Page 77 of An Invocation of Monsters

I heard him before I saw him. There was a thickness to his breathing I didn’t like, a bubbly rasp that sent chills down my spine.

I practically jumped out of Toth’s arms and ran to the enormous lump in the shadows. “Kiraxis?”

“My Elle,” he breathed, trying to sit upright, and my fingers touched something warm and wet.

All of him felt that way. His sleek fur was plastered to his body, the stickiness hot against my palms. I smelled the iron scent in the air and bit my lip.

“Stop worrying, precious mate,” he growled when my hands found the gnarled spear of bone stuck in his chest. “I am beyond pain, ferocious and mighty.”

“Bullshit,” I whispered, my throat closing up. There were many spikes, piercing his chest, his arms and legs…

“The bones must be removed,” Toth said, tucking in his wings neatly and approaching the wounded Mlul’dra.

I withdrew my hands from Kiraxis, realization dawning. If I healed him now, I would only heal him around the sharpened spikes that had plunged into his body. The wounds would close, keeping them buried inside him with constant agony.

“I can’t touch him,” I said, twisting my hands together to prevent myself from doing such a thing.

“No. You cannot.” Toth looked at me, the glow of his eyes flared into an angry scarlet. “I will remove them, and as soon as the last one is free, you do what you must.”

I nodded, wishing I felt less useless.

When Toth gripped the spike lodged beneath Kiraxis’s collar bone, the Mlul’dra made a sound that made my knees feel watery.

What good were my healing hands if I couldn’t touch him and remove them to begin with? The Zizhatl had one hand braced on Kiraxis’s chest, the set of his face grim as he began to withdraw the spike.

There was a horrible grating sound, bone on bone, and then the spike was pulled free. Toth threw it aside, finding the next one lodged in Kiraxis’s side.

I picked up the discarded thing. It was a long bone, possibly from a thigh, knobbed on one end, the other sharpened into a spear-point. The entire thing was slick and black with gore.

Who would do such a thing? Why?

“Keep yourself together,” Toth warned him, when Kiraxis growled and snapped his teeth towards him.

“I am strong,” the Mlul’dra said, his voice hoarse. “I am powerful. Pain is a mere illusion.”

“Indeed. Keep it in mind.”

I slammed the bone spear into the ground point-first, fury bubbling under my fear for Kiraxis.

“It’ll be over soon,” I reassured him. I knelt as close as I could without touching him, gripping my own thighs to prevent my hands from moving towards him. My fingers ached as I dug in deeper. “As soon as they’re out, I’ll help you.”

“I know, my Elle,” Kiraxis said, grunting as Toth began to remove shattered splinters from one of his arms with deft fingers. “You are here. That is all I want.”

I hadn’t fully understood until this moment how the monsters might actually feel about me. With Kiraxis bleeding before me, letting out low growls every time Toth painfully removed a bone spear from his body, I wanted to let the red creeping over my vision take over.

I wanted to find the fucking Hunter, and wring their fucking neck over and over and over again.

The idea of him—of any of them—being in pain was almost too much to bear.

This is what it feels like to care for someone, I thought. Until now, I’d only cared about family. The rage that came over me from someone hurting Kiraxis was completely foreign.

I wished I had sharp fangs to gnash and clawed arms to disembowel the Hunter with.

When I found them, I would make them wish they had never been born.

I would feed them to the creature in the forest, piece by piece.

“It is close to being done,” Toth said softly, interrupting my black thoughts.

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