Chapter 12

Was I breathing?

The air drifting in and out of my chest was all that I heard, but it felt like there wasn't any in my lungs.

Looking around the camp, I grasped a tree branch and slowly lowered myself to the soil.

We only had one casualty. There had been more, but between Jeremy, Hannah, Warren, and Ramona, all the others had been returned to their bodies. CPR played a big part in that. While only necromancers could save the mortally wounded, we could keep their blood pumping until one of the four had time to reach them.

Connor and Naomi were out searching for sacrifices who could bring that one casualty back to life. I wasn't certain of her name. I'd only seen her in passing yesterday. But she was young, no older than twenty, and she was dead on the ground a few feet ahead of me.

Her lips were blue. So was her pale skin, where it wasn't covered in blood.

Blue and red. That's all she'd been reduced to, all I could see when I looked at her now. No matter how sweet she'd been when she offered me a drink from her flask yesterday, or how brave she'd been when she offered to fight in this war. I didn't see her smile, or the dimples it formed on her cheeks, or her bright, innocent eyes. I only saw blue and red.

Our enemies were dead. We had killed each and every one of them. I couldn't describe each of them, nor the way I took their life, if mine depended on it. There was no memory of it. Maybe because I had only been able to see them for the last few minutes. Maybe because, in moments like this, there were no thoughts.

Maybe detaching the mind from the body, from the actions, from the violence, was the soul's way of saving itself.

A hand grasped my shoulder.

The sparkling ore was between my fingertips again.

I jammed it upward.

Luci caught my wrist. Despite the blood that coated his cheeks, his hands, his entire body, his eyes were calm. His grasp was soft. "It's just me."

A shaking breath escaped my lips. Gently, I pulled my hand away. "Sorry."

"Don't be." Using the same branch I had for stability, he lowered himself to the ground. With a grimace, he reached into his back pocket and came back with a canteen. "Water?"

"Whiskey would've been fine, too." I lifted the bottle and chugged. Strange, I hadn't even realized I was thirsty. Suddenly, though, the leather-lined metal was empty. A belch worked its way up my stomach and out of my mouth. Oddly enough, that burp was my confirmation. There was, in fact, air within me. "Did we get anyone?"

"Couldn't get any of them to calm down long enough to tie them up." Pulling back his T-shirt, he grumbled something indistinguishable. "You have any gauze?"

With all the blood that covered him, I'd assumed the patch on the lower left side of his ribs was someone else's. Now that the skin was exposed, it was clearly a wound. Deep and wide.

"Here." I reached out with a glowing white palm. "Let me fix that."

He pawed me away. "That doesn't work on me."

My face screwed up in confusion. "It works on everyone."

"It doesn't. Wouldn't work on you or Rain either." Luci hooked a thumb behind us, gesturing to Laila. "Courtesy of the tree of life."

"Oh." Someone should've filled me in on that sooner. "Guess it makes sense. We heal fast enough. We really don't need to be healed by someone else."

"Aye, esiasch." Pulling in a deep breath, he scanned the camp. The ravaged, blood- soaked camp. "You alright?"

"As alright as I can be," I murmured. "You?"

"About the same."

"Don't kill a whole hell of a lot in Hell, do you?"

"Scarcely." Chuckling, he spared me a smile. "It's complicated for me. Being here. Fighting in this. I'm sure you can relate."

"For different reasons, I'm assuming."

"Very different." Suddenly, a flask appeared in his hand. He twisted off the lid, tilted his head back, and chugged. His eyes stayed on that dead girl when he extended it my way. "Your father was a soldier in this. Mine is the reason it's happening."

Why was this happening?

I never understood it. As a lad, we were told the Angels hated us. Fair enough. We hated them. But why were they here?

They had their own world, Matriax. They had domain over the human world. All we wanted was this one place, but they wouldn't leave us alone.

Every war had a reason. They didn't want our land. It wasn't as though they flattened a village and built one of their own in its place.

It wasn't religion either. They made no attempts to indoctrinate us into believing in and worshiping their god. We prayed to Véa and Nix, and whichever other paired soul we wanted help from at that given moment. They had no grievance with this. They didn't burn our chapels and destroy our statues of them.

So why were they here?

"What do you mean by that?" I asked. "I know Lux is to blame for all this. Obviously. He governs the Angels. But Laila and Jeremy have him locked up. This is still ongoing."

Again, another slow exhale. Another sip from the flask as well. "It's complicated?—"

"Why the fuck are you just sitting there?" Warren's voice.

