collapsed, fingers curling over the back of her skull only a second before it would’ve connected with the wooden planks beneath our feet.
“Ghost!” I shouted, pushing wet strands of hair away from her face. “Hey. Hey, stay with me.”
A hand came down on my shoulder, and I whirled, my upper lip curling at Corvus.
“It’s me,” he said, and Grey was there, too, looking white as a sheet.
Corvus tried to take her from me, but I held her tighter, my mind in a fog filled with flashing lights and Ghost, Ghost, Ghost.
“Okay,” Grey shouted, pulling Corvus back from me so that he could step closer.
Around us, a crowd of onlookers was gathering, and I glared at them, my vision wavering so their costumed faces looked as though I was seeing them through a fun house mirror.
“We need to get her out of here,” Grey was saying and I focused, blinking to clear the haze from my eyes. “Take her to the back room.”
Out of here.Yes.
I lifted her to my chest, almost losing my footing until Corvus righted me. “Hurry. She’s lost a lot of blood, Rook.”
No. She was fine.
She would be fine.
Her wetness seeped into my clothes, drenching me in a brutal cold, nearly as cold as where my hands held her bare arms. She was too cold. She needed to be warmer.
Grey ran ahead of me, opening the door to the back room. He flipped a breaker and the music and lights behind us went dead as the heavy door shut. The partiers screamed and shouted their protest, but already their footfalls seemed to be retreating, leaving the Docks. Good.
Corvus knocked bottles and glasses from the top of the short black bar where we kept our stock, sending them shattering to the floor. The intoxicating smell of good bourbon and very good whiskey filling my lungs.
“Lay her down,” Corvus ordered, and I grudgingly set her down on the damp bar.
“She’s cold,” I managed, coming back to myself, the influence of the whiskey still churning in my stomach, waning in the face of an injured Ghost.
Warm.She needed to be warm.
I threw off my leather jacket and laid it over her chest while Grey worked to untie the strip of black cloth around her shoulder. The knot came loose, revealing a water-puckered wound. Too messy to have been a bullet.
“Diesel,” I growled, picturing the crossbow bolt that would’ve gone straight through her. In one side and out the other. Invading her flesh, corrupting her perfection.
I’d kill him.
