Laughing, he brought his blood-soaked finger to his lips and licked, not even budging from my attempts to dislodge him.
Before I could double down on my efforts, Atlas’s hands wrapped around me and pulled me away, dragging until I was a few feet back, rendering me once again as nothing more than a puppet.
“Leave him be,” Atlas said, his voice so low and dark that I almost didn’t recognize it. “Let him go and we’ll leave now. We won’t bother you again.”
Claude cocked an eyebrow before pulling out a small blade from a sheath at his belt. “You think you have any bargaining chips here, wolf? That’s almost adorable. But let’s see this process in action,” he said as his eyes met mine with a wicked glint. In one swift motion, he stabbed Eli's chest.
Eli let out a piercing, heart-shattering scream as he clawed uselessly at Claude’s hands.
Atlas left my side and lunged just as Darius shoved me behind him and followed suit.
“Guess I missed the heart,” Claude muttered as he wrestled Atlas and his brother to get back to Eli. “No worries, I’ll try again.”
I ran towards Declan, my legs simultaneously heavy and like jelly, as she watched the process, eyes wide and filled with a disoriented panic. Her forehead was cut and blood carved a jagged line down her cheek and jawline.
“Max,” she said, and I realized that some of her panic was directed at me. Her eyes were focused on mine as she raised her hands, like I was the one on the brink of shifting into a wolf. “You need to calm down. Breathe. Take one slow, deep breath in. And then slowly let it out.”
I could feel my blood rushing through my body as I turned my focus back towards the tangle of boys. Claude had managed to pull the blade from Eli and was fighting against Atlas and Darius, trying to plunge it into his chest again. My vision blurred and I felt something unfamiliar rising beneath my skin, desperate for escape.
My hands felt hot as I looked wildly around the room and saw Declan creeping closer to me, face a mess of sweat and dirt and blood. Her mouth was moving as she spoke to me, but I couldn’t hear anything. I curled my fingers into fists, trying to dissipate the weird tingly heat and closed my eyes, desperate for the room to stop spinning and choking me.
A heavy, unfamiliar rage was brewing in my gut and when my eyes opened, they locked onto Claude. I breathed in, and as my body moved with the heavy inhalation, it felt like it was getting ready for some sort of release. Like the energy corrupting my focus was ready to disperse. Finally.
Almost excited now, ready to jump into the fray and rip Claude from the boys, I started to exhale, breathing the rage into existence—
“Enough,” a quiet voice echoed behind me and I felt a sudden calmness wash over the room—over me—in an instant, as a soft breeze blew past my hair.
9
Max
As if hypnotized, we turned as one towards the new presence.
Ralph was growling beside Khalida in the doorway. She looked so small standing next to him, somehow both fragile and lethal at once. His focus was on Claude as she walked further into the room and I was certain that he had gone to her for help. Though why on earth he seemed to trust her, I had no idea.
She was carrying a large scythe that looked nearly as tall as she was. Within what felt like a moment, she was standing next to Claude, the blade of her weapon less than an inch from his neck.
“Khali,” he said, as he swallowed and stared at her wide-eyed, a tenuous smile on his lips, “don’t be ridiculous. You’re not going to do this and that’s too dangerous to toy with. Put it down.”
“Don’t make me,” she responded, her tone was sad but firm. She glanced down at Darius and Atlas, and whatever they saw in her eyes had them backing away immediately, without question or comment. “You will not harm the protector. And you will not kill your brother. Living with you after the sort of torment that will rain down on you is not an option. So don’t be an asshole. And drop the blade. Now.”
Metal crashed soundlessly on the carpet as Claude dropped his blade and crawled away from Khalida, his eyes glistening with anger and defeat as he stared at her weapon. His jaw was tensed so tightly that I was sure at least one tooth would crack from the pressure. After a moment, his shoulders sank in defeat. “Khali, you don’t understand what he’s done.”
