My body burned from the inside.
Amal raised her hands, pushed out. I tumbled backward, a helpless rag doll. Arms, elbows, knees cracked against the floor. Sharp, jagged pain blotted out everything except the truth. The ungrateful queen, hovering in midair. Wielding a raging magic I would never understand. While my mate lay dying. So close and yet too far away.
I wasn’t able to see him, but I saw the illusion painted on the stone walls the way I’d seen the illusion in the witch cave: not of a battle but a distant coastline.
I heard the rush of moving water, the crash of ocean waves. My hair fell across my face as if it was wet. Beneath my hand, I felt damp sand. Impossible…
But I studied the grains coating my fingers. Listened to the beating of my heart.
Mist hid the lonely beach while the ocean sang a mourning song. But not the ocean… a woman sang. A woman standing on the sand. I’d met her in the Farmer’s Market. She’d looked old then, surrounded by rosemary… telling me about liminal spaces… leaving a rune-covered toy…
She stood now on the edge of my vision. Her wine dark hair flared around her head. The white bone necklace circled her throat. Her dress, as black as midnight, danced a dance of sorcery and power, partnered by the wind.
Her hands were outstretched, a priestess singing a song of broken souls, those destroyed by the sins of selfish queens. A song like rain on the mountains. Like the smoke of the dead, burning. The sea, returning. A sacred horn, blowing from the shadows and drums, beating, calling the warriors home.
The words raged with pain and vengeance. With hope and love. And I sang what I heard her sing, ancient, reedy words that raked through my throat. I could swear those words were born of the ocean and the living air, the earth and the endless, fathomless sky. Born of forsaken love. A love torn by fate. And the words came from a language no one in this life understood except that witch… and me.
I didn’t know how. I was afraid to question, but perhaps… perhaps the seidr magic was as eager to heal itself as I was to destroy this queen.
Amal’s voice, desperate as she said, “Keep singing.”
The queen was close to hysterical, scrabbling across the floor, searching for the rune stone she’d knocked from my hand. And I lay there watching her cup it in her hand. Watching as an animal slowly emerged from the runic design. First, the head, then thin, shaking, spindly legs, like a fawn born not knowing how to stand.
Amal’s smile became blissful, gentle… a loving smile as she cradled the wolf she hadn’t seen in centuries, changing her face as if a weight had lifted.
I did not know if this was a shared gift of sight, or if it was illusion. But I crawled closer. Put my hand on her ankle and syphoned the vile sparks, a trickle of energy that grew and grew until it was a flood and I was drowning, drowning in the black river of her hate, of her centuries corrupted by loss. While the surrounding wind raged, tore at the tears streaking down my face.
But I could not stop syphoning. Ending her. Duty did not come without cost, nor was it offered to the weak, no matter how it hurt.
And I could not stop the grief that followed. Like the lament, needing to do the right thing, the merciful thing, even when it went against every morality I’d ever had. Everything I’d ever trusted to be true.
Because true evil existed in the world, and I refused to look away. Pretend it did not exist, and that fate had not given me this task.
Instead, I syphoned the life force from her, an oozing acid that coated my veins.
Slowly, painfully, like a leaf caught in an early frost… Amal crumpled in on herself. Her fingers curled, trembled. Her eyes glistened with more tears than I judged possible for someone without compassion.
And as she faded. As her skin pressed against bone and her eyes grew vacant… the magic continued to weave in and out and around the room, building mountains for me to climb when I had no strength.
I left Amal, crawled across what felt like a million miles toward Grayson. “Please… please…” My voice was a thin husk. “I need your wolf. I can’t end this without you.”
My mate said nothing. His distorted shoulder joints pressed whitely against his skin. His chest wasn’t moving. I pressed my palm against his heart, where my sigil was my promise. To protect him. Protect his wolf.
“I promise you… wherever you are. Close or far. In this life or the next. I promise you.”
Behind me, Amal had roused, risen once again to her feet, a looming, fierce predator. The chill was like sinking into nothingness, where only the beating of my heart filled the air. A cry broke from my lips when her clawing hand closed around my ankle.
The woman in the mist was gone. Only the stone wall remained, with the chains hanging, still covered in Grayson’s blood.
The bite of frozen steel cut into me as Amal dragged the chain around my wrist. Her insane muttering scraped like talons in my brain.
I slid into another space, deep in my head. My faille space, where I’d always been afraid. But no longer.
However you want me, my love… I’ll meet you there.
A white wolf leapt through the air. White like an angel, barreling into the queen and taking her to the ground.
Then Grayson’s black wolf was there, a snarling menace, and once again, I refused to look away. Refused to stop singing what was now a lament. Refused to stop honoring his sacrifice. Angel’s sacrifice. Even when the tears were so bright in my eyes, they looked like stars.
