Immortals After Dark 12 - Lothaire

be buried alive down here.
    The earth grinding over me . . .
    With violent shudders, he struggled to breathe. A cold sweat beaded his skin.
    He’d told Nïx that he’d go back to the grave for Elizabeth. Here I fucking am.
    No, focus! Two little tasks. Elizabeth would want him once he saved her family. I could take her home with me, this very day.
    He clenched the first boulder in his way, heaved it to the side. Then another. Yelling with effort, he began clearing his way through the tunnel.
    All the while, the ceiling bowed precariously above him, support beams cracking under their burden.
    As silt rained over him, he shuddered anew. Focus!
    At last, he spotted lights from the miners’ helmets. Most of the men were unconscious, but all had heartbeats. With the dust obscuring their faces, he couldn’t discern Elizabeth’s relatives from the others.
    Which meant he’d have to save all of them, and sort later.
    The ones still conscious recoiled from him.
    —“Who the hell are you?”
    —“Your . . . eyes!”
    —“What are you?”
    He grabbed the men’s collars, tracing six at a time, dumping them in that scorching field and quickly scanning their faces to tally the Peirces.
    But he still hadn’t found the relative Elizabeth secretly loved the most—her uncle Ephraim. Lothaire traced deeper, deeper, straining to see.
    Just when he spotted the man a short distance away, Lothaire heard another ominous quake.
    He snatched up her uncle and traced him, tossing him into the field before returning. One man was still unaccounted for, a cousin.
    Lothaire had saved his Bride’s favorite mortal; now he was to risk being buried down here for some random cousin? He was tempted to trace away, calling this finished. She’d told him to make it back, hadn’t she? He was ready to get back to the business of them .
    But she trusted him, trusted him to save any who lived. Loyalty must go both ways. Though if he demonstrated it in this shadowy hell, then so help him gods, he had better receive it from her—
    He scented the spark too late. . . .

    Lothaire had come to her. Had he come for her?
    Ellie was healing with every second, his blood like rich, warm rocket fuel compared to the animals’ blood she’d been forcing down.
    Her hearing was already back, her internal injury mending.
    She was no longer petrified for her family—because Lothaire could do anything. If he said he would save all who lived, then that’s what he would do.
    Funny, Ellie—you didn’t mind his high-handedness in this.
    But immortal or not, if the coal dust ignited down there, he could . . . die. Beset with anxiety—for him —she paced/traced, biting her lip.
    She couldn’t lose him again. Her eyes began to tear up, blood pooling. What was taking him so long? She shivered, remembering the falling rocks, the coal in her lungs—
    She gasped. “Oh, dear God.” He’d dreamed of being buried in the earth, trapped. She’d tried to sooth his agonizing nightmares.
    And yet I sent him into a mine collapse. With a cry, she traced to the triage field.
    So many had already been saved. Hasty head count. Every single one of her relatives, some of them badly injured, was accounted for. So why hadn’t Lothaire returned?
    Then she noticed that one of her third cousins was helping the others, but he had no dust on him. He hadn’t been in the mine earlier—yet she’d shown him to Lothaire as one of the missing.
    Lothaire is searching for someone he’ll never find.
    Filled with dread, she traced inside the mine, immediately dropping to her front as flames shot over her. There hadn’t been fire before! Oh, God, oh, God. She yanked her shirt over her mouth to keep the flammable dust out of her lungs.
    If Lothaire had breathed too much of it . . .
    Crawling through the blinding drifts of smoke, she scrambled to reach him, struggling to sense him as she navigated the arteries of the mountain. He’d said they had unbreakable ties.
    Marshal your wits, Ellie!
    Once she settled down and concentrated, she seemed instinctively
to know where to go, which way around boulders, and her connection to Lothaire grew stronger, like a sound getting louder closer to the source.
    Almost there . . .
    She found him. “Lothaire! Leo? ” He was unconscious, pinned under a landslide of flaming rocks, his skin on fire.
    When she dragged him out from under the rubble, she screamed. His coal-laden lungs had ruptured wide, his torso exploded outward.
    His lids cracked open.