“I would never let anything happen to you, Chloe. Look at me.” Chloe’s eyes fluttered, scrambled wildly around the room searching for him. Then he was right there. If she focused hard enough she could feel his breath against her face, cooling her hot tears. “You know that I do not lie. I would never lie to you. I will not let you die.” Tyrian squeezed her hand as if to prove his point. Then he threw back his head again and roared, “Nanu!”

Chloe might have winced if she wasn’t dying, because she was. She’d never know where Lily and Willow were. She’d never discover all of Tyrian’s secrets. She’d never have babies and know what it felt like to have a baby suckle her breast.

The pain inside her morphed, twisted into something worse. She screamed, her body

shaking violently on the table, her teeth chattering hard. She knew Tyrian was speaking but couldn’t hear the words. The room spun and shook around her, growing fuzzier, blacker. In one last searing wash of pain, she sucked in her last breath of air and everything faded to black.

Nanu came sprinting into the room.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Tyrian growled. Nanu came to a hard stop at the sound of his voice. She’d never heard him yell before.

“I’m sorry I was in bed.” Quickly, she pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves and grabbed the stethoscope off her desk. “Tell me what happened.” She listened to Chloe’s heart as he answered.

“Demon attack at the hotel. It clawed her straight across the midriff.” Nanu pulled back the scope and barked orders.

“Go to the med’s cabinet and grab the two clear bottles that say diazapram and sodium pentobarbital. Now!”

As Tyrian rushed the cabinet, Nanu swabbed Chloe’s arm with alcohol. Tyrian handed

her the bottles and she quickly filled a cocktail in a thin needle. As she did, she said in clear, modulated tones, “Listen to me, I need you to go to into the next room to the bathroom. There’s an ice machine behind me. Fill the tub with ice and cold water. We need to lower her body temperature now.”

Tyrian paused and leveled a hard look on her. “If you let her die...”

“I know. You’ll kill me. Hurry up and get her in there. I’ll be right behind you.”

Tyrian filled the bath with cold water and ice and had Chloe floating in it in less than thirty seconds. “What’s wrong with her?”

God, he felt wired, strung out, and terrified. And why did he even ask what was wrong?

He knew what was wrong. He’d been fighting demons for most of his life. Now he was just losing his mind.

“She’s poisoned. Relax, Commander Tyrian. I should be able to drain it from her system before it reaches her brain.”

Her brain, he thought and froze. “Hurry,” he said gruffly. How much time had already passed since she was poisoned? He tried to think fast, to count the minutes and seconds, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d been fighting a wave of demons, hadn’t even known she was being dragged back. He ran a hard hand over his face. He fucked up and it was his fault.

Tyrian could only stand back and watch everything happen. Could only watch as his most skilled healer slit open Chloe’s wrists, a vein under her knees, and one in the center of her chest.

The wounds weren’t terribly deep but they weren’t paper cuts either.

Fuck. He paced back and forth. The sight of her blood turning the icy water around her red had his heart pounding in his chest, hands pulling at his hair.

“You must care for her a great deal.” Nanu’s words took a moment to sink in.

“No. I am her Protector. She is my responsibility.” He couldn’t hold it back anymore.

The anger and fear inside him finally spilled out and he bit his lip until he tasted blood and drove his fist into the wall. The brief flare of pain didn’t help, but it brought him a little back down to earth. The stone crumbled around his fist.

Tyrian turned back to watch Nanu work. How she managed to keep her hands from

shaking was a pure miracle. Though that was a big part of why she worked for him. He had only the best. Nanu wasted no time after the cuts were made. She sprinted back into the lab and came back with a green flask he was familiar with.

During the Great War when the Atal Warriors were created to battle the demons, many men and women died because of the idummi’ s poisonous claws. Nothing any of the healers did could cure the vicious fluid or stop its destructive path to the brain where it quickly feasted upon the matter and killed the being; no matter if the being was vampire, shapeshifter, or even succubus.

There was no surviving once it reached there. That is, until hundreds of years after the Great War, when the battles had settled to mere pockets of excursions, and healers worked together to develop an anecdote. They did it, too.

At first, the concoction didn’t work. They injected it into the blood and still the poison ate its way to the brain and destroyed the unlucky being. It was only after countless more deaths and experimentation that the healers developed a method to cure the idummi poison.

First, there was time. They had to act quickly because it didn’t take long for the poison to make its way through the body. Second, blood had to be let. The healers referred to the process as “leaching” though they didn’t use leaches anymore. Tyrian didn’t know what the purpose of it was, but knew that it was necessary for the injection that came.

Nanu stuck a large needle into the green flask and pulled back until fluid nearly filled the entire syringe. Nanu lifted Chloe’s closed eyelids and said, “Shit.” Then she plunged the big needle straight into Chloe’s heart. “Grab me the bucket from the corner over there.”

Tyrian grabbed it and held it next to the tub, his stomach tightening at what was to come.

If it hadn’t already killed her, then this was going to be the messy process, the third step in the cure.

For long, breathless moments, nothing happened. Not a flicker of movement, not even a blink. Seeing the full of life succubus so...dead twisted his heart like a coiling snake. He didn’t have time to breathe as he normally would have done, or to take a moment to block himself off from feeling. Chloe always seemed to find a way to make him feel no matter how hard he fought it. Was this why Francis sent her to him?

Chloe’s eyes sprung open, their color an eerie pale green. Her body started convulsing, flailing. Water sloshed violently out of the tub.

“What’s wrong?” Tyrian said.

Nanu shook her head. “I don’t know. It might have reached her...”

Tyrian felt his heart stop beating in his chest. Chloe start screaming, a horrendous, gut-piercing sound that he hoped he’d never have to hear again. Then she leaned over the tub and vomited. Relief surged through him with such incredible force, he felt lightheaded. Somehow he still managed to put the bucket under her as hard, wretched heaves came from her.

The last step of the process. She would live. She would vomit every drop of poison from her body.

Nanu sighed with relief. “Thank the Gods. We almost lost her.” Tyrian’s veins froze with anger and ice. He stared at Nanu and her eyes widened a fraction.

“Commander Tyrian, I saved her, not killed her. I am not the one who put her in danger.”

Tyrian pulled back as her words hit him. Henry came running into the room with Rayn and Draven behind him.

“What’s happened?” Henry said, his gaze flicking over Nanu.

Nanu answered, for which Tyrian was grateful because he wasn’t sure he could talk

without screaming right now. He still couldn’t understand why he was feeling this crazy. What kind of spell was he under?

“She was poisoned by an idummi. We got it out, though. Barely.” Chloe gave one last long heave, then flopped back into the tub with a splash.