Page 190 of City of Snakes
I waved her away. “Get yourself and everyone out! The walls are coming down.”
We had only minutes before we would be beneath rubble. El ran from me, obeying. I heard her bark orders to the others.
“Sybilla!” The dust kicked up more as marble struck the ground in chunks around me. Fuck.
In the heart-pounding, ear-thudding moments that I couldn’t find my spitfire wife, I prayed to any Source who would listen. “Please,” I cried out.
The woman who I’d just today committed to making my eternity could not be gone so quickly. I longed for her to jab some insult about my incompetence my way or tell me I was insufferable. I’d kill to hear her voice cut through the air.
“Sybilla!”
Finally, I found her.
She’d been thrown against a wall of the pit and lay flat on her stomach in the sand with a gash on her head and her arm twisted back in an unnatural position.
I bolted to her and drew her carefully into my lap. Darkness whisked us out of the amphitheater and onto the streets of Sahlmsara a few blocks away.
So much of my power had been drained, and I slumped over her too-still body. Please breathe.
I trembled and checked her pulse. “Please, Sybilla. Throw some fire at me, stubborn woman...” I could not lose her.
Her blood pumped to her pulse point; it was the most exquisite sensation. Kneeling with her rested across my knees, I rocked forward and back.
“Thank fuck,” I rasped. “You need to wake up…I need you to yell at me for leaving you at the flat.”
Her arm was still cocked at that awful angle, her skin pale as a ghost, her hair lusterless and strewn with marble dust and sand except in the awful places where it was stained with blood.
Tears ran down my dust-stained cheeks as I lifted her up, cradled in my arms, careful not to jostle her broken arm, and stood.
Footsteps shifted the gravel behind me—Elsedora approached with a small party. We were a few blocks from Umber House, and I needed to get Sybilla to a healer. Glancing back, I assessed who she was with Asterie, Fenris, Amara, Hurley followed her.
“Krait!” El sobbed.
“Where’s Wyeth?”
“She flew toward Umber House,” El answered. She gasped and put a hand over her mouth as her gaze found Sybilla. “Is she?”
“No…she’s breathing but we need a healer.” I carefully cradled Sybilla’s head to my chest. “Where is Ryn?”
The way Elsedora’s face fell destroyed me. She sobbed again, before grabbing my arm.
He hadn’t made it.
“No,” I denied.
But Elsedora’s nod confirmed my fears.
“No, El…where is he?”
“He’s gone,” she choked out.
Horrified numbness crept over every inch of me. That couldn’t be. “That can’t be,” I repeated the thought that kept repeating in my head.
My friend could not be gone; we’d just seen each other—minutes, hours ago? My brow pinched, and my tears fell into Sybilla’s hair.
Elsedora winced. “I saw...She saw.” She nudged her chin down at Sybilla as her lower lip trembled.
Fenris hugged Asterie’s shoulders, and her wolf-demon’s head hung low.
