Serena was conscious. Her green eyes were open, glassy with pain, and her breathing was shallow and wrong. Her white hair was soaked, plastered to the stone beneath her in heavy, tangled ropes, and her skin had gone a shade of gray that made Gav's chest constrict so hard he forgot to breathe.
She had been there the entire time. Through every scream, every extraction, every second of triage on Fin and Dex, she had been twenty feet away with dark magic burrowing into her body. And she hadn't called out once.
Gav found the zipper on the back of her training suit and pulled it down.
The bottom dropped out of his stomach.
Three black spikes protruded from her body. One buried deep in her left side, wet with blood that was still running. One in her lower back, angled toward her spine. And one embedded between her shoulder blades, the skin around it already blackened and pulsing with the same sickening rhythm they had seen in Dex and Fin.
