Page 30 of Cherish

“I’m okay.” She brushes a reassuring hand over his cheek, but when she turns to the rest of us, the look in her eyes is grave. “I’ve just come from the Vampire Court.”

I glance at Hudson and realize he’s gone from watchful to intense between one breath and the next. “Is there a problem?”

“Of course there is, but that’s not what I’m concerned about.” She looks between Jaxon and me. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing else I can do for your friend.”

Alarm slams through me, has my heart pounding and my palms sweating. “Do you mean Mekhi?”

“I know I warned you that this was the last time he could be in Descent, but he’s woken up much sooner than even I thought he would. As you know, the sleeping potion loses efficacy over time when it’s used with the elixir. Unfortunately, due to the nature of a vampire’s metabolism mixed with the poison, his body is simply metabolizing it at increasingly faster and faster rates. The amount required to put him under again would kill him instead.”

Jaxon lets out a strangled cry at the news, and I flinch—we all do.

I start to reach for him, but Flint gets there first, his arm sliding around Jaxon’s waist. “It’s okay,” he murmurs, their earlier discomfort with each other nowhere to be seen in the face of this latest development. “We’ll find a way to save him.”

Flint sounds confident, but the look he shoots me is anything but. Which I get, because I’m pretty much feeling the opposite of confident right now as well.

How the hell are we going to convince the Shadow Queen to give us an antidote to the poison that’s killing Mekhi without a bargain to release her from her prison? Not to mention, we still don’t even know how to getintothe Shadow Realm without a horde of time dragons hunting us immediately. It all seems impossible right now.

Panic burns in my stomach. It makes my hands shake and threatens to buckle my knees. To stave it off, I take several quick and shallow breaths, then shove it down as hard and as deep as I can. I’m going to push through—I have to push through this, for Mekhi’s sake.

As my mom always said, the best way to achieve any goal is to tackle it one problem at a time. And our first issue, the one I’m still certain Jikan can answer for us, is: “Jikan, we really need to find out how to travel to the Shadow Realm safely.”

“I still don’t understand why you’d ever want to go back there, Grace.” A minute ago, it had seemed like he was going to answer the question, but now he’s back to stalling.

Frustration eats at me. “Shadow poison? Mekhi? Dy-ing?” I bite out each syllable.

Jikan is too busy staring at the Bloodletter to pick up on the urgency in my voice. “I really don’t think this is a place you should be going, dying friend or not.”

Before I can tell him I don’t have a choice, he continues. “You did hear me when I said it was created with a very unstable magic, right, Grace? Probably best to avoid that, too.”

He’s still locked in some kind of silent communication with my grandmother, and it takes everything in me not to throw a foam finger on the ground and jump up and down on it right now. One of my best friends is dying, and these two are tiptoeing around some ancient mistake they apparently want to forget ever happened.

I rack my brain, trying to come up with the right thing to say to get Jikan to give us the information we need. But before I can, Heather steps forward, shoving a braid behind her ear as she does.

“So, I’ve been listening to everything, and I’ll admit I don’t understand a lot of it, but I know this much…” Heather holds up a single finger. “The way I see it, we only have one choice. We need help from the Shadow Queen. It’s the only way to save Mekhi. Her poison. Her cure.” She extends another finger. “But to get that, we have to be able to travel to the Shadow Realm without attracting time dragons.” She extends a third finger. “And we are definitely going to need a way back home.” She extends a fourth finger. “And if we can make allthathappen, we’re still going to need a bargaining chip to force the queen to help cure Mekhi or—” Now she curls her fingers into a fist but extends her thumb, gesturing with it to Jaxon on her right. “High Testosterone Vampire here is going to try to beat it out of her. In which case, we will probably all be fucked.”

Everyone chuckles at that. Well, everyone except Jaxon, who stands a little taller. “I could take her,” he murmurs, and Heather rolls her eyes.

“Like I said, we’re probably all fucked if this guy ever gets going. He is bad. Ass.” She tosses Jaxon a wink, and I swear he stands another inch taller, if that’s even possible. His shoulders certainly look broader.

But Heather’s already moved on, both hands on her hips as she squares off against Jikan with narrowed eyes and a determined look on her face. “So, while the Hudson-Grace brain trust tries to figure out leverage against the queen—which something tells me the Bloodletter here is going to know how to get, since it was her evil sister who started this whole mess—we needyouto stop dicking us around and give my bestie here a straight answer about how to travel between realms safely. So, do you think you can do that, or are we going to have a problem?”

Silence descends on the room as Heather finishes her speech, and I have to fight the urge to applaud. Because oh. My. God.

My best friend is…amazing. Beyond amazing. She’s freaking incredible.

I mean, she’s also definitely about to be smote, but still. That wasawesome. I don’t even bother to hide the giant grin spreading across my face. She may think Jaxon is the badass of the group, but I’m pretty sure she could give him a run for his money in that department anytime she wants.

Considering she’s been aware of this world for less than three months, I have no idea how she’s been following all the strange new things about it. Then again, I always knew she was the smarter of the two of us. And now everyone else knows it, too. Including Jikan, who is currently sizing her up with eyes as cold and flat as a king cobra’s.

“I’ve met humans,” he begins. “They’re weak. Silly. Scared.Youare not human.”

Heather narrows her eyes more. “I kicked the last man who tried to tell me what I was and was notin the nuts.”

As one, my friends and I take a step closer to her, and I’ve never loved my found family more. If Jikan wants to smite Heather, he’ll have to go through all of us first.

The thought has barely occurred to me when Jikan waves a hand and freezes everyone except the Bloodletter, Alistair, Heather, Hudson, and myself. Which, okay, way to reinforce the fact that we wouldn’tactuallybe able to put up that big of a fight against the God of Time. Still, surely he doesn’t want to upset his best friend by killing her granddaughterandher granddaughter’s best friend and mate, especially not right in front of her.

“Jikan?” The Bloodletter’s voice is pleasant as she nods toward Heather, but there’s a warning in it nonetheless.

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