with her other hand. I worried my lip as I mentally ran through the incantation. I didn’t want to screw it up.
The dragon was shimmering, his head almost at the entrance to the cave. The next moment, a cloud of smoke appeared and a tall man that I recognized only too well appeared, landing on the floor. The swarm of death beetles immediately receded, as did the mother beetle.
“Crap!” I stared into Gyell’s gorgeous eyes, trying to control the shaking in my voice.
He took in the scene and began to run toward us, eyes glinting with a malevolent light. I started to chant:
Powers of the vortex, heed my call,
Take us home, one and all!
By oak and thorn, by ocean’s roar,
Transport us away from Death’s door!
As my words echoed through the room, there was a massive groan, as though the Underworld was loath to give us up. Gyell reached out toward me and I thought he was going to grab hold of my arm, but his hand passed through me, and the last thing I saw, before the mists swept us away, was the anger in his eyes, and the bloodlust on his face.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I wasn’t sure where we were going to end up, but as the smoke and mist cleared, I realized we were standing the break room, in the exact position we had been in when we went into the Underworld. A sudden fear that Gyell had come through with us hit me and I whirled around, looking for the crazed dragon shifter, but he was nowhere to be seen.
There was a loud shout and the next moment, Herne raced into the room. Before he could grab me for a hug, I pointed toward Viktor.
“Get him down to urgent care!” And then, my knees weak, I collapsed into the nearest chair. Raven and Angel dropped to the floor, both looking as exhausted as I felt.
Talia and Yutani had followed Herne into the room. Talia immediately pulled out her phone and called the clinic, asking them to send up a medic.
Yutani knelt beside the three of us. “Are you all right? Are any of you hurt?”
I started to shake my head, but then Angel let out a shout and slumped over. Turning, I saw she had fainted and there appeared to be something moving under her shirt.
“What the…oh great gods! It’s one of the death beetles!” I ripped at her shirt, pulling it up and we saw one of the smaller beetles trying to burrow into her skin. It had managed to gnaw a hole in her side and was trying to eat into her thoracic cavity. I grabbed hold of the back end of the beetle and pulled. The scutellum of the beetle broke off from the head and thorax, leaving the guts of the beetle dangling. But it kept hold of the flesh in its mandibles.
“We need to cut that out immediately,” Raven said. “The head can continue to live for a brief time—long enough to do more damage.”
I pulled out my dagger and, biting my lip, cut the head away from the mandibles. The doctors could remove the rest of it from her when they got here. It hit me that I was staring into a small hole in my best friend’s side. I turned to the side and leaned over, kneeling with my head on the floor as the room began to spin.
The next few moments were a blur. The medics arrived and they took both Angel and Viktor away, down the elevator to the clinic. Herne began stripping my clothes off, and ordered Raven to do the same.
“We can’t take a chance that another one of those beetles is hiding in your clothing,” he said. “You can tell me what happened while you’re undressing.”
Raven told him everything that had happened as we stripped. I was still feeling faint. By the time we had everything off, we had found no more death beetles, and I relaxed a little. But my thoughts were downstairs with Angel and Viktor, and I fretted the entire time.
Herne’s phone rang as Raven and I got dressed again. He spoke in low tones, and then, he slipped his phone back in his pocket and turned back to us. There was a gleam in his eye that instantly made me relax.
“Angel will be all right, and so will Viktor. Angel is going to need a couple weeks’ bed rest—she has an infection from the death beetle, but they caught it early and can