“I do,” she said as she bent down next to Eli and rested her palm on his chest, “and it was incredibly ill-advised. But neither of them deserve to die for one mindless mistake. Especially since it was a selfless one. Go clean yourself up and then you can escort them both to hell. The sooner they are gone, the better it will be for you. We’ll talk more when you’re back.”
Claude narrowed his eyes, like he was considering whether or not it was worth the effort he would expend to argue with her. After a long, drawn out breath where the two of them were locked in a silent battle, he stood up and walked out of the room, without a word to any of us left in his wake.
The second he left, the room seemed to erupt into a panic as we all moved like lightning to reach Eli. Each of us stared at him, desperate to help but afraid to touch him—all of us worried about causing him more pain. More damage.
He was in horrible shape and while Claude didn’t bite him, he still looked like he was hovering aimlessly on the edge of death, one breath away from falling beyond reach. Protectors could survive a lot, but they couldn’t survive the sort of beating that Darius took. Not even one as strong as Eli.
“The blood tie,” Declan said, glancing down at Darius, “did Eli incur all of the damage that was inflicted on you?”
It was the first time since before Khalida walked into the room that Declan’s eyes left me. And while I knew that she could somehow see or feel whatever paralysis had come over me in that moment, my stomach tightened at the fear in her eyes. For a moment, it had felt like she feared me more than she feared even Claude.
Why? Was it because she blamed me for all of this—for getting her team members killed off one by one.
Or was it something else?
“Blood bonds are unpredictable,” Darius said, his voice hollowed out as he leaned against the wall. He wasn’t in nearly as bad shape as Eli, but he looked rough all the same. He would need blood soon if he had any hope of healing through all of his wounds in the next day or so. “Sometimes they can be cut-for-cut mirrored, sometimes the bonded person gets hit with more than the one who was hurt in the first place, sometimes the opposite. Hard to say. It’s not like a videogame with clearly defined damage points. Magic doesn’t seem to ever come with an instruction manual, unfortunately. Especially forbidden magic. Cross-species blood bonds are especially...risky.”
Eli’s panting slowed down as Khalida pressed down on his chest like she was trying to stem the blood flow. Her fingers pressed gently around the knife wound, almost as if she was trying to push it out of him. I couldn’t see her eyes, but Atlas was focused on them with laser-precision, his mouth opened slightly in awe.
“Wh-what are you doing?” I asked as I reached out for Eli’s hand, desperate to hold onto him, to feel his skin against mine. We’d just gotten him back. To lose him all over again felt like a cruel, vicious game. One that we’d never win. “Can you heal him again?”
I looked up at Darius as the question left my lips, but he shook his head.
“No, my blood might relieve some of the pain, but it won’t heal him again. That’s not how it works.”
“And if he dies, you’ll die too,” I said, the statement quiet and wavering with my own confusion. I knew that losing Eli would cut me to the core. But I didn’t like the thought of losing Darius either, even if he was technically the enemy.
Darius’s mouth tightened into a thin line, but he didn’t answer. That non-answer said all I needed to know.
Yes, he would die.
I was surprised by the fact that there was no fear in his eyes, not anymore. Just a hard determination, a level-headed surrendering to whatever the fates would bring him.
Fear clawed angrily at my thro
at as I watched the mixture of sweat and blood collect on Eli’s face, making their way down his cheeks in curved, gruesome trails.
As I watched him, his eyes seemed to regain some of their usual luster and his breathing evened out slightly. It was faint, almost imperceptible, and I held in a long breath for fear of breaking the moment by pointing it out.
I was afraid to hope. Hope was a dangerous thing, especially in our world. That was one of the most difficult lessons I’d learned since leaving the cabin.
Khali turned towards me and I almost fell back on my butt. Her eyes were pure black, no white in sight, and while I couldn’t see anything in them besides my own reflection, there was an unfamiliar distance somehow. Like she was there with us but also not. She was beyond reach.