I turned around, but the man I saw was unrecognizable.

Wet maroon drenched every inch of him, from the dark hair on his head to his bare feet. None of us looked our best, but the only other time I had seen so much blood on a person was when we had brought Jake back to life. When he had to be literally bathed in it to return to his body.

"We're just catching our breath—" Luci began.

"You said as soon as this was over!" That had to have been directed at Luci, but he was looking at me. By the time I was on my feet again, we were standing inches apart. Before I had time to respond, to ask what was going on, he grabbed me by my shirt and hauled me into him. "How can you just fucking sit there?!"

It was without thought.

I took hold of the wind and lunged it at him.

He tore my shirt as he collapsed onto the soil.

When he smacked the ground, a punch kicked through my chest. But not my chest. His. At once, I felt the wind I had knocked from his body escape through mine.

Before I had time to recover, he was on his feet again. "Do that again?—"

"Put your bloody hands on me again?—"

Someone was between us. A hand planted on my chest and another on Warren's before I even realized whose.

"Knock this shit off." Jeremy's voice rang like a crack of thunder. His wide blue eyes glanced at me, then settled on Warren. "He doesn't even know what you're pissed about."

I sure the fuck did not.

"How?" Warren veered around Jeremy to look at me. His pale blue eyes were so cold they burned. "How do you not feel it?"

"Because what you're feeling is guilt." Jeremy gave him one hard push in the chest, knocking him back a few steps. This time, he didn't advance again. "They're okay. If they were hurt, you would both feel it. You're not feeling the lack of their presence, Warren. You're feeling guilt because—if we don't find them—you think it's gonna be your fault."

"If we don't find—" I stopped myself.

I looked around.

Rain was nowhere in sight. Neither was Ezra. Jake sat on a log a few feet from Amara. Ramona stood a few feet behind Jeremy, watching this fiasco carefully.

Overhead, ravens flew circles, croaking as they often did, as I'd grown used to over the last year or two.

But Rain and Ezra were gone.

I scanned for their energy, just as I had with my eyes for their bodies, but I didn't feel it nearby either.

"I—I don't understand," I said, shaking my head quickly. "Where are they? What the fuck?—"

"You were right there!" Warren stepped in again, and Jeremy returned his hand to his chest. "She was touching both of us when those fuckers took her, and you didn't fucking feel it? You didn't notice they disappeared into thin goddamned air, Graham?"

No.

I didn't notice.

The sun was up now, but I didn't remember it rising either. The last hour was like a VCR stuck on fast-forward. I saw glimmers of people I knew, things I understood, but mostly, there was nothing to make sense of.

All I could do was shake my head.

"Because he was focused on surviving," Jeremy snapped. "Now stop fucking patronizing him so we can find them."

"Already did." Across the meadow, Laila sighed dramatically, propped her hands on her hips, and frowned at Warren. "It was my first priority once they were all dead. You would've known that if you took a deep breath and used your brain, asshole."

Breaths slowing to a normal pace, Warren unclenched his fists. He ignored Jeremy's hand on his chest and made his way across the field to Laila. "Where are they? Why can't I reach their minds?"

"I don't know. And I don't know. But I do know." He opened his mouth to protest, and she held up a pointer finger to motion him to silence. "I don't know how to describe where they are, but I can feel it. I don't know why you can't reach their minds. Best guess, though, is that Graham can, because Graham is telepathic." She turned to me, arching a brow.

Mentally, I dropped into Rain's thoughts.

I couldn't see everything. It was fuzzy, not much different from that broken VCR tape. I could barely make out a dim red light in the darkness. But I heard her voice. I felt Ezra's hand in hers.

"They're moving," I murmured, trying to focus on the other senses. The air was moist against my skin. Water dripped in the background, and when it made contact, it echoed. "In a cave, I think? It looks like they're in a cave."

Warren looked at me, breathing slower, eyes full of some combination of fury and pain.

"This isn't my first rodeo, Warren," Laila said. "When we were training, Rain cast that spell with all of our blood, remember? At the very least, I can always tell where you guys are. Now watch your fucking attitude and keep your hands to yourself. I can't deal with a grown ass man acting like a toddler while we're on a rescue mission."

"Get the dragons, Amara," Iliantha said.

A raven dropped down from the sky. Its wings smacked the air furiously. The little shite's big black eyes burned into mine. Flapping its wings, feet planted atop the soil, it croaked again.

"Least they knew she was gone," Warren said under his breath.

Jeremy shot him a look. "Get in line for the damn dragons."