Page 42 of Hercules

“Hush,” he bit out, harsher than he’d intended. But Meg didn’t sound right either. Why had her voice changed so suddenly like this? Her breathy pronunciation bore more weight and had dipped by a couple of octaves. But he didn’t dare even jog his head back to ask why. It didn’t matter anymore. “Hush,” he repeated, addressing his meandering mind as much as her interruption. “I can’t hear…upstairs. I have to focus on them now.”

“Them…who?”

“I said hush!”

But it was too late. The walls already caved in.

His brain went black. As his body gave out and tumbled low.

No. No. No.

In the darkness, his lips somehow formed the words. Not as screams, but not as whispers. Something stranger and harder, distant but close, as protests in nightmares often were.

It isn’t time. It never will be.

You’ll never see them again. Not that way. Not in any way.

Accept it, damn it. Know it.

Never. Never. Never.

Only after his head swept up and his eyes spread wide did he realize how brutally the chant had crawled up his throat and possessed his vocal cords. His mouth was a helpless conduit for the creature, this grief he couldn’t subdue, even after raising a hand and pulling at his lips. Fighting the monster with desperate digs but not stopping even after the word retreated to his gut.

Because it still rambled down there. Taunting him in the name of tough love. Pushing back even the bile that surged, determined to match its violence with a grisly extermination. The battle battered him in other places, crumpling him more, until he was hunched on all fours. Though he inhaled hard and pushed air out just as determinedly, nothing helped. The flowery ammonia of the floor wax gave his stomach a bigger thumbs-up for attempting the vomit rocket.

Until his equilibrium was lurched in a whole new direction.

“Hercules?”

By the woman who’d dropped to his level, flooding every inch of his personal space with her sweet scent and potent energy.

He shook his head, struggling to process the urgent word off her lips. Which made no fucking sense, because it was his own stupid name. But drenched in her haste and fear and worry, it was something else completely. A rasp that meant something. No light or polite lip service.

“Hercules.”

Especially from the moment he dragged his head up, finding a direct standoff in her earnest stare.

“Oh, holy ssshhh…”

Earnestness that detonated into astonishment—with a clear trajectory toward alarm, if he didn’t tighten his shit and get a handle on the poor little thing.

“I’m okay.”

Damn it. That sounded so much better in his head. If only his larynx, which had been along for the worst-night-of-his-life rerun, could agree. But everything north of his neck decided it was fine to revisit the moments after that horror inside the house, when he’d stumbled down to the Saranti sand and bellowed his anguish to the stars.

“You’re bleeding!”

“It’s—” He reared back, struggling onto his haunches. The protesting aches of his muscles were a welcome blare to his mind, finally dimming the memories to tolerable intensity. “I said I’m okay.”

His peace was short-lived. The feral sound from Lois eclipsed even his physical pain. She folded her arms so fast, the leather sleeves of her dress croonched.

Fires of hell, that dress.

Especially now, with its skirt hiking to new definitions of daring as she knelt next to him. Not that she noticed, with those concentrated creases between her brows and that stern concern pursing her lips.

And now, with that sweet slender hand of hers raising to the edge of his jaw. Then stretching her thumb in to rub the length of his bottom lip.

That was one way of making him forget about the suggestive skirt.