Chapter 59
Chapter
Fifty-Nine
EVIE
T he room felt like a tomb.
Pelts had been carefully placed on top of Zandyr’s body and Leesa had draped one onto my shoulders. She’d refused to leave until I swirled a minty tonic around in my mouth three times and drank a full jug of water.
She’d kept smiling through it all, but I heard her muttered prayers as she left, leaving me alone in the ugly silence I despaired in.
My body wrapped around Zandyr’s, hands grasping his shoulders as if I could shake him awake.
The wound on his neck wouldn’t heal.
His heart wouldn’t beat.
His lungs wouldn’t suck in air.
All I had of him was that lone flicker of his warmth at the other end of a growing ravine that called to me.
The bond was a thin thread I clung to. Without his presence pulsing in me, my feelings were bare and mine alone to face. This stubborn heart of mine no longer hesitated.
The man I loved was dying next to me and I was powerless to stop it.
I was slipping and I knew it.
My own death didn’t terrify me, it never had. But if I was dying, so was Zandyr, and that wrecked me.
He was lying here because of me.
Because he’d saved me and caught the arrow which had been meant for me.
“I’m so sorry,” I mumbled.
If we met in the afterlife, would he be glad to see me? Would he curse my soul and forever avoid me for dying?
The Blood Brotherhood would fall without him. Banu and Valuta and whoever they were working with would devour it from the inside out. Then they’d probably move onto the Protectorate, unless Allie and my cousins could guard against it.
The war, the sacrifices, the lost lives, none of them would matter. The exact same steps which had brought us close to victory would now be our undoing.
Maybe Zandyr’s soul would forgive me, but I couldn’t.
With the last of my energy, my fingers trailed his features, trying to memorize the beautiful tapestry that was just him.
His strong nose, which had that little peak in the middle of it, from gods-knew which battle he’d won.
The mighty eyebrows which could say so much with a simple furrow.
The cheeks, sharp enough to cut, that used to catch the light, but now looked pale and sunken.
The lips I’d kissed so ravenously before the wedding, then drew blood from in the bowels of the Arena.
The kiss of death, he’d called it.
He would have loved the irony of it.
A strangled laughter choked out of me as I struggled to sit up enough to touch our foreheads together.
He would have loved this, too. Such a small, intimate gesture. None of the pomp and circumstance of Phoenix Peak, just two people breathing each other in.
My tears fell onto his cheeks. I didn’t know how my body could still produce them, not with the darkness spreading.
I tilted my head to the side, my last little act of rebellion against this life which had taken more from me than it had given.
“Come back to me,” I whispered.
As soon as our lips touched, the abyss opened wide and swallowed me, dragging me after him.
I groaned as the coldness seeped into my bones, no hint of that warmth anywhere near me. I rose on the same golden altar I’d woken up on in our first dream together.
Only the barest light flickered from above. I’d thought the rays had been my doing, but, apparently, he’d brought out the light in me.
There was no sign of him anywhere in my cavern, which had turned echoey and glum. The stillness made the hairs on my arms stand up.
Still, I held on to hope, my only ally now.
The abyss I’d been sensing might not have been death. I didn’t know.
But if I was here, I wasn’t dead, which meant he was still alive, too.
Aside from my harsh breaths, there was only one other sound in this cavernous chamber–the dark whispers from his wall of shadows.
It had gotten bigger. The whirls of darkness stretched out farther, as if trying to catch some prey to devour.
It was menacing.
It felt like certain death.
It made my skin crawl.
But I knew what was left of Zandyr was on the other side of it. He’d faced the Defector Lands to save me when I’d been kidnapped.
So I stepped through the shadows to find him.