He screams, once, twice, and starts to flail wildly. In the mayhem, his gun goes off and I brace myself for the impact of a bullet. It never comes. Instead, Declan is there between John and me. He wraps himself around me as he lifts me into his arms, covering every inch of my body with his. And then we’re barreling through the flames.
I close my eyes and hang on tight, and try to pretend not to hear John’s screams as the flames devour him inch by painful inch.
“Are you okay?” Declan asks as he careens around a corner. “Did he hurt you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good.” He makes a sharp left, then a right and another left. Suddenly a staircase looms in front of us and he runs for it, flat-out. Fire alarms are going off and people are stirring—I can hear shouts echoing down the corridors. I can’t help freaking out.
“One more minute,” he tells me. “We just need one more minute.”
I glance over his shoulder to where people are staring after us. “I’m not sure we’re going to get it.”
“Oh, we’ll get it.” He takes the stairs three at a time and the second we’re fully above ground, I feel it—that strange, shadowy tugging again. It’s the last thing I feel before things turn black for the second time in an hour.
This time the effect on my senses isn’t as dramatic and it doesn’t take as long. I’m not sure why, but I think it has something to do with Declan. When I can see again, I’m standing in the middle of my living room with Lily hovering over me.
“Is she okay?” my roommate asks Declan.
“I’m fine,” I answer.
“Oh, good. So then maybe you can explain to me how you materialized from nothing? One minute I’m watching Netflix, wondering if you’re planning on coming back here after work, and the next minute you two are in the middle of the freaking room. And you were looking,” she adds critically, “a lot worse than you did when you left the house this morning. And that’s saying something.”
I turn to Declan. “Can you tell her what you did? Because I’m not sure—”
I break off at my first good look at Declan. He’s pale, ashy, weak. Some instinct I didn’t know I had has me reaching for him, but I’m too late. His knees give out and he hits the ground, hard.
For a second it’s so shocking that all I do is stare. But as he falls face-first onto the carpet—his arms spread wide—I fall to my knees beside him.
“Baby! What’s wrong?” Even as I ask the question, I see the blood seeping onto the hardwood beneath him. I flash back to that moment when the gun went off, right before the flames swallowed John, and I know what’s happened. Declan’s been shot.
“Call 911!” I shout to Lily as I rip at his jacket and shirt, determined to see the wound. There’s a lot of blood on my floor and it’s only been a few seconds. I can only imagine how much blood he lost while he was running through the underground passageways of the ACW.
“I’m fine,” he grates out from between clenched teeth. “I just need a minute—”
Neither Lily nor I pay any attention to him. Lily because she’s on the phone and I because . . . because I’ve just uncovered the wound. It’s a huge hole that goes straight through his shoulder, leaving nothing but raw, jagged flesh in its wake.
“Oh my God. How did you carry me with this? How did you run?”
“It looks worse than it is.”
“Somehow I doubt that.” I place one hand on the front of the wound and one on the back and then press. I’m desperate to stop the bleeding.
Declan blanches, mutters a string of curses. But then he reaches up with his uninjured arm and places his hand over mine. A wild heat spreads from his hand to mine and I watch in fascination as the blood flow becomes sluggish.
“You can heal yourself?” I whisper as he arches into the warmth. It’s a rare ability, one that few healers ever develop. Rachael, my sister, can heal little things on herself, but nothing on the scope of a gunshot wound.
“Not me,” he grates out. “You.”
“I can’t heal.”
He doesn’t answer me, just presses down a little harder on my hand. Within a couple of minutes, the bleeding has stopped completely. The wound has begun to heal, and though it’s still red and angry-looking, it’s nothing compared to how it had appeared even five minutes before.
“Cancel the ambulance,” Declan says hoarsely, finally letting go of my hand.
“You need to be checked out.”
“Too many questions with a gunshot wound. What am I going to tell them?”
I know he’s right, but it kills me to just go along with him when it’s obvious he needs medical attention. “What about infection?”
“The healing takes care of that.”
I turn to Lily. “Can you help me get him up?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
Together we wrestle Declan to his feet. He sways a little, but once upright he seems a lot more in control. Which is good. An injured, dependant Declan is a terrifying thing. Not because I don’t want to take care of him, but because it kills me to see him in pain.
“I’ve got it from here,” he says, and begins the painful trek down the hall to my bedroom.
Rolling my eyes, I plaster myself to his uninjured side and drape that arm over his shoulder. “Don’t you want to sit down?” I ask, glancing behind me at the sofa.
“I need to take a shower before I bleed all over your house.”
“Do you think I give a shit? You’re who I care about.”
He smiles at me, a real, genuine smile that lights up his whole face and has my heart hitching in my chest. “Yeah, well, I think we’ve done enough damage to the place in the last couple of weeks, don’t you?”
I know he’s talking about the fire I started and the windows I’ve broken as I tried to seize control of my magic. “So far, I’ve done all the damage. Now it’s your turn.”
He shakes his head. “Shower.”
I all but growl in frustration. Goddess deliver me from big, strong, alpha he-men.
But in the end, I help him strip off his clothes. Even help him with the shower before drying him off and tucking him into my bed. “You need to rest.”
He grabs onto my hand. “I’ll rest a lot more if you’re in bed beside me.”
“If I’m in bed beside you,” I say with a snort, “I doubt you’ll get any rest at all.”
His smile is wicked. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
“Go to sleep,” I answer severely. “Or at least rest while I get you something to eat.”
“First tell me what happened. Who was that guy?”
“You rest first. Then we’ll talk.”
“Xandra.”
I look away, refusing to be drawn into the dark dominance of his gaze. “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
He grumbles under his breath, but in the end he takes it because I don’t give him any other choice. And I’m glad I don’t, because in the time it takes me to make him some soup and fill Lily in on what happened, he’s fallen fast asleep.
I don’t wake him. Instead, I stand by the bed and watch him until long after his soup grows cold, and try to pretend that I’m not terrified. But I am. I almost lost him today, and though it’s been only three weeks since Declan walked back into my life, I no longer want to imagine what my life would be like without him. In a very short time, he’s become incredibly important to me.
With that thought first and foremost in my mind, I gently crawl into bed beside him. Then I curl myself around his uninjured side and drift slowly into sleep. The ACW can wait, for a little while at least.
I wake up slowly, hot and thirsty and completely out of sorts, though I don’t know why. I’m curled up against Declan, whose body is radiating so much heat that it feels like the middle of August instead of January.