the Crimson Sword pulses in the darkness. Even with my heightened sight I can’t see a foot in front of me.
“Stay put. I’ll check the hall to see if it’s safe.” Ayden’s voice whispers out to us and I nod despite knowing he can’t see me.
With wide eyes I listen as he walks away. His quiet steps feel like they run on forever in the shadows before finally fading away entirely.
My breaths come in heaps. I feel blind and almost helpless here. It isn’t a feeling of fear. It’s almost a feeling of … intuition.
Something isn’t right.
We shouldn’t be here.
“This feels like a mistake.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you.” Asher’s fingers skim the side of my cloak, rubbing my arm lightly.
“It’s not that.” I turn in a circle, searching the heavy darkness for something. “This place feels … dangerous.” A shiver runs down my spine. “Maybe it’s just the darkness, but it just feels … morbid.”
“It’s probably just the darkness. Hold on.” Asher’s warm feeling of safety falls away from me as his hand leaves my side, and I hear him running his palm along the concrete wall.
With a pulse of electricity the lights flicker on. My eyes blink hard from the intense brightness.
“Shit,” Asher says in a defeated whisper from behind me. When I open my eyes, I realize what he means.
Glass, casket-like incubators line both sides of the walls, tubes streaming from inside the glass. One thin tube is red … the color of blood. But that isn’t what has Asher staring wide, his chest rising and falling quickly as he assess each incubator.
He doesn’t dare move as the seconds tick by in silence. All I can think to do is slip my hand into his. He doesn’t appear to remember I’m here.
Within the hundreds of caskets are sedated hybrids.
Seven
Shame
Asher
Fallon’s simple presence pulls me back to reality.
“We should help them,” she whispers in a hollow voice.
I swallow hard, my gaze scanning over each one.
“We can’t. There are too many. They’re too sedated. It’d take days for them to wake up.”
The clouded memories of the compound come spiraling back to my mind. I was never a Curing Hybrid like this. Only a select few were. Ones that were close to death.
All of the hybrids in this room are close to death. The bright lights above shine down on sunken faces and sharp bones. I do a quick estimate of the hybrids in the room.
“It’s all of them.”
“How do you know?”
“Because there wasn’t many of us left. This is it.”
She squeezes my hand and pushes her hood back before walking along the incubators. My heart pounds even harder and anxiety rises in me, wishing like hell she’d put her hood back up.
“They’re … all male?” she asks, running a delicate finger along the glass.
She doesn’t look at me as she stares down into the face of a numbered hybrid. A pike.
“The females were … disposed of upon arrival at the compound.”
Elimination of the subhuman race is hard work, but the mortals seem to be doing a superior job so far.
“They’re storing their blood?”
“The Curing Hybrids are bled out. The mortals use their blood to heal the upper class.” What will they do once the blood runs dry?
Fallon’s beautiful face turns back to me, her fiery eyes shining.
Slow and almost fearful steps lead her back to me. She slips her fingers into mine again, and for an instant she’s the woman she was before. The caring and loving woman I married.
“We’ll save them,” she insists.
We won’t, but her promise and compassion is enough to make my heart calm.
Footsteps sound against the concrete and I flip the lights off, darkness comforting my thoughts once more.
Fear isn’t something that lives inside me. It visits from time to time in my life, but it never stays long. And yet, since I’ve met Fallon, I think fear has started to settle into me; making a home, getting a little too comfortable within me. Right now, as I wait for the president to unknowingly find us planted in her library, fear is thrashing through me, shaking my hands and rattling my breaths.
“You two shouldn’t have come,” Michael says in a quiet, chastising voice. His tone echoes up the enormous walls of the library. An attempt at a fatherly lecture, I’m sure.
Imagine if he knew about the other four of us who are just outside …
Neither of us utter a word in reply. Fallon walks away entirely, running her fingers down the thick spines of the