Absolutely, nothing.
CHAPTERNINE
BROOKE
“What’s wrong?!” Ria gripped my shoulders, shaking them.
I saw her. She was right in front of me. But it was like a glitchy camcorder overlapped my gaze. It wasn’t only Ria before me, but Declan’s hand, and that blood.
“Something happened,” I said. Head spinning, heart racing, a sudden thump slammed the back of my head. Now I stared at the ceiling. A wooden ceiling, and a slow spinning fan. I shook off Ria’s grasp. “I-I—Stay here.”
Simultaneously as I teleported, her hand fell to my shoulder.
We landed just before the door. My gaze dropped to the ground, and my stomach fell out of my body.
Blood. Declan was surrounded by blood, leaking from a hole just below his ribs. His fingers were overtop of it, but the gush wasn’t slowing.
“Holy shit,” Ria said. “Who is…”
Her voice faded, and he was the only thing I could focus on.
His fluttering, wide eyes told me he was awake—that he was alive. His rapid breaths told me he wouldn’t be for long.
I collapsed to the ground beside him and took his face in my hands. “You’re okay. You’re gonna be okay.”
He saw me—I saw myself through his eyes while simultaneously seeing him beneath me on the ground. It was such a bizarre sensation, and so difficult to put into words, but that’s the only way to explain it. I was in both of our heads at the same time.
But I wasn’t sure if he heard me, because his mind was like a box of steel where a gun had just been fired. He saw my lips moving, but all he heard was ringing.
Planting one hand over his wound, I grabbed Ria’s wrist with the other, and I teleported again.
Gasps and screeches sounded. The fluorescent lights flickered overhead, and Ria screamed out for a doctor.
From there, it was only flashes. Declan’s eyes closing, me furiously shaking his shoulders, and a gurney being rolled toward us. Then me flashing him on top of it. A bunch of nurses wheeling him down the hallway, and my bloody hands.
Then Ria grabbing my shoulders, saying something that didn’t register, expression showing terror. Ria ushering me to a chair. Then her tugging me into a bathroom to help me wash the blood off.
He was going to be okay. I knew that he was, but my heart wouldn’t stop racing. I got him here quickly, he was a Werewolf so he had accelerated healing on his side already, and the underground supernatural hospitals were better than any traditional ones in the world.
He was going to be fine, so why was I so scared? Why was I in this frantic panic? Why was I so worried?
But most of all, how the hell was I in his head?
Why did I feel his pain?
How did I know?
* * *
I wasn’t a stranger to blood. Not only had I been on the receiving end of a few daggers, but I’d patched up more wounds than I could count. In my childhood, I’d fixed up Dad’s after drug deals gone wrong.
But I’d worked a few cases too.
Witches weren’t the primary race Angels recruited to hunt down rogues, but Guardians were. Since I was both, I was a hair more valuable than either.
My ability to teleport came from Dad—the Guardian half of me. But to Dad, teleportation made him a better thief. His powers weren’t to save people—they were to help him with whatever scheme he was working on that day.
My Witch abilities came from Mom, but she’d left when I was six. All of the spells and magic I knew were self-taught from the books she hadn’t managed to fit in her duffle.