Millie dove for the gun and several things happened at once: Dom snapped the neck of the feyrunner and tossed him aside like an old rag, Millie skidded through the gravel to grasp the gun, and Charlotte lurched out of Dom’s hold to meet her just as her fizzing, popping blood exploded.
The struggle over the charged bolt gun was brief and brutal. They tangled in the gravel, a snarling, screeching knot of limbs fighting over a slim, matte black bolt gun. Millie’s finger curled around the trigger just as the skin of the forearms under Charlotte’s hands began to burn.
The whine of the bolt releasing came in the same instant that Millie started to scream.
* * *
Dom watched his mate slump to one side in slow motion.
He’d seen people die. Of course he had. You didn’t fight in the Great War for any length of time without witnessing Grim take her tithe — or being the one to hand it to her. It never got easier, and even after over a century, he still thought about rotting, gaping corpses in open fields and the animalistic rush of ending a life before his opponent could do the same to him.
Death wasn’t easy. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t always cruel, and Grim wasn’t a goddess to fear, but it could be senseless. It left its mark on the living even when it was kind.
Dom wasn’t a demon that ever reveled in death or violence, not any more than his nature forced him to, but in the seconds that encompassed Millie’s mad dash for the bolt gun — a weapon that would struggle to take down a demon even half his age — and it going off, he came to a new understanding with the white-robed goddess.
Without a thought, he ended one wasted life and in the same breath prayed for the safety of another. Not her, he thought, dropping to his knees to catch his mate before she fell into the gravel. Not her. Not when I just found her.
“No, no,”he rasped, gathering Charlotte into his lap. His hands, his real hands, with their elongated claws of compressed shadow, stroked her hair and skimmed down her front, looking for the wound. Charlotte wheezed and clutched at her chest, her eyes wide as she struggled to draw in air.
“Let me see.” His voice was a raw growl from deep in his chest, almost incomprehensible. Cold panic made him frantic as he tried to support his mate’s weight and peel her hands away from her chest at the same time. “You have to let me see, glowbug,” he urged. “Let me help.”
Dom wrapped one arm around her back, mindful of her delicate wings, and used his other hand to firmly pull her hands away from her sternum. He held his breath, disregarding the funny, almost uncomfortable tingle that singed his palm.
His mind raced ahead of him, wondering how quickly he could get her to a med center or a local healer, so fast it took him a moment to understand what he was looking at.
Charlotte’s chest heaved with stuttering inhales, but where he expected to find the gaping, cauterized wound of a bolt blast, all he saw was a swath of inky black. A breastplate of moving, opaque shadow had adhered itself to her baby pink hoodie, saving her from a ghastly wound.
Dom felt everything in him, every cell and every shadow and every bit of his soul, shudder. He couldn’t cry in this form, but he still felt his throat close, first with the cold grip of terror, then with the vice of pure relief.
She’s okay.
“Thank you,” he muttered to Grim, to Glory, to Blight himself — it didn’t matter who saved his mate. He was grateful. He was more than grateful.
Dom dragged her against his chest and let his shadows curl around her however they wanted to as he stroked her back, encouraging her to take deep breaths. “That’s right. Breathe, glowbug. Breathe. You just had the wind knocked out of you. You’re okay. Breathe for me, glowbug.”
The feeling of her arms coming around his chest, her small hands curling into the fabric of his t-shirt over his shoulder blades, made him sag forward with relief. She was okay. His mate was fine. He’d taken care of the threat and nothing would ever—
Dom lifted his head to search for Millie, his arms and shadows contracting hard around Charlotte’s slim back. A menacing growl built in his chest at the sight of the woman lying a few feet away, but it died almost as soon as it began.
He huffed out a surprised breath. Ah, no wonder my hand tingled.
Millie lay twitching on the ground, the exposed skin of her arms already turning the blue-green, sickly yellow, and black shades of putrefaction. He watched her convulse, her back arching as her mouth opened in a silent, agonized scream.
Dom glanced down at the crown of Charlotte’s head with renewed respect. His defenseless little Changeling wasn’t so helpless after all. Wee feet and fangs she might have, but it appeared she’d hidden a rare — and profoundly dangerous — magical skill.
My mate’s a poisoncraft, he realized. Dom puffed up a little, his spine straightening with no small amount of pride. Hot damn.
He’d never encountered one before, but he’d heard of them. Poisoncrafts were an extremely rare subclass of alchemic m-types. Alchemic types were people who were naturally suited to turning physical substances into whatever their specialties were, with the most common being crystalcrafts. The least common crafts involves specific chemical specialties, and most ended up working in the pharmaceutical industry at a young age.
But poisoncrafts were a subclass within a subclass; highly dangerous and sought after folk who could, with only a touch, create the most complex and unique chemical mixtures in the world. Dom had once read that some poisoncrafts went into bespoke perfume creation — and that their work went for hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece. But others simply disappeared; snapped up by the governments of their territories to work on things that would make the average person’s stomach turn.
Did Charlotte know? He peered down at her speculatively. No, he didn’t think so. If she’d known, his little wildcat would have tried to douse him first thing. Not that it would have done anything lasting, of course. Demons were made of sturdier stuff than most other races realized. Only prolonged exposure to even the most caustic or perfectly biologically tailored poisons would take him down.
That was part of the reason so many demons managed to come out of the war alive, while other races suffered so many losses. The witches, healers in particular, still hadn’t recovered to their pre-war levels.
Dom wondered how his wee Changeling would feel about the discovery of such a coveted ability. He wasn’t one for prestige or chasing luxury. He liked his quiet life and his woods and his mate. But if she wanted to pursue a career as some high profile perfumer or other, he’d support her.
Before all that, though, he needed to get her away from this rest stop. He didn’t worry about authorities coming after them — the few that existed in the outskirts of the New Zone could be easily dealt with — but he wouldn’t feel secure in her safety until they were over the border and out of reach of any backup her kidnappers might have had.