Page 99 of Shadows of Light
“Help me grab him!”Sahira shouted when her brother’s body floated to the surface.
Del wasn’t moving, and blood coated the water around him, but hehadto be alive. She couldn’t lose him.
Tears clogged her throat and burned her eyes as she twisted her hands in her shirt while kneeling at the water’s edge. When she stretched a hand over the water, some of those silver fish leapt toward her.
She snarled at them but refused to snatch her fingers away as her brother’s broken body floated closer. “Del,” she whimpered.
Maverick rested a hand on her shoulder before kneeling with Varo beside her. Taller than her, they had longer arm spans as they leaned over the lake and grasped Del’s outstretched arms.
Despite his stillness, Del’s body jerked as they dragged him closer, and more blood spilled into the water. Those damn fish werefeedingon him.
But they were the least of her concerns as a dark shadow rose from the depths of the bloody lake. It cut through the water with a speed she never could have imagined. Even before she saw its fin, wide-open mouth, and multiple layers of teeth, she knew it was a shark.
“Hurry!” she gasped as she leaned toward Del.
She still had no idea where Cole was, but they could help her brother. Finally, he was close enough that she could hook her fingers into his shirt, and as the smaller fish continued to feed, they hauled him onto the shore.
The shark leapt out of the water a second later. Its massive jaws clacked shut with a bang that echoed around them before it plummeted beneath the water again.
Blood and water spilled around Del as Maverick set him down. It drenched Sahira’s feet as she leaned over her brother.
“Shit,” Maverick breathed.
Sahira’s hands frantically ran over Del as she gently rolled him over. Two gray, scaly fish with lower jaws jutting out from their upper mouth and teeth the size of her fingers, snapped at her as she tore them off Del.
When they started flopping against the shore, Skog booted them into the lake. “He had a prettyshittyplan.”
Sahira shot him a look before focusing on her brother again. Grasping his cold, pale cheeks in both hands, she leaned over him as he coughed. His fingers twitched against the ground, but his feet remained unmoving as water spewed from his lips.
That awful, racking cough filled the air as Sahira wiped water from his lips and turned his head to the side so he could spew out more water. He coughed a few more times before going still.
“Del?” Sahira ran her hands over his chest before settling them against his cheeks. “Del, can you hear me?”
Finally, her brother’s bright, blue eyes met hers; he coughed again before smiling. In a voice made rough from the coughing and water, he spoke. “I can hear you. You’re not exactly quiet, you know?”
Sahira laughed loudly as she bent to kiss his forehead. Only her brother would consider her noisy, but he was the only one who knew there was a time when she was quite loud.
For most of her adult life, she’d been reserved, but by then, she’d learned to accept her fate as an immortal who never truly fit in. Because of her lineage, she was trapped between witches and vampires, two species who despised each other.
When she was a kid, she hadn’t realized how much that would leave her in limbo. As an adult, she’d learned how unwelcome she was throughout most realms.
Back then, if the humans had known the truth about immortals like they did now, she wouldn’t have been welcome in their realm either. Now, the mortals were so badly beaten that they had no choice but to accept immortals.
But, as a child, before she encountered countless hate and disdain from others, she’d been loud, vivacious, and outgoing with the people she met in the human realm. Her dad and Del used to tease that giants were quieter than her, and she’d laugh… loudly.
Then time wore on, her dad died, and as an adult, she learned she was a rare, shunned, oddity amongst immortals. Not even her mother wanted her.
Now, she laughed while hugging Del against her and winced when he groaned over the jostling of his wounds.
“We’ll fix you up soon,” she promised.
Skog stepped beside them and planted his hands on his hips. “You lost my ax.”
“I’ll get you a new one,” Del croaked.
“You cannotsimply get a dwarf a new ax. It took years of death and beheadings to hone my weapon into the fine killing machine it was. Are you going to behead thousands of immortals for me?”
“Like it’s been thousands,” Del muttered.
