Page 31 of Raven's Dawn

Maybe detaching the mind from the body, from the actions, from the violence, was the soul’s way of saving itself.

A hand grasped my shoulder.

The sparkling ore was between my fingertips again.

I jammed it upward.

Luci caught my wrist. Despite the blood that coated his cheeks, his hands, his entire body, his eyes were calm. His grasp was soft. “It’s just me.”

A shaking breath escaped my lips. Gently, I pulled my hand away. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Using the same branch I had for stability, he lowered himself to the ground. With a grimace, he reached into his back pocket and came back with a canteen. “Water?”

“Whiskey would’ve been fine, too.” I lifted the bottle and chugged. Strange, I hadn’t even realized I was thirsty. Suddenly, though, the leather-lined metal was empty. A belch worked its way up my stomach and out of my mouth. Oddly enough, that burp was my confirmation. There was, in fact, air within me. “Did we get anyone?”

“Couldn’t get any of them to calm down long enough to tie them up.” Pulling back his T-shirt, he grumbled something indistinguishable. “You have any gauze?”

With all the blood that covered him, I’d assumed the patch on the lower left side of his ribs was someone else’s. Now that the skin was exposed, it was clearly a wound. Deep and wide.

“Here.” I reached out with a glowing white palm. “Let me fix that.”

He pawed me away. “That doesn’t work on me.”

My face screwed up in confusion. “It works on everyone.”

“It doesn’t. Wouldn’t work on you or Rain either.” Luci hooked a thumb behind us, gesturing to Laila. “Courtesy of the tree of life.”

“Oh.” Someone should’ve filled me in on that sooner. “Guess it makes sense. We heal fast enough. We really don’t need to be healed by someone else.”

“Aye, esiasch.” Pulling in a deep breath, he scanned the camp. The ravaged, blood- soaked camp. “You alright?”

“As alright as I can be,” I murmured. “You?”

“About the same.”

“Don’t kill a whole hell of a lot in Hell, do you?”

“Scarcely.” Chuckling, he spared me a smile. “It’s complicated for me. Being here. Fighting in this. I’m sure you can relate.”

“For different reasons, I’m assuming.”

“Very different.” Suddenly, a flask appeared in his hand. He twisted off the lid, tilted his head back, and chugged. His eyes stayed on that dead girl when he extended it my way. “Your father was a soldier in this. Mine is the reason it’s happening.”

Why was this happening?

I never understood it. As a lad, we were told the Angels hated us. Fair enough. We hated them. But why were they here?

They had their own world, Matriax. They had domain over the human world. All we wanted was this one place, but they wouldn’t leave us alone.

Every war had a reason. They didn’t want our land. It wasn’t as though they flattened a village and built one of their own in its place.

It wasn’t religion either. They made no attempts to indoctrinate us into believing in and worshiping their god. We prayed to Véa and Nix, and whichever other paired soul we wanted help from at that given moment. They had no grievance with this. They didn’t burn our chapels and destroy our statues of them.

So why were they here?

“What do you mean by that?” I asked. “I know Lux is to blame for all this. Obviously. He governs the Angels. But Laila and Jeremy have him locked up. This is still ongoing.”

Again, another slow exhale. Another sip from the flask as well. “It’s complicated?—”