Page 63 of Immortal Longings
Calla jerks to the side. It doesn’t do anything. Her jacket is a crumpled shield on the floor, her sword scattered afar.
When Pampi puts the blade against her heart, Calla swipes a hand forward. She’s not trying to escape. She’s trying to get another look: two parallel lines of blood on this vessel’s chest too.
“You think that’s going to do anything?” Pampi plunges the blade in, and then Calla can only see white—blinding white. What has it hit? It’s too far to the left. They don’t intend to damage the heart, but to carve it right out, whole and beating.
Someone’s screaming. Someone’s screaming, and then Calla’s nerve endings jolt to life again and it’s her that is screaming, her chest cold and hot and a hundred other sensations at once.
“Jump!” Anton is yelling. “Jump or they willkillyou—”
Anton stamps his foot hard, then hooks it around the leg of the nearest body beside him. The Crescent stumbles, and when he feels the air move, when he feels them lifting a weapon with intent for harm, Anton leans right in, letting his face take it.
It cuts, and it cuts deep. But it also slices through the blindfold, which tumbles to the floor in one long piece.
Anton shakes his wristband off and jumps. He takes that nearest body first, the one who slashed him, and turns the blade on his own throat. It’s a risk, but he leaves fast and breathes a sigh of relief when the next body accepts him. He won’t stay that lucky—many Crescent Society members are doubled, resistant to jumping. The element of surprise is on his side, though; with his opponentsclustered shoulder to shoulder, they can’t see where he keeps going, light darting in and out the closed space, light blinding and blinding each time it flashes, pushing him in and out even when he fails, onto the next within a split second.
Calla is still screaming. Anton takes his cold sweat with him when he moves, and it’s hard to determine what exactly is going on, hard to see what they are doing to Calla, until he is right beside Pampi, a chain in his hands and within arm’s reach.
He swings the chain over her neck. He tugs, slams her to the ground. Calla drops too, hand clasped to her chest and blood pouring through her fingers.
Hard to tell whether it’s fatal. Whether he has just lost his best ally.
Anton bares his teeth.
“You like blindfolding so much?” he hisses. And before Pampi can look elsewhere and jump, he finds a sharp knife in the pocket of this body’s jacket and slashes across her eyes. He thinks he blinded only the left, but it’s enough to shove her aside when she screeches, counting her incapacitated.
He swivels to Calla. Grabs her by the arm, uncaring whether she can stand or not. She must. If she’s stupid enough to stay in this body, then she must be strong enough to carry it through. The other Crescents in the room are all injured and bewildered. There is an easy path—a quick shove and then through, his arm swooping down to retrieve the wristband he’d tossed onto the floor before hurtling up the steps with Calla and barging out from the basement.
Anton looks left, right. The corridor is empty. There’s no one here.
“Fifty-Seven?”
Calla teeters sideways. He catches her immediately, his shirt staining with red where she presses close.
“I’ve got you,” he promises. “I’ve got you, Princess.”
And Calla passes out.
CHAPTER19
The curtains stir with a soft breeze, a humid warmth blowing through the open window where daylight won’t. When Calla blinks awake, that is what catches her eye first—the swirling of the curtain’s white lace hem, incongruous with the rest of the room, installed over the blinds and pushed to the side. She hadn’t noticed it the first time she was in here.
The next sensation that registers is a soft tugging on her hair. A steady, delicate brushing, smoothing the strands away from her face and along her temple.
Calla turns her head. The stranger pauses, his fingers halting as soon as he sees that she’s awake.
“Anton,” Calla greets, looking at his midnight-black eyes.
“Oh,” he says. “I didn’t even say our catchphrase yet.”
Despite her dry throat, she manages a croak of a laugh. “Go on. I’ll let you have your fun.”
Anton reaches for a glass of water, already prepared by his bedside table.“What fine daylight we have today,” he says, passing her the glass. “Careful not to—”
Calla lifts onto her elbow to reach for the glass, but then there’s a sudden searing pain at her chest, and her hand jerks up, her last memory flashing through her mind. Her wound needs immediate tending. It needs—
Calla peers down, her hand halting. It has already been tended to. Someone—Anton?—has sliced her shirt along its middle, stopping just before she is indecent, the exposed skin slathered with herbal leaves that cover her wound. All the blood on her chest has been wiped clean. Only her torn shirt shows the remnants of her torment, though it has long dried, the fabric dyed into a deep red brown.
A sense of weightlessness stirs in her stomach. The same suspended vertigo as peering over the edge of the tallest building in San-Er, except she’s looking at her own mended body.
