In this heightened state, even the intentions of others become visible. Their light moves ahead of them just before they do, and you can see what they are about to do.

In the hairbreadth of a second just before Silas turned his gun toward Mel, Eliana, at long last, achieved katachi.

It was instantaneous and unthinking. From one heartbeat to the next, she became.

A surge of energy crackled over her skin, and a wave of power, huge and pulsing, lit through her like dry kindling bursting into flame. Her sword was at her side, sheathed in its leather scabbard and hidden beneath her long coat, and then it was in her hand, sweeping up in a long, perfect arc with no more effort or concentration than it takes to inhale. There was no conscious decision; there was only action and reaction. The clarity of her vision supplied her muscles and nerves with everything they needed to move lightning-fast, invisible.

She lunged forward, and her feet never even touched the ground.

In a single, clean stroke, she lopped off Silas’s hand at the wrist.

Still clutching the gun, it went flying into the air in a spray of crimson and landed with the flat thud of meat against the wall. It fell to the floor, and the gun popped out from between the lifeless fingers and clattered against the bare stone.

He staggered back, stunned, mouth gaping, as blood from his severed hand began to run from the wound in a trickle, then a pulse, then a flood. He clutched his wrist with his other hand and backed away, then turned and ran, trailing blood in a long, dark smear behind him.

Then as quickly as she became, Eliana unbecame, and all the light and magic drained out of her as if a switch had been flipped.

She sagged against the doorway Silas had just been standing in and let out her breath in a gust. There followed a silence so profound it seemed as if the Earth itself might have stopped spinning on its axis and everything on it—every person and bird and insect, lacking gravity—had been flung out into the far reaches of space.

Then an odd sound, liquid and gurgling, broke the unnatural stillness.

Choking.

She whirled around and—no. No!

Mel was lying on her back on the stone floor, coughing up blood.

The bottom fell out of the world. Eliana dropped her sword and dropped to her knees beside Mel, her hands fluttering over the spreading stain in the middle of her shirt. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be, she hadn’t heard the gunshot, she hadn’t seen the flash of light, it couldn’t be—

But then she smelled the sharp, lingering scent of gunpowder in the air, registered the swiftly widening pool of red around Mel’s shoulders, and she knew that it could.

“Ana.” Mel’s eyes were wild, rolling, one hand clutched at the front of her coat. “Ana.” It was almost lost beneath the horrid burble of the crimson tide that spilled from her mouth and bubbled from her nose. Her lung must have been punctured. She was drowning in her own blood.

“Help!” Eliana screamed, turning to the door. “Someone help us!”

There was the sound of fleet footsteps and murmuring voices, and then faces appeared in the doorway, blinking away sleep. One of them rushed forward—Bettina, gray-haired and nimble-fingered, she’d been the midwife back at home. She’d helped to bring Eliana into the world long ago, had been her mother’s devoted friend and something like a mother figure after she died. She’d refused to stay behind when they’d fled the catacombs, insisting her place was at Eliana’s side.

“Sweet goddess Nephthys,” she whispered, bending over to inspect Mel, “don’t take her yet.” She tore open Mel’s shirt to reveal a gaping wound in the center of her breastbone, pulsing blood. She cursed in Latin, tore a strip of the sheets from the bed, and pressed it to Mel’s chest.

Mel’s head lolled to the side. She coughed, and a spray of blood splattered Eliana.

“What happened?” It was Aldo, one of Caesar’s most devoted followers, a young male with wide shoulders and a brash, in-your-face attitude that had rubbed her the wrong way for years. He followed Caesar like a dog follows a trainer with bacon in his pocket.

“Silas shot her!”

Aldo recoiled in disbelief. “Why? What’s going on? What did she do?”

Eliana wanted to kill him for that. “We have to get her to a hospital!” she shouted, her control beginning to crack. Everything was beginning to slip sideways, and the shape of the room was beginning, just slightly, to blur. She bit down hard on her tongue to focus herself and tasted blood, but she blinked back into control.

If she had a panic attack now, she’d be utterly useless. And Mel might die. And Mel could not die.

“No hospitals, Eliana, you know that,” replied Bettina, very softly. She met the woman’s gentle black eyes. “We can’t take the risk.”

She read it in Bettina’s eyes. It wasn’t only the risk, it was the way of their kind since time immemorial. Survival of the fittest meant exactly that; all who were no longer fit due to age, injury, or infirmity were left to die. It was a hard, cold truth they all lived with, a law of nature that until now had seemed brutal but just. Necessary, even. Strength was their one advantage over all the other species. Only the Bellatorum, who were too valuable to her father to be discarded if injured, were given medical attention, trained to do it themselves. Everyone else was SOL.

Shit out of luck.

Her face hardened. No. Not this time. She would do whatever it took to keep Mel alive.

Mel writhed on the floor between them, wracked with a spasm of pain. Her mouth was working, and Eliana leaned down to hear her. “Mel,” she whispered, “Mel, you’re going to be okay, we’re going to figure something out—”

“Demetrius.” Mel choked it out, the veins on her neck straining. “Take me to Demetrius. He’ll know what to do.”

At the mention of his name, Bettina drew back, horrified, and there were more murmurs of shock from the doorway where more of the others had gathered. She noticed that Aldo had disappeared.

“What is she saying? Demetrius?” hissed Bettina. “Why does she mention the King Slayer?”

That’s what he was to all of them now, the King Slayer, the one who’d plotted to kill Dominus and take over the kingdom for himself. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t, and Silas had done a wonderful job of convincing them all that Demetrius wouldn’t hesitate to slay them all if he ever found them, or if they ever returned to the catacombs.

He’d convinced her best of all.

“Help me lift her,” she said to Bettina, ignoring the question, and then she turned to the gathered group, gray-faced and wide-eyed in the faint light that was just beginning to show through the cracked window. “Geo.” She looked at a tall, young male standing near the door who had a talent for hot-wiring anything electrical. “Find a car. Fast. Bring it to the south entrance. We’ll meet you there.”

Geovanni nodded and disappeared.

From the others that were left, there were murmurs of confusion, Silas’s name repeated in shocked whispers, the shuffling uncertainty that accompanies a scene of such jarring unreality. No one knew exactly how to react or what to believe.

“Silas is a traitor.” Eliana, voice throbbing, looked at each of the gathered group in turn. “He’s a liar and a murderer and cannot be trusted. He shot Mel and would have shot me, too, if I hadn’t stopped him.”

Eliana jerked her head toward the corner, to the bloodied stump of Silas’s hand lying still near the gun it had been grasping, and some of the shocked whispers turned to cries of disgust. “Everyone go to the Tabernacle and wait for me until I get back. Has anyone seen my brother?”

“He went out, my lady,” came a small voice from the back of the gathered group.

They turned aside and Lina stepped forward, the youngest of them all, a girl with glossy black bangs and a shy smile who’d fled with them from the catacombs because her highborn father had informed her that very night she’d be wed to the son of another highborn family the day she turned fifteen. That boy had been known to enjoy torturing stray dogs he captured by taping their muzzles shut until they suffocated to death.