Page 77 of Gemini Hunted
Something warm spills down my brow and drips in my eyes. My dazed hand drifts to my throbbing forehead, then lowers, dark with blood.
“Ouch,” I murmur, faint and breathy, trying to focus my doubled vision on the blur of my bloodstained fingers. “Let’s hope… I don’t scar.”
In the distance, Zara’s dragon is roaring—a brassy bellow of challenge that lights up the sky with my queen’s electric rage. Oddly, I can barely hear. My ears are ringing like a school bell, a shrill buzz that muffles her deafening roar and the rumble of falling concrete.
Dimly, thoughts forming slowly, like a swimmer backstroking through a soup of mud, it occurs to me the roof hasn’tentirelyfallen.
Yet.
But that open slit of skylight now yawns much wider than is structurally sound. Misty gray daylight, weeping with rain, seeps through the split. After the Stygian darkness of McSnicker’s wretched spell, this sudden blaze of light hurts my eyes.
Swaying on hands and knees, I lower my throbbing head and breathe. In. Out.
Concussion.
The word floats to the surface of my dazed mind. Blood drips from my eyebrows, between my splayed palms, to splatter the floor with crimson.
Somewhere in the distance, now strangely muffled, Neo is shouting my name. “V, are you there?Vasili!”
I may be damaged, but I’m still his alpha. I’ll always come when he calls. So I swing my head toward the dear boy’s voice.
Even that modest arc of movement makes my gut heave.
The bleary sight of that fallen pillar lying across the tunnel—blocking the entrance, sealing Neo and the others inside, shutting the rest of us out—rips from my chest a groan of dismay.
Overhead, lightning forks and dances through the skies. No doubt summoned by my vengeful queen, who’s raging across the cavern. I’m a bit nearsighted (a flaw in my scrumptious perfection I’ll never admit, and don’t evenmentionwearing glasses). Still, my head injury makes the condition worse. I struggle to focus my blurred vision, swing my head toward the far entrance, and resolve my splintered eyesight from three Zaras into one.
My little queen’s teal dragon alights near a writhing tangle of four-legged shifters, fighting and snarling at the entrance.
A vicious swipe of her taloned foreleg carves a path through the slaughter. Her long neck snakes in, jaws parting to grip a writhing hyena. She slams the creature into the wall with killing force, hurls the carcass aside, then trumpets in the deep bronze rumble of the lightning voice.
Her outraged roar cleaves my throbbing skull like a battle axe.
Yelping with alarm, hyenas scatter before her rage.
Scales gleaming in the dim light, Zara parts her jaws around a fork of lightning that electrifies her next four-legged target to a blackened husk. She’s a lightning dragon, a very rareone, and feared for an excellent reason. Snarling a warning at the rest, she plants her magnificent bulk protectively over the still form of a fallen wolf, his familiar chestnut pelt dark with blood.
“Lucius,” I say thickly. “Dear God.”
A desperate fear for my love (for Lucius is that, I love him, I’m ridiculously in love with him) squeezes my chest and ribs like a bear hug. My gut twists with dread. Surely, surely, my little darling will protect him.
My Zara.
My faith in her is absolute.
After all, I wouldn’t bend the knee to just anyone. I’ll follow no other queen, love no other queen,obeyno other queen but this one.
The Gemini queen.
Typically, I find it rather quaint that our luscious sovereign believes it’sherrole to protectus. It should rightly be I, as her alpha and Lucius’, who protects them both.
But I can’t.
I can’t.
Not just now. I can’t even protect myself.
Thunder crashes and savages my head. With every thud of my pulse, a red stab of pain digs cruelly behind my eyes.