“You being near him, is helping,” she said, her voice filled with a ghostly calm. “I have very little connection to him, which isn’t ideal for this type of magic. But between the two of us, we should be able to bring him back from the edge. Once you are fully bonded, I imagine your strength will only amplify. Especially since you seem to possess the ability to pull multiple beings into your orbit. You’re an interesting creature, Max Bentley.”
Her words sent a chill down my spine, like they held the sort of certainty and illegibility that came with prophecy. Not that I believed in such a thing.
I could feel the others’ eyes on the two of us, could feel their questions and suspicions lapping against my skin, rough and critical. I saw Declan’s distrust and fear from a few moments ago, recalled months of Atlas questioning my heritage and trying to push me away from the people he cared about, and remembered the way that Darius studied me with curiosity, like a toy he didn’t quite know how to make function.
Claude was right to taunt me. What the hell was I?
Could Khalida’s words be true? Was I really helping Eli?
“What do you mean?” I mumbled, my lips and mouth so dry that I felt like I’d spent months living in the desert, choking on sand.
Khalida turned back towards Eli, waved her hand so that her scythe completely disappeared from sight, and set that hand on his stomach.
I shook my head, convinced that I imagined her weapon’s disappearance, but it was gone. There one moment, and then gone the next.
“What are you?” Declan narrowed her eyes, the emerald green glistening through her thick lashes. Even when she was angry and covered in dusty debris and blood, she was absurdly beautiful.
I wasn’t sure whether she was talking to me or Khalida, a realization that chilled me to the bone.
“He’s healing,” Khalida said in response, “and what I am is someone who can help him. And Max, you are helping to heal him too. That is all that is important for now. Expending energy on questions is useless and will only serve to pull energy from him.”
That seemed to be all anyone needed to hear. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing to help heal Eli, but if Khalida thought he stood a chance of coming back from this attack, I was willing to sink into it to the best of my capabilities.
“Is there—is there something specific I should be doing?” I asked as I clung to his fingers with a sort of desperate gentleness.
She tilted her head slightly, studying me with those startlingly black eyes. Carefully, she removed one of her hands from Eli and grabbed one of mine. With a slow precision, she placed it over his eye and cheek. “Stay here, and focus on visualizing the wounds closing. That will be best for now. I will do the rest. And, eventually, hopefully, our combined efforts will succeed.”
Her voice was soothing and melodic, and even though the uncertainty and strangeness surrounding her terrified me, I relaxed into her words and did as she said. She had the effect of a gentle balm, like a mother’s embrace—or, rather, what I imagined a mother’s embrace to be like.
We stayed like that for what felt like hours, though it was probably realistically only a few moments. I closed my eyes, no longer wanting to focus on anyone else in the room. Instead, I pictured Eli. The images came rushing through my mind, from the first moment we met, with his teasing grin, to the moment we shared our first kiss out at his pond, to the intense union in Wade’s dreamscape.
The way his eyes always seemed to be filled with clever laughter, the way his lips seemed to be lifted into a permanent smirk, the way his hair was always perfectly messy, the way his lips felt against mine—the rightness of kissing him. I tried desperately to shove the bloodied and pale image of him in front of me away, to delicately but uncompromisingly fold that version of him into the version I knew. The version that was quintessentially Eli.
With my eyes still closed, I moved my hands from his cheek to his lips. They were soft and perfect, even though I knew they were crusted in dried blood. Slowly, I moved my fingers down his chest until they passed Khalida’s and rested on his lower ribs and upper stomach.
I wasn’t sure why, but something in him seemed to be guiding me there. Or something in Khalida, maybe. I was so desperate for whatever this was to work that I didn’t bother questioning it. Questioning would only pull my focus, would only divert my energy, as Khalida had pointed out.
After another few minutes or hours—I couldn’t be sure—my breathing felt like it was evening out. Until, eventually, Eli and I were breathing in sync, mirrors of each other that were chaotic at first, and then, slowly, filled with a heady calm.
I felt my body grow more exhausted, which seemed absurd since I’d only been awake for a few hours. Khalida shifted gently next to me, causing a soft ripple of noise that felt so strange in the silence. She’d been so quiet throughout the process that I had almost forgotten she was there.
