Page 118 of Bought for Blood

I put it over him. Over both of us. Over the whole corner of the room.

The light stops.

There’s a line across the concrete where the gray band is, and past that line there’s nothing. The window is still there. The sun is still climbing. It isn’t getting in. All I have to do is keep it until someone comes.

“Here!” I choke out. “We’re in here!”

There are shouts from outside. Gunshots. More voices.

But none of them is moving closer.

Hold it. Just hold it.

“We’re here!” I call again. I’m starting to shake, and it isn’t the ribs doing it. I’m fighting the sun, and I’ve never had to do that. Something hot runs over my lip and down my chin and drops onto his chest. Red splashes against his pale skin.

The room slides, and I have to get a hand onto the wall over his shoulder to stay upright. Blood streams from my nose into my mouth. The pressure in my head grows unbearable, and then it starts out of my ears.

The shaking gets worse until there’s no part of me still. My heart stops. One beat missing, then two, then it comes back too fast, and the edges of everything go white.

Hold it.

“Serenity.” His voice is almost not there. “Let go.”

“No.”

“You’ll die.”

“Then I’ll die.”

The light climbs. Every minute of it takes more out of me than the one before. My arms won’t stop shaking, and the blood off my chin is coming faster than it was.

Below us there’s more shooting, and then there isn’t, and then boots come up the stairwell at a run.

“In here.” My voice doesn’t come.

The door goes back off its hinges.

Crowe stops there with one hand on the frame. The light should be reaching him where he stands. It isn’t; my magic is holding the whole room past the line, and he’s inside it, looking straight at a corner that looks empty.

“There,” Odile says behind him. Her coat is open, and there’s a cut down the side of her face. “Move, Crowe.”

They come through. I feel the moment they cross the line. The whole thing bows and nearly folds. I get it back, and the sound I make doing it comes out of the wolf.

Crowe goes down on his knees beside me.

“Left arm’s broken.” He gets his forearm under Bastien’s shoulders. “Odile. Take his legs. Don’t hold his left side.”

Odile’s hands come onto my shoulders. Her gloves are gone. Her fingers are cold and steady.

“Let go,” she says. “We have him.”

“Not until he’s out of it.”

“Then thirty seconds more.”

They lift him. I go with them on my knees with one hand on his chest, holding it over him. The dark goes across the floor with us the whole way, down the corridor with the window burning white at the far end of it, and none of that light reaching us.

Somebody has the door. Somebody is shouting about the stairwell. Both my hands are on him now, and my face is running, and I can’t see anything.