The wound through his abdomen was clean. Precise. The kind of wound that temporal energy left — not torn, not burned, but the specific damage of tissue aged beyond function, the cells simply no longer doing what cells were supposed to do.
He was not healing.
Cassius had been injured many times. Vampire healing was significant — most wounds closed in minutes. He had sustained damage that would kill a human three times over and walked away from it.
This was not healing.
He lay back in the dry grass and looked at the sky above Vael'kira. The isolation field distorted the light over the city slightly — a shimmer in the air above the spires, above the coloured glass that split morning light into patterns across the streets.
The coloured glass was probably broken now. Some of it. The parts of the city Chronus had walked through.
He thought about that for a moment.
Then he stopped thinking about Vael'kira.
He was thinking about Elena.
