Page 85 of Griffin Undone
“Will you come with me?”
He was asking? That was new. So was the worry. I glanced back toward the two shifters crashing around my living room, fighting savagely to overpower each other. The look in Sun’s eyes came back to me, the cruelty in Maddox’s red gaze.
Assuming Sun won, would the Archai be any different than Arik? In that moment I felt any chance at a safe place, a place where I could be happy and left in peace, disappear. None of the shifters would stop chasing me, would they? Didn’t matter if their intentions were good or bad. They’d all eventually use me.
“I’ll come.” I’d fight any other battles as we came to them.
Arik nodded without comment. As his wings shot out from his back to fill the hallway, he jerked his head toward the open window he must have entered through. “Think you can make that big enough for the two of us and my wings?”
The security of his presence allowed me to tap more easily into the power running in my veins. “Yeah.”
A deafening roar sounded behind us. I turned. Maddox’s wolf surged toward us on all fours, fangs dripping, hell in its eyes. Panic sparked deep in my core.
I jerked around to the window and threw out my hands. “Open!”
Power coalesced in my chest, seared down my hands, the surge so strong I thought it might rip my body apart. The next instant, it did. I caught a brief glimpse of the entire back half of my apartment exploding as I fell to the floor. Arik caught me before I could hit, his legs already hurrying us toward the destruction as I blacked out in his arms.
ChapterThirty-Seven
Arik
“Holy shit, I never meant for you to blow the whole building, Kitty Kat,” I muttered. Okay, it was only half the building. And it had gotten us out of there, but the consequences… “Kat? Kat!”
Shit, Kat was in no shape for me to yell at her. She was bleeding all over my couch and I was shouting, but I didn’t know what else to do. She wouldn’t wake up. Shaking her was out; I had a feeling her brain was scrambled enough as it was. I didn’t want to make it worse, so yelling was my only option.
Guilt tickled my throat—or maybe that was something else, something I refused to acknowledge—and then Kat’s eyelids fluttered open. A bloody tear leaked from the corner of each eye. A crease appeared between her brows. “Arik.”
“Yes, Arik,” I growled.
“Why are you—” A trickle of blood escaped her mouth, and Kat coughed. “Why…yelling at me?”
I fought to keep my hand steady as I swiped up the blood on her face with an already bloody cloth. At this point I was more smearing it around than actually cleaning her, but what else could I do? “Because you scared me shitless.”
Without waiting for a response, I stood, towel in hand, and strode to the kitchen. When I returned with a fresh wet cloth, Kat’s eyes were closed again, but she opened them at the first cool stroke along her face. I did a thorough job before setting the towel aside.
“Don’t feel so good.”
“You don’t look so good either,” I muttered. And every time I got her skin clean, she bled more. Her eyes were doing that jerky thing when she opened them, the movement indicative of seizures. That blast of power had been everything I’d wanted to see from her, the back half of the second-floor apartment gone in seconds, but the aftereffects…
“Help me, Arik.”
The words were no more than a whisper, but they pierced me like a knife. “I will.” How, I didn’t know, but I would.
An hour later I was no closer to a damn answer, and Kat was no better. Her condition continued to deteriorate just as it had after her triggering. Maybe the volume of power she’d wielded in the apartment had destroyed the barriers Grim had built, but there was no way for me to repair them. And Kat couldn’t. I should go, find Sun, turn her over to the Archai—they could heal her. But every time I stood up, Kat reached for me, even unconscious. I told myself to leave, but she kept pulling me back.
If I wanted her to live, I couldn’t allow emotion to rule me.
Unsure if she could hear me, I leaned close until my mouth nuzzled her ear. “I’ll be back with help, Kitty Kat. You stay safe for me.”
Kat turned her head toward me, her lips at the corner of mine, eyes still closed. “Feed me.”
“What?”
“Feed me, Arik.” One arm rose, tried to reach me, then fell back to the couch. “I need your strength.”
Shit.I stared down at her white, blood-smeared face, and shook my head. Of course. The shadowing gave her some of my abilities. Feeding her would give her strength and the ability to heal faster. It hadn’t been enough after her triggering, but then, her body hadn’t known how to protect itself then. Now it knew the drill. Could the strength from my blood be enough to heal her this time?
Damn it, how could I not have thought to try this hours ago?
