Even a Nejeret will die from a ripped-out throat. And there was no way I was about to let some kid kill me.

I wedged my boot between us, pressing the sole into her belly, and rolled onto my back at the same time as I kicked out. She might’ve had the adrenaline-fueled strength of a pro boxer, but she was still as light as a young child, and I launched her far. All forty-five pounds of her flew even farther than I’d intended, and her frail body slammed against the corrugated metal wall. The boom of her impact echoed throughout the room, a gong of pain and death.

She sat limp for a moment, but impossibly, she lifted her head and managed to gather her feet under herself. She was preparing to spring at me again.

“Stay down,” I said through gritted teeth as I stalked toward her, hoping some part of her brain was still lucid. “Please, just stay down.”

She placed her hands in front of her on the floor and leaned forward.

“Damn it,” I howled, reaching over my shoulder to draw my sword. It was easy enough to stop her once Mercy had joined the fight. As the At blade slid through her little body, it was one of the few times Mercy proved the rightness of her name. The girl had already been at death’s door. She been fated to die the second she contracted that fucking disease. At least, now, her suffering was at an end.

The footsteps behind me stopped, and I pulled Mercy’s blade free as I turned my head to glance over my shoulder. “The sedative isn’t working,” I said to Dorman. “When they get close to the final phase, end it.”

He nodded, his throat working but no sound coming out.

I wiped my sword’s blade on my jeans until the At was invisible once more, then stood and re-sheathed it. I stared down at the little girl lying on the floor. Somehow her face was absent of bloodstains, though the rest of her seemed bathed in the stuff. She almost looked like she was asleep.

“What was her name?” I asked softly.

“Ab—” Dorman cleared his throat. “Abigail. Her name was Abigail.”

“Any family?”

“A mother, but she’s sick, too.”

I raised my eyes to the ceiling so high above and blinked several times, then took a deep breath. “That’s a blessing, then.”

“Yes,” Dorman said. “It is.”

Chapter Eighteen

Before I left the Tent District, seven kids had to be euthanized. Neffe sent word to me through Dom about her theory that the spike of epinephrine that floods the infected person’s system as they enter the final, rabid stage of the disease must be so intense that, in some cases, it’s able to override any sedatives. She said that increasing the already tripled dosage further might help keep them down—might—but such a high dosage was also just as likely to kill them.

Apparently she and Aset and a team of other brilliant, scientifically minded Nejerets had been tirelessly working in their lab on Bainbridge since they first received the blood samples from Nik. They had some idea of how the disease worked—some sort of an attack on both the body and the soul—but not enough to slow it down, let alone stop it. It was unlike anything they’d ever seen, and considering they had millennia of experience in the field, that fact scared the shit out of me.