Chapter Twelve
Nox swam in a fog of nothing.
Lead filled his limbs. Sludge clogged his veins.
And every time he was sure he might see a break in the gray, it swallowed him back up.
But even the fog couldn’t dim the burn of energy threading its way through him. Through the Anubis melded with every cell of his body.
Those strings flared, and the blur clouding his mind seared away, bursting into an inferno of color, sounds, scents.
Memories.
The other Anubis, Luca, his pain, his imminent death seconds away. Nox wrapping around him, the Anubis emerging from his flesh, slipping into the wounds covering Luca’s destroyed body.
His Alpha. His reason for existing. The reasonwhyhe existed.
The beat of Luca’s heart deafened Nox.
He tore from the suffocating emptiness, coming off the floor. His still numb legs buckled, and his shoulder hit the wall.
A webbing of particles threaded through it. Smoked glass.
Six sheets held together by L-shaped brackets of glass. Air holes no more than an inch round a foot from the top. A sliding door on the right locked with three thicker slabs of smoked glass.
A primitive construction but that was all it needed to be. The thinnest sheet of smoked glass was to the Anubis what miles of rock were to human hands. Able to absorb the kinetic energy of their strength and deflect their ability to cut.
Fluorescents cast a sickly light down concrete walls in the relatively mundane room with a door at the far end and no windows.
“Nox.”
Luca wore an oversized coat, his hair stuck up in every direction. Despite his mud-streaked face, he glowed with health.
Nox crawled over.
Someone else occupied the cell with Luca. A face Nox hadn’t seen in years and thought he never would again.
Dr. Reese Dante.
He’d lost weight, and there were half-moon shadows under his eyes. The man smiled, small, sad, kind. The same expression he’d worn when he had contact with Koda or his betas. Nox pressed against the glass. His hands itched to touch Luca. His body burned with the need to be closer.
Luca’s eyes darkened, and the flush blossomed in his cheeks. His desire for the same thing filtered back to Nox in a near-endless loop.
Luca dropped his forehead against the glass and Nox did the same, narrowing the world down to the depth of his gaze.
“Are you okay?” Nox knew he was. Luca’s life force surged through him with every breath.
“Yeah.” Luca lifted his gaze. “I don’t remember what happened after….”
After Luca had been torn apart and seconds from death. He didn’t have to say it. His fear and pain ghosted Nox’s mind.
“Do you?” Luca trailed his fingers down the glass.
Nox mirrored the movement. “No.”
“Dr. Dante said he found us in the woods.”
Dr. Dante dropped his gaze. “Yeah, uh, yeah, I did.”