He laboured onto his feet again, blinked hard to clear his vision.
His mind cleared instead, the oily haze lifting enough that thoughts formed in order and his senses came back online.
The male.
“Fuery,” he mumbled, locked his focus on the male and shook his head, trying to rid himself of the tangled threads of darkness that were still trying to engulf him again. “No.”
The male stopped and Hartt felt his gaze on him, sensed a trickle of concern through their bond as boots scuffed the dirt and steps grew louder.
“Hartt?” Strong hands claimed his shoulders, clutching them tightly to keep him blessedly upright.
He sagged in his friend’s grip and laboured for breath, fighting the darkness with every beat of his heart, attempting to purge it because he feared that if he didn’t, he would kill someone—and it wouldn’t be his friend.
It would be the female.
He managed to clear his vision, peered beyond Fuery’s shoulder to her where she lay on the dirt, out cold, but not dead. Blood covered the side of her face and dripped from the corner of her lips, and four nasty cuts darted across the right of her chest, from her breast to her shoulder.
Claw marks.
Hartt lowered his gaze to his hands where they dangled before him, stared at his bloodied black talons and growled as anger rolled through him on the crest of a wave of hurt, agony that threatened to rip his sanity from him again. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her, but he had. The darkness had seized control and he had attacked her and wounded her—might have killed her if Fuery hadn’t come along.
For once, he was thankful his friend had harassed him until he had told him where he was going. Fuery must have felt his pain through their bond, or had felt the darkness, and had come to him in the hope of freeing him from its grip as Hartt had freed Fuery from it so many times.
The female moaned and her nose wrinkled.
Fuery released him and turned in her direction. He began stalking towards her.
Something dark inside Hartt bayed for freedom, snapped fangs and snarled in Fuery’s direction. A powerful rush of darkness swept through him, threatening to wash away his fragile grip on consciousness as Fuery advanced on the assassin.
When the male dared to flex his own black talons, Hartt couldn’t hold back the roar that rolled up his throat.
He launched at the male, filled with a need to stop him, to protect the female.
Staggered and fell flat on his face when his legs gave out.
The male stopped his advance and turned back, hurried to him and rolled him onto his back. Hartt wanted to claw at him, growled as his body refused to cooperate and his vision tunnelled. He weakly lifted his hand, managed to move it barely a few inches off the ground before it fell back to the dirt.
Concern filled the male’s violet eyes as he loomed over him, onyx encroaching from the edges of his irises. Hartt growled at him, the sound strained in his own ears, as the male placed a hand on his chest. When he pressed, pain blazed through Hartt, had darkness rolling over him for a heartbeat before his vision came back again.
“Hartt?”
He knew that voice. Fuery. He struggled to blink. Fuery was here. He scented someone else too. The assassin. Mackenzie. Her blood filled his senses. Her cries filled his mind, a broken replay of a battle he had tried to stop. He saw her fear, felt it in his own veins as he lashed at her, as he bared fangs and grasped her throat, trying to throttle her. He felt the blows she had delivered, ones meant to weaken him but ones that had only infuriated him, giving the darkness a firmer hold over him and wrenching away his control.
Heat pooled beneath the hand pressed to the right side of his chest, turned cold as it touched the air.
“We must get you home,” Fuery whispered.
Hartt tried to shake his head, a dark need filling him and driving him to refuse to go. He put a name to that need.
“Mackenzie,” he rasped.
Fuery’s blurry face loomed over him, clear enough that Hartt could make out a frown and the black pits of his friend’s eyes.
He wanted to tell Fuery to let her live, ached to tell him to bring her too, fearing she would do something reckless without him here. He struggled to form the words, but the effort it took was too much for him and his grip on consciousness failed.
The abyss devoured him.
Chapter 7
Awareness rolled up on Hartt like gentle waves lapping at a black shore. The darkness receded a little more with each one, but it fought back, sank its claws into him and hung on, refusing to let him go. His hearing was the first sense to awaken, muffled male and female voices filling his ears, sounding as if they were underwater. Or perhaps he was. He felt sure he was drowning as a more powerful wave crashed over him, this one pure oily darkness that threatened to wash away his growing awareness of the world.
And the light that was beginning to fill his soul again.
“There was a spell,” the female said, her voice soft but not the beautiful harmony a distant part of him had wanted to hear. “Words he said to boost your bond with him.”
“When was this?” the male snarled.
Fuery.
Hartt felt as if he frowned as he tried to piece together what they were talking about, tried to grasp it and pull it into focus. He wasn’t sure though. He wasn’t sure of anything as he swam in the darkness, trying to keep his head above the surface. Pain throbbed hot and fierce in his right shoulder, pulsing in waves over his ribs, and a duller ache lingered at the rear of his right hip too. He had been fighting. Injured.
“In the elf kingdom, when your eyes were going crimson.” The female sounded worried as she quickly added, “It harmed him to use such a spell.”
A very masculine growl sounded.
Bond. Spell. Words.
It crystallised in his mind and he fought to move, filled with a need to stop Fuery. He must have managed to lift his hand, because strong ones suddenly gripped his arms, and he sensed Fuery beside him.
“Hartt?” Fuery’s concern echoed in the link they shared, a connection he had forged with blood and boosted with the spell Shaia had mentioned to her mate.
A spell Hartt had kept secret for this very reason.
“Tell me the words, Hartt.”
He weakly shook his head. He wouldn’t. Fuery would try to use them to steal the darkness from his soul just as Hartt had used them to free Fuery of its grip more than once, bringing him back from the abyss against all the odds. Doing so would push Fuery back towards that abyss, undoing all of his friend’s hard work.
“Tell me the words,” Fuery gritted and tightened his grip on Hartt’s arms.
“Fuery,” Shaia whispered. “Be gentle with him. He is hurt.”
As she said that, Hartt grew aware of the injuries on his body again, as if her words had triggered a reaction in them. The left side of his stomach blazed, joining the throbbing ache in his right shoulder and the back of his hip. They weren’t the only places where he hurt. They were just the worst ones. Someone had gone to town on him, treating him like a pincushion.
He frowned as it hit him, the crest of a wave of fear that left him colder than the blood loss.
“Mackenzie.” He forced her name past his lips, a desperate urge compelling him to speak it, a need that made him wild and made him want to fight, roused darkness and a black hunger for violence.