Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 552

Chapter 552

ARIA

"For what," Jordan said, doing it anyway.

"I need to go in," she said. "Manually. Extract the parasite before the activating sequence completes."

"Go in," Jordan said. "As in—"

"Surgically," Ivory said. "Without sedative."

"Without sedative," Nina said.

"Sedative kills the host," Ivory said. "The compound interacts with the death eater's biochemistry. The sedative neutralizes the host's immune response which the parasite uses as a suppression barrier — without it, the parasite accelerates. Killian dies faster." She looked at Killian's face, at the black eyes and the dark veins and the thing that was using his body. "He's going to have to experience this."

The room was very quiet.

I thought about what Ivory had said in the briefing.

"You've done this before," I said.

"Once," she said. "On myself."

"On yourself," I said.

"There was no one available to do it for me," she said.

The look she gave me then was brief and complete and carried twelve years of doing things alone because alone was what was available.

"Tell me what you need," I said.

"Hold his head," she said. "He needs to see something real. If there's anything of Killian still conscious in there, he needs an anchor. That's you."

"Why me," I said.

"Because the bond is real," she said. "The wolf can feel you through it even in this state. You're the clearest signal available."

I moved to Killian's head. Knelt down. Put my hands on either side of his face and looked at the black eyes and tried to find whatever was underneath them.

"Killian," I said. "I need you to be here. Whatever part of you is still here — I need you to hold on."

The black eyes didn't change.

But something moved behind them. Just slightly. Just enough.

Ivory put the knife to his stomach.

What happened next was going to be in my memory for a long time. The sound Killian made, sent shivers down my spine, the skin was burning, scent of burned skin in the air as she made a straight incision,

She reached in.

"Talk to him," she said to me.

"Killian," I said. "I know you're in there. I need you to hold on. You came here. You came here because this was where you were going and you're not done yet. Hold on."

The black eyes flickered.

I had seen a great many things in the months I'd been at Shadowmere. I'd been in a border battle. I'd held a moon-shield against two hundred wolves. I'd watched Kael put his hand through a mahogany council table. I'd been in the secondary clinic when Ivory had stitched her own wounds and I'd understood something about what she was capable of because of how she moved through it.

I was not entirely prepared for this.

Killian was screaming. The sound of it had a specific quality that came from someone who'd been stripped of the thing that managed pain — the pitch-black eyes had gone and Killian's own face was back, which was worse in some ways, to hear the sound coming from a face that you recognized. Kael's jaw was locked. Nina and Jordan held their positions with the specific resolve of people who'd decided the holding was the thing and were doing it.

Ivory's hands moved.

She found the death eater and brought it out and it was exactly as wrong as the movement under the skin had suggested it would be — a pale gray shape, the size of a large caterpillar, moving with the autonomous purpose of something that didn't have a nervous system but operated as though it did.

Ivory put the dagger through it.

It turned to ash.

Immediately. Completely. The specific finality of something that had existed and then simply didn't anymore, the ash dispersing before it could settle.

Killian went still on the floor.

Killian's eyes changed.

The black bled out of them in the way darkness bled out of a room when a light was turned on — not gradually, quickly, the black draining back to wherever it had come from and leaving behind the eyes that were actually his. The dark veins on his neck faded. The wrongness in the quality of his presence dissolved with the same speed as the ash.

He made a sound that was the human version of what had been happening, and it was a bad sound, and I kept my hands on his face because that was what Ivory had told me to do and Ivory had told me to do it for a reason.

"I have you," I said. "I have you. You're back."

"Ivory," he said, and his voice was his voice, the wrong layers completely gone. "Is she—"

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