Page 44 of Claimed

I am not healed, simply burning through whatever her blood gave me.

The realisation strikes with ice-cold precision and vanishes under the necessity of violence. I seize the Myrkshade by the throat and drive it into the wall. The stone blackens around it. It shrieks without sound, the noise happening inside the bones of everyone in the room.

The demon’s venom hits Eira a breath later.

I see it in the twitch of her fingers around Widow’s Fang, in the fine tremor that runs through her injured arm as her nerves turn to razor wire. Her lips part as she drags in a careful breath. Her pupils tighten. She straightens anyway, stubborn as steel, but the truth is in her pallor, in the sheen of sweat gathering at her temples.

The mark beneath my shirt pulses hard, as if it senses the threat and resents my restraint.

I go fully vicious, now fighting three battles at once: the monsters in front of me, the clock inside her blood, and the terror threatening to consume my necessary rage.

I need to get her away from their claws. Get her to safety and my blood into her before the venom decides her body belongs to it.

I decimate what stands between us with a speed that feels almost detached, and then the dullness returns, heavier this time. My mind fuzzes at the edges as the world tilts half a degree too far.

Something is wrong with me. Something I have denied for long enough.

My hands keep moving. The Myrkshade tries to dissolve beneath my grip, and I force my power through it, pinning shadow to matter long enough to rip it apart.

I do not notice the exact moment the fight ends.

Only the aftermath.

Eira’s voice cuts through first. Valentin.

Then Malachi’s. Sire.

All of them too sharp.

I blink. The room swims back into focus and I see the carnage – demon bodies in pieces, black ichor smeared across the walls. Vampire mercenaries in ruined heaps and the Myrkshade torn apart so thoroughly it barely resembles something that was alive.

My Twelve stare at me with wary, bewildered eyes. They felt me falter.

I slam the bond quiet and force composure back onto my face. One demon still breathes, barely. ‘Do not kill him,’ I say. ‘I will be back.’

Then I cross to Eira in two steps.

Her arm is still bleeding. She is too disciplined for panic, too stubborn for drama. But I can smell the demon venom threaded through her blood like a foreign note. I feel it in the way the mark pulses, in the way my own restraint fractures into something ugly.

With a compulsion I don’t resist, I sweep her up against my chest.

She makes a sound of protest. ‘Valentin⁠—’

‘Quiet.’

I turn sharply to my Twelve. ‘Get Kessler. Aaron, secure him in the Tower and return for us.’

They move instantly. In under ten seconds, they are dragging the politician’s limp, whimpering body towards the exit while I hold Eira tighter and feel her try to argue even as her body betrays her with the faintest tremor.

Outside, music drifts faintly through glass, guests oblivious to the battle that has occurred beneath their painted smiles and champagne.

‘You’re making this dramatic,’ Eira mutters.

‘You are poisoned.’

‘I’ve had worse nights.’

‘No,’ I snarl. ‘You have not.’