CARLYLE

I bolted from my bedroom, intent on one thing only - getting the team to Savannah to rescue Jack. I found Sol first, and I practically collided with his open arms. He squeezed me tightly as I gasped out, “I know where Jack is.”

Sol burst into action, spinning me into a nearby chair before running up the stairs. “I’ll get Jai,” he called back to me.

I’d barely focused my thoughts when the rest of the team came rushing into the living room. “I’ve been having those dreams of Jack, but I know they aren’t dreams,” I rushed out. “This time he saw me and heard me. He gave me a message that he’s in Savannah - I know the Ringmaster has a camp there. He’s in trouble, you guys. He looked so bad.” My lower lip started to tremble, and I chomped down on it.

Crying wouldn’t help solve this problem.

“Mobilize,” Jai began, but the second the words were out of his mouth, all the air in the house seemed to suction away, and a pop resounded, echoing in my ears.

I shot to my feet - I knew that feeling better than any of them now.

“Dair,” I whispered, following the sense of magic out of the room.

Sure enough, the mage had siphoned into the entryway of the house, and he was staggering under the weight of an incredibly large, limp man. It was like a whirlwind had sucked up my guys as they rushed to help Dair.

“Bathtub, upstairs,” Jai shouted, and Killian took the steps two and three at a time. Sol and Jai moved to take the burden of the man’s weight from Dair, who stumbled back against the wall, sliding down its smooth surface in exhaustion. Kana darted into the kitchen, where I could hear her slamming the refrigerator and cabinets.

I knelt next to Dair in the hall, wanting more than anything to ask if he was okay, but afraid that we had too much unfinished business. His eyes slitted open to study me, and the blankness of his tired face made me very nervous. I needed to apologize, and fast.

“Dair, I...”

He cut me off with a finger pressed against my lips, making a shhh gesture. “Not now,” he managed, closing his eyes again as his finger slipped away from my skin. I felt the loss of his touch like a chest punch, and I stumbled to my feet, backing away.

Fuck. I really had messed up with him.

“Carlyle!” Sol’s voice rang through the house, and the panic in his tone yanked me out of my worries about Dair. I hurried to follow Sol’s repeated shouts until I found them all crammed into my bathroom.

Toro was slumped in the big jacuzzi tub, his massive form taking up even more of the space than Sol had.

“He’s not breathing,” Kana shrilled at me, shoving Sol out of the way as she came through with some sort of gloppy mixture in a mug. She climbed right in the tub with him, forcing his lips apart and pouring a little of the greenish goo into his mouth. It just dribbled out the corner of his full lips, though, and more than one of my guys cursed.

“Carlyle, we need you!” Sol insisted.

“Ah, what do you think I can do?” I stuttered.

He wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I panicked. “You want me to mate with him? So I can do something with his powers? Fuck that. One, I don’t know how to just do it. And two, I’m not fucking a complete stranger.”

His head shot up, and he met my eyes in fury. “Nobody said anything about mates or fucking,” he growled.

“Ah...” I chewed my lip. Maybe I’d been a bit hasty in my outburst.

“You don’t need to mate with him, Qilin,” Kana snapped. “We need another one of Jack’s scales, or even a shred of his regeneration power.”

Ah. Right. “I don’t know how to do that, either,” I admitted.

Pushing to the edge of the tub, I gasped as I got my first solid look at Toro. He was as hauntingly gorgeous as the rest of them. As soon as I pressed a fingertip to his bare chest, though, I could smell it.

He was dying.

“I don’t know what to do!” I cried, flinging desperate glares around the circle.

“Back it up, assholes. Give her some space to figure it out,” Kana commanded, swinging her dripping legs out of the tub and pushing me into the water. She pressed the guys back as far as she could before returning to the edge of the tub. Leaning close to my ear, she whispered, “Just focus. You have all that power inside of you, girl. Find it. Use it.”

I nodded, my hands shaking as I knelt in the cool water next to Toro. I closed my eyes and spread my palms flat on his bare, broad chest.

The need to help him was suddenly like the need to breathe.

It was a million times stronger than the need to help Jack had been, and a million times again more than the need I’d ever felt to help one of LuAnn’s human customers.

It felt as if I didn’t save him, I would die myself.

I struggled to focus with an audience, moving my fingers higher, above his heart. Shaking my head, I felt a tear roll down my cheek. I didn’t know what the fuck to do. I didn’t feel emotions choking him. I didn’t feel any power in his body I could push or pull. I had no idea how to make my scales solid enough to pull out.

All I felt was death, eating up the life in his body with every second.

Over and over, I ran my hands over his insanely-muscled chest and abs, searching for a way in, hunting for a ball of emotions or power - anything. His deep brown skin was growing cool and clammy. I was no doctor, but a cold body was bad news.

Finally - a spark of something just where his heart should be. Shifting my hips to straddle him, I dug deep into my own powers.

I’d described my power with emotions to LuAnn once, explaining how it was like seeing an X-Ray of a person’s body. I could follow a wavy, thread-like line to the snag were the emotions where being blocked and use my power to pull the knot apart.

Using my odd senses on Toro didn’t look like an X-Ray, though.

His body was in full color in my mind’s eye - a gorgeous swirl of all shades of blue, mixed in places with green and black and white. I didn’t know what sort of magic he was supposed to have, but it was the most beautiful thing I’d seen.

My fingers guided me deeper, channeling my power like a doctor’s scope inside his body. Instead of a tangled knot of thread - what I usually saw in humans - I sensed something closer to a scaly growth covering his heart, preventing his life force from flowing like blood through his body.

I didn’t know what it was, but it had to go.

Using my mental equivalent of fingernails, I scratched and scraped at the scales, peeling off tiny edges and corners before finally larger sections began to break away.

A muffled noise broke my concentration, and I opened my eyes to see Sol hunched over the sink, gagging. Killian’s face looked grim, but Jai just motioned to me to continue. When I looked back to Toro, I saw the problem and all the air rushed from my lungs, leaving me dizzy.

I’d been using more than mental fingers to scrape at Toro.

Whether it was with magic or my newfound strength, I’d ripped a hole in his chest and made a bloody mess of the water.

“Oh, god,” I murmured, my hands shaking before my face.

“Shut up,” Kana whispered fiercely. “Finish what you started, and quit being a goddamn baby.”

My stomach lurched as I forced myself to lay my fingers back on his tattered skin. What the actual fuck had I done?

“Close your eyes,” Kana said, her voice worming its way into my thoughts like a dose of calming medicine. “His heart is there.” I felt her guide my fingers deeper in the wound, and I felt the wet sponginess in my palm. It wasn’t moving - wasn’t beating. “His Haret kardia is here.” She pressed my hand lower, and my fingers closed over something angular.

It felt like a box, and my brain slotted the information together with what I’d seen Jai do when he’d saved Kana’s life.

This was the piece I’d felt before - this was covered in the scaly growth. If this box was the source of his magic, maybe all I had to do was free it from this substance. It was a different feeling from unraveling knots of depression in a human, but the general process was the same.

Clamping my eyes shut against the gore, I used both my fingers and my mind to hack away the magical growth.

As I peeled away the layers of dark crustiness, I felt the brush of his heart pulsing against my fingers. I sensed life rallying inside of him, and I worked harder. My energy was waning, but I tore like mad at that spot, scraping it clean and free.

Beneath me, his chest began to rise and fall again, and Kana laughed in triumph.

Using the last of my energy, I scraped the final bit from his kardia. My fingers slipped free off his slick insides, and my body sank deeper in the water. Then the blackness of true exhaustion swept through me, and there was nothing else.