Page 312 of Scarlet Wars
The scrape.
The drag.
The sound of something soft, somethinghuman, crawling through blood.
My eyes flew back open.
“Emma,” I choked, the word like gravel in my throat.
She was moving.
Gods,she was moving.
Blood smeared beneath her as she was dragging herself across the floor like every inch was war, her good arm shaking under her weight, her broken body fighting to obey. Her face was slack with pain, but her eyes… Her eyes were locked onme.
Focused.
Determined.
She shouldn’t have been able to move. She shouldn’t have beenawake. But she was coming to me anyway.
“Stop,” I begged, my voice nearly gone. “You’re—don’t?—”
She reached me.
Her fingers touched my chest—trembling and slick with her own blood—as her golden haze flared to life.
I didn’t know how she still had any power left in her. Didn’t know how she was even conscious. But the second her magic hit me, I felt it: warm fury pouring into the parts of me that had already started to die.
It was like sunlight crashing through frostbitten skin.
And ithurt.
Fuck, it hurt. As if my body didn’t know what to do with life being forced back into it.
But it was working.
She was healing me.
And it waskilling her.
Smoke curled from her arms. Her own skin blistered beneath the golden glow. Her lips split open, bleeding down her chin. She was burning from the inside out, unraveling herself cell by cell just to hold me together.
“Stop,” I croaked, barely more than a whisper. “Heal yourself.”
She didn’t answer.
Didn’t blink.
I could feel her starting toslip, her pulse faltering against my chest.
“Nightcrawler,” I said again, eyes stinging. “Please.”
And somehow—somehow—she heard me.
I don’t know what she did. I don’t knowhow.
But her haze shifted, turned in on itself, folding and fracturing like molten glass reshaping under invisible hands, until there weretwo.
