Chapter 46. Then We Go

Selena’s POV

The hospital room smells like over-bleached linens and apple juice. I’m propped against pillows while Caleb snores softly with his arm flung over my waist like a dragon guarding his favorite hoard.

The beeping that dragged us back to the world yesterday is gone; the IV poles are gone; the nurse with the stern eyebrows is, mercifully, also gone. What’s left is the hum of fluorescent lights and the ache-that’s-not-an-ache where death brushed my skin and decided to be fashionably late about it. It feels like the taint the Darkwoods tried to mark me with is battling with the protection Selene so gracefully bestowed upon me. I hush it with my magic, making it shiver once and settle finally.

Skysong stretches inside me, the lazy-cat kind of stretch that ends with a yawn and a flash of fangs.

‘We live,’ she says, terribly smug.

‘We live,’ Si echoes, flicking a phantom braid over her shoulder the way only the vampire in my soul can make it d