Was she growing tired too?
Someone behind me inhaled sharply in surprise and I felt Eli start to fidget below me, like he was stirring awake beneath my fingertips.
“Enough now, Max,” Khalida whispered as she stood up. She sounded drained and groggy, like she’d been woken from an intense dream she was desperate to claw back onto.
I was familiar enough with those sorts of alarmingly vivid dreams to empathize.
Her hand fell gently on my shoulder but I resisted her pull. Doubling down, I focused on Eli, blocking out the world around us. Pulling each image of him, with all of his personality quirks, even the assholish ones closer to me. Pushing them back into him.
I wasn’t sure why, but now that I could feel Eli stirring back to life, healing, I had no desire to stop whatever it was that we were doing. It was almost as if I could feel that there were still more repairs for Khalida to do. I didn’t understand why she was pulling back, quitting. He needed her. He needed us.
“Max,” she said again, this time with more force behind my name, “you need to stop before you drain yourself. This is dangerous magic to toy with. Especially for one as inexperienced as you. If you go for much longer, you could die.”
Her words seemed to drift around me, but they couldn’t quite break through. I didn’t understand what she was talking about. And, more importantly, I didn’t want to stop. We weren’t done. She was wrong. She was giving up, stopping too soon.
My shoulders shook, but it was like nothing existed outside of me and Eli. The world around me started to dissolve, my vision blurred, and I could feel that unfamiliar tingling energy beneath my skin again. It was like my blood wasn’t liquid but a system of crawling ants bubbling beneath the surface, working to lift pieces of me down a jarring assembly line.
I took a deep breath in, feeling the way my lungs inflated and then deflated, the breaths growing more drawn out with each second that passed.
All at once, my body flew back, my shoulders and head landing against a surface that was somehow both hard and soft. I reached my fingers out towards Eli, an intangible fear licking at my insides when I couldn’t feel him anymore. I needed to help him. I couldn’t let him die. Why wasn’t Khalida helping me anymore? She said we could save him. So why weren’t we?
Was she lying?
Disgust filled me the second
the thought occurred to me. Of course she was lying. Who’d ever heard of healing someone with nothing but fingers and visualizations before? As if we could fix Eli up by doing nothing but resting our hands against his battered body. He needed doctors. He needed help. We were wasting time with this nonsense.
My stomach clenched with anger as I tried desperately to rip away from whatever or whoever was holding me back. I was part of the reason we hadn’t gotten him help sooner. What had we all been thinking? Standing around like that, like we could stitch him up with nothing but our will power and good intentions—with nothing but the desperate hope that he would survive.
I could feel my body shaking, could feel my skin tingling and singing with a foreign, restless energy.
“What’s happening to her?” a familiar voice asked. It ricocheted around my head but I couldn’t attach it to a face, to a name.
Breath whispered past my ear, and the vice around my stomach tightened even more.
“Fix her,” another voice said.
“She’s given too much,” this one seemed to call to me on a cellular level. It was reaching for me while the others simply reached past me. “You need to calm her down, get her to still. She has to be the one to let go of the power. Only she can stop this right now.”
“Max, you need to breathe,” the first voice again, filled with a gentle worry.
I turned my head around as my vision clouded and blurred. Until I was staring at a pair of dark brown eyes, streaked through with shades of gold. They were so close and I lost myself in the way one color bled into another. I felt my breathing still momentarily and I settled back, looking up at the eyes that were both familiar and unknown.
My head landed on a firm, muscular chest and I breathed in and out, timing each breath to match the one against my back, until, after a few long moments, I realized that I was in Atlas’s arms—that it was his eyes calling to me.
Suddenly all that I could focus on was an acute awareness that his limbs were wrapped around me—his legs around my thighs to keep me still, his arms around my middle, locking mine against my sides. All of his limbs were pulling me back against him.
Hell and Back: The Protector Guild Book 4 Page 13