Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Dorian’s eyes were fixed on me, wide and wild. His voice cracked with terror, desperation. He held his sword raised like it would do any good. Perhaps he didn’t know.
“Dorian,” I breathed. “No.”
The spectral woman turned, her hair blown high and wide by his windstorm. His magic wasn’t even powerful enough to set her off balance, to give her a moment’s pause. Her lips parted; a raspy ululation poured from her throat. She pointed at him.
Both wolves spun toward him. They were in motion before I could react.
They charged, leapt, and brought him down together, slamming him into stone. The three became a writhing mass on the ground.
The sight was a knife to my gut. Sudden, deep, irrevocable. Worse than watching Isa the nurse crushed by her own kingdom’s wall. More painful than finding a crater where my childhood home had stood.
This was my partner being torn apart. And I was helpless to stop it.
I was hardly aware of the scream at first. It started low in my belly, a sweep of molten heat. It roiled and writhed and forced its way up my esophagus and into my throat. It curled my fingers, sent electricity up my arms and into my chest, neck, and face.
When it tore free from me, it wasn’t human. It didn’t belong to me.
Everything changed.
The waterfall, which had followed the pull of gravity a breath ago, shifted course.
The water sheared sideways, jetted into the cave.
The spectral woman was thrown from her feet and blasted into the cave’s wall, the horse screaming as the torrent swept it alongside her.
The water poured over Dorian and the wolves, their bodies flung apart by the flood.
The fae and her horse were off their feet. The wolves were swept away toward the river beyond. The water flowed and flowed, jetting as though its course naturally took it into this cave.
I ran out of air. The scream stopped. I fell to my knees and dropped my sword with a hard clang.
Immediately, the waterfall returned to its normal flow straight down into the pool as though it had never altered. The water in the cave settled, washing over the rocks until only rivulets trickled over the floor.
Only seconds had elapsed, and the entire scene had changed.
The spectral woman and her horse lay against the far wall, soaked and breathing hard. The wolves were gone. Faun and her partner sat dry against the opposite wall, staring at me.
My eyes searched for Dorian and found him. He lay half in the cave and half on the moonlit path, wet and still.
I got to my feet and rushed to him, knelt at his side and pressed his wet hair from his face. His jerkin was torn in places, blood oozing between the leather.
His chest rose, his eyes opened, and he was looking up at me with an expression I’d never seen from him—never expected to see. Not from him, aimed at me. His eyes were round, startled, almost childlike, and my face reflected back at me in full.
It was Faun who spoke first, from inside the cave.
“Magic.” Faun’s voice was low, hoarse. “The fucking human used magic.”
Dorian’s hand came up and touched my cheek. His finger grazed my skin. He didn’t speak; he didn’t need to.
I set my hand over his. “Are you all right?”
“I’m alive, you’re alive.” He let out a cough-chuckle. “Yes.”
A bitter twist of a smile tugged at me. It disappeared when that voice rattled behind me.
“Light of the forest.” The mistress of the Wild Hunt. My face half-turned; I didn’t want to look at those burned-out eyes. “Paragon of nature. Rise.”
I didn’t move. Didn’t understand.
“She means you,” Dorian said to me in a rasp.
I returned my attention to him. I didn’t want his hand to leave my face. This moment felt important beyond all others—
His eyebrows lifted at the center. “Stand, Eury.”
If I turned away from him, my partner might disappear again. This time, forever.
“Show me your face,” the deathly voice said, echoing inside the cave.
With a sharp breath in, I forced myself to rise and turn, to look at that eerie face. The fae woman had risen, as had her horse. Padding sounded through the grass beside me, and the sodden wolves trotted past me into the cave. They dripped across the stone to her side.
The mistress took one barefooted step forward, then another. The wolves stayed with her, their dark eyes on me.
She stopped in the center of the cave, and silence fell amongst us all. The thundering of the waterfall became almost deafening as the three creatures—the ancient fae and her two wolves—studied me.
The adrenaline that had carried me, the fear, the fury, had begun to seep away. My knees wobbled, and I barely kept myself upright. Even so, my heart thrummed under the Wild Hunt’s scrutiny.
Finally, the spectral fae’s hand rose on an unbent arm. It lifted to horizontal, and she closed her hand except for one pale index finger.
She pointed straight at me.
“Worthy.”
I exhaled. Dropped to my knees.
Those ghostly eyes shifted toward Faun and her partner. I felt the change in the air, the intent. “You…”
“No,” I breathed, the words automatic. “Don’t kill them.”
The spectral woman paused, her pitted gaze still on the two fae. “It is the right of the Wild