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not away. His body was softer, less certain of itself, but I was just as trapped. I might have forced him to move if I’d been willing to hurt him badly enough, but I was unwilling to hurt more of the people I cared for.
    Galen took a breath that broke in a sob. I heard Rhys’s voice. “Goddess, help us!”
    I pushed harder at Galen’s chest. “Move, move, damnit, let me see.”
    He turned back to me, pressing his face against my hair. “You don’t want to see.”
    I’d been frightened before; now it was panic. I screamed at him. “Let me see, or I will hurt you!”
    It was Rhys who said, “Let her see, Galen.”
    “No,” he said.
    “Galen, move. Merry isn’t like you. She’ll want to see.” The tone in his voice turned the panic to ice in my veins. I was suddenly calm, but it wasn’t true calm. It was what happens when terror turns to something that will let you function, for a time.
    Galen moved slowly, reluctance in every muscle as he crawled off the bed on the opposite side from where he’d started. He put himself close to the very thing he hadn’t wanted me to see.
    I saw the nightflyer first, wrapped around Gran like a shroud. One of the spines that they could carry inside their bodies had pierced her through. I saw the spikes on the spine, and knew why he, for it was a he, had not taken the spine back out. It would cause more damage going back, but it wasn’t like a blade. You couldn’t cut it off, so that the injury wasn’t inflicted twice. It was a piece of the nightflyer’s body. Why not just take it back out and be done with it?
    Gran’s hand reached to empty air. She was still alive. I sat up, tried to get up, and no one stopped me. That was bad in and of itself. It meant that there was more. Sitting up, I caught a glimpse of that more.
    Doyle lay on the ground, eyes blinking up at the ceiling. The front of his borrowed surgical scrubs was blackened, and part was peeled away to show the raw burned flesh underneath.
    Rhys knelt beside him, holding his hand. Why wasn’t he shouting for a doctor? We needed a doctor. I hit the call button beside the bed.
    I half fell and half crawled out of bed. When the IV pulled, I tore it out. A trickle of blood oozed down my arm, but if there was pain, I didn’t feel it.
    I knelt on the floor between the two of them, and only then could I see Sholto on the far side of Doyle. He was collapsed on his side, his hair spilled across his face so that I could not see if he were awake and watching me, or beyond that. The remnants of the t-shirt that had framed the perfection of his chest now showed a black-and-red ruin. But whereas Doyle’s injury was on his stomach, the bolt of power had taken Sholto over the heart.
    So much had gone wrong in so short a space of time that I couldn’t take it all in. I knelt on the ground, frozen in my indecision. A sound made me look at the woman who had raised me. If ever I had truly had a mother, it was she. She stared at me with those brown eyes that had shown me all the kindness I had ever known from a mother. She and my father had raised me together. Now I stared up at her from my knees, the only way she would be taller than me as she had been when I was small.
    The nightflyer unfurled its fleshy wings enough that I could see that the spine had taken her just under the heart. Maybe even gone through the bottom part of it. Brownies are a tough lot, but it was a terrible wound.
    She stared at me, still alive, still trying to breathe past the daggerlike spine. I took her hand, and felt her grip, which had always been so strong, now frail, as if she could not hold my hand, but she tried.
    I turned to Doyle, and took his hand in mine. He whispered, “I have failed you.”
    I shook my head. “Not yet,” I said. “It’s failure only if you die. Don’t die.”
    Rhys went to Sholto and searched for a pulse, while I held the hands of my grandmother and the man I loved and waited for them to die.
    It was one of those moments