With a scream, I leapt onto his back, wrapping my hands around his face. His head went up in a black flame that consumed my hands, but I didn’t let go. The heat sung along my nerve endings, a pain that tore at me, worse than any of the injuries I’d ever incurred, even putting them all together.

He tried to buck me off, his hands grabbing at my legs, his fingers digging into my flesh. “Will you fucking die already?” I yelled as the flames began to travel down his neck.

“Rylee, let go!” Milly screamed, and I wanted to, damn, how I wanted to. But I knew that the second I did, he’d heal again.

“Can’t.”

“You can’t kill him! It isn’t possible.”

That was Talia and my eyes found her next to the doorway on the landing. It was open and on the other side … shit, the other side opened up to my farm in North Dakota.

“HURRY!”

Timing was everything in a fight, and this one was no different. Gripping Orion’s face even harder, I drove my fingers deep into his skull through the fire softened flesh, and put my feet up into his lower back. With that leverage, I pulled as hard as I could, my jaw tight with the effort and the enormous pain writhing up my hands.

A scream slipped out of me, merging with Orion’s as his neck snapped backward and his howl of fury slid into bits and pieces of gurgling mess.

I rode his body to the ground. Talia grabbed me and jerked my hands from Orion’s burning flesh. I couldn’t look at them, could already feel muscles and tendons tightening into crippled digits that would be next to useless.

“Milly hasn’t the strength to heal you,” Talia said as she slipped the violet skinned book into my arms and then a small, mewling bundle wrapped in red silk. I could barely stand; the pain reverberating through my hands and arms was so bad.

“How long will he be out?” I whispered, though whispering hadn’t been my intention. I coughed. The smoke I’d inhaled had scorched my throat and lungs.

Talia guided me and I tried to see where Milly was. “I don’t know. If we’re lucky, days. Not so lucky, hours, maybe minutes.”

My brain struggled to function around what had happened, how fast everything had come together. “Milly.”

The necromancer let out a heavy sigh. “She has to stay, you know that.”

“I want to see her.”

Talia moved to the side so I could see Milly slumped against the wall, her green eyes unseeing, a pool of blood blending into the red dress. So much blood.

“No.” I couldn’t see past the tears that filled my eyes. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. Not with her like that, splayed out in a demon’s realm like a broken doll—dying as she gave birth.

“Go, you have to.” Talia gave me a push in the right direction, but her voice was thick and heavy with tears that slid down her face. She tucked my whip into my arms beside the baby. “She wanted you to save her child, above all else.”

I knew what Talia was saying was true, that Milly wanted her baby to be safe. “Goodbye, my friend,” I whispered as I backed through the doorway. The bite of the winter wind was a blessing against the burns arching from my hands almost to my elbows, but the relief was only physical. Talia stood in the doorway, and then shut it so I stared at nothing, not even an empty door. She would tell where she’d sent me the minute Orion questioned her.

A soft cry from the bundle in my arms drew my eyes downward. Brilliant spring-green eyes stared at me, one tiny hand reaching up as if he would touch me. I bit my lip and headed toward the barn, the only structure left intact on the farm. I had nothing to feed the little boy, and I couldn’t even touch him, my hands were so badly burned.

There was nothing to do but wait and pray. And hope this time, someone rescued me.

Chapter 7

LUCKY FOR ME, I had good friends who knew when I needed them. Well, at least one good friend.

“What the fecking hells is this?”

I rolled to the side, the baby asleep in my arms, for which I was grateful because if he’d been upset, there wouldn’t have been much I could have done. We were half buried in the hay, the insulating factor keeping the winter cold at bay. “Charlie? How did you know I was here?”

“Everyone’s looking for ya … what happened to yous hands?” He gasped as he limped toward me, his wooden leg obviously giving him grief. He held out his hands to me, but I couldn’t do the same. My skin had toughened, already to the point where moving anything made it crack and bleed.

“I need a healer. And food and clothes for this guy.” I awkwardly held up the bundle of baby wrapped in my jacket.

“Sweet mother of the gods, Rylee, that be a baby.” Charlie’s eyes were wide. “Is it yours?”

I barked out a bitter, pain-filled laugh. “No. Milly’s. We got him away from Orion.”

He stared at me, sadness and pain filling his eyes. More than any of my friends perhaps, he knew the loss of loved ones.

“Ah, lass, I see it in you. She’s gone, isn’t she?”

I nodded, my lip trembling as I fought the tears. Charlie made a face. “I’ll gets Pamela. She’ll heal you up right.”

He ran back toward the door and slipped through. I tipped my head back and watched the light filter in through the barn slats. We were only an hour or so from sunset, and then Frank would be trying to send Berget across the veil to me. How the hell was I going to take her head when my hands were so royally fucked up? Never mind the emotional toll I was looking at for finally becoming my sister’s murderer.

My family, adoptive mother in particular would finally be right. I would finally be the one to kill Berget. I wanted to vomit.

The how of it, with my hands as they were, weighed on me as I waited for Charlie. How was I going to fight Orion with messed up hands? Was Liam still alive? What was going on at Jack’s that things had fallen apart so fast?

Ten minutes, and a thousand questions in my head, later, Charlie was back with a bundle of cloth, a bottle, and a heavy wool blanket. Without asking, he took the baby from me, dressed him in the clothes that the bundle of cloth turned out to be, and popped the bottle into his mouth. The little guy latched on and sucked hard, and noisily.

It was easy for me to forget that Charlie had a family at one point, that they’d been killed. He rocked the little boy with a practiced ease while the kid sucked at the bottle greedily.