The Shadows (Black Dagger Brotherhood #13) - J. R. Ward Page 0,19

on her back. Then he leaned across her and took her arm to check for a—

“Oh … God.”

The limb was stiff, as if rigor mortis had set in. Except … when he placed his two fingers on the inside of her wrist, there was a pulse.

Selena moaned and her foot twitched. Then her head jerked against the grass.

“Selena?” His heart pounded so hard, he could barely hear anything. “What happened?”

No reason to ask if she was okay. That was a resounding fucking no.

“Are you hurt?”

More moaning as she seemed to struggle against something.

“I’m going to roll you over.”

Bracing himself, he took her arm and began to try to move her—but he had to stop. Her position did not change, her contoured limbs and stiffened torso were so rigid, it was as if he were dealing with a statue made of stone—

“Oh, shit!”

At the sound of Rhage’s voice, Trez jerked his head up. V and Rhage had materialized out of nowhere, and while he had always liked the two of them, at the moment, he could have kissed the pair of warriors.

“You gotta help me,” he barked. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

The Brothers knelt down, and Vishous went for that wrist, checking the pulse.

“She can’t seem to move. But I don’t know why?”

“She has a pulse,” V murmured. “She’s breathing. Shit, I need my stuff.”

“Can we get her to … where the fuck are we?” Trez demanded.

“Yeah, I can transport her—”

“No one moves her but me,” he heard himself growl.

The position paper was hardly a bene in this situation. The bonded male in him, however, didn’t give a fuck.

Conversation rolled out between the Brothers, but damned if he heard any of it. His brain was tripping over itself, snippets of the past couple of months filtering through as he tried to look for signs that there had been something wrong with her.

There had been nothing that he’d seen, or heard of through the grapevine. If she’d only collapsed, it might have been the result of offering her vein too much, but that wouldn’t explain the fact that her body had seized up in the way it had—she seemed to have literally turned to stone.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Rhage.

“Give me your hand.”

Trez put his palm out and felt himself get lifted to his feet. Before they could talk at him, he said, “I have to carry her. She’s mine—”

“We know.” Rhage nodded. “Nobody’s going to touch her without your permission. We need you to pick her up—then V will help you both back, okay? G’on now, gather your female.”

Trez’s arms were shaking so badly, he wondered whether he’d be able to hold her in his arms. But as soon as he bent down, a profound sense of purpose wiped away all the nerves and trembling: The goal of getting her to the training center’s clinic gave him a physical power and a mental clarity that he had never known before.

He would die in the effort.

God, she weighed so little. Less than he remembered.

And beneath the robes he could feel her hard bones, as if she were wasting away.

Just before that whirlpool effect overtook him again, his eyes shifted to a thick row of stocky trees that were broken by a trellis. On the far side of the arch, there was a courtyard of some kind in which marble statues of females in various poses were set up on pillars.

Had she been on the way there?

For some reason, the sight of those statues terrified him to the core.

SEVEN

Standing in front of the long mirror in her bedroom, Layla tried to pull the supposedly loose coat around herself, but getting what seemed like its copious folds across her belly was like asking a throw blanket to cover a king-size bed.

Looking down, she could no longer see her feet, and for once in her life, her breasts were big enough to create some serious cleavage beneath her robing.

Given the breadth of her, it was hard to believe she still had months to go with the pregnancy.

Why couldn’t vampires be more like humans? Those rats without tails took nine months to do this. Her species? Try eighteen.

Glancing over her shoulder, she checked herself out in the dresser’s mirror across the way. According to the various human birthing shows she’d watched on TV, she was supposed to feel all aglow. Revel in her body’s changes. Embrace the miracle that was conception, incubation, and impending expulsion.

Guess humans really were a different race.

The only positive