Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,123

dirty young woman who sat curled in a ball, rocking back and forth and whimpering a few feet away. Her body was covered in copious amounts of blood.

Their blood, her brain told her. It’s their blood.

She couldn’t have told anyone what her body was doing after that. All she knew was a ringing in her ears and the distant, muffled sound of Cain’s voice.

“She wouldn’t do it, no matter how he threatened her,” he was saying. “So Maze grabbed her knife hand and used it to kill them himself.” He paused, perhaps out of some sense of propriety. She couldn’t have said. Ringing. Faint voice. Nothing else.

“Forcing her to have any part in this at all was traumatizing enough to her that it fed him the energy he needed to disappear. This time without a trace.”

Anna was moving again, this time moving forward like a puppet on a string. She watched herself as if from a distance or in a dream, vaguely and bordering on numb as she stopped directly between the two bodies.

And then, quite suddenly, she was dropping to her knees – and her mind chose that unfortunate moment to boomerang back into itself, fully immersing the entirety of her in the first horrible, horrible truth of what had transpired.

“No,” she said quietly. The word was so quiet, the whisper was a ghost’s plea, desperate but trapped in a world of its own.

They’d made her believe this wouldn’t happen. They’d never come out and said it, they hadn’t made any promises, but Anna realized then that she hadn’t truly thought, not for one tangible instant, that this might actually come to pass. She’d entertained the concept in random passing, experiencing brief segments of anxiety over the idea. But in the end, Annaleia had fully trusted that all the wardens and all the sovereigns and all the fantastically powerful people around her would be able to keep her friends safe.

And not let them come to harm.

Anna saw her hands reaching out, one on either side, and felt her fingers slid over the unmoving, slightly cooler hands of her best friends. These were the two, the only two humans on Earth, that she’d loved and trusted enough to share her secret with. She’d let them into that part of her life knowing they wouldn’t run. They wouldn’t get scared and they wouldn’t judge. They would understand.

A person can search the world over for a friend like that and never find one. Lots and lots of people did. They lived their days by interactions with acquaintances, nothing more. And they died with obligatory funeral attendees as the only people who saw them lowered into the ground.

Annaleia Faith had been lucky enough to find not one, but two. They’d promised her they would always have her back. She could hear Piper speaking in her head right now… “We got your six, babe.” And Carmen… “Yeah. Me and the cringa here got your back, bruja. You count on it.”

“I didn’t have yours though.”

Annaleia lowered her arms and closed her eyes and like a condemned prisoner who’d reached the end of the green carpet, she faced the second of the hard truths that had been thrust upon her.

She could save one of them. She could bring one of them back. But only one.

She had to choose.

She barely heard herself speak this time when her somewhat splintered spirit finally whispered, “Not again.”

Chapter Forty-one – Austin Texas

When Jarrod exited the portal in an alley outside the garage he knew belonged to the Monsters, he was met with a familiar feeling, one that made his chest feel tight. This is it, he thought. Whatever it was, whatever was going to happen, it was happening now. His vision was coming true.

He was going to lose someone he cared about.

As he ran into the building and up the concrete stairs, preparing the pass code that would allow him into the otherwise invisible and warded level of the garage… he knew. He knew who it was he was going to lose.

On a deeper level of his consciousness, in a place he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge was even there, he knew that he’d known all along. He’d tried so hard to ignore it, act against it, take measures to prevent it. But one way or another, his goddamn visions always came true.

So he’d done the only thing he could think of that might make it right again. It was his only option left. And when Antares Mace and the Monsters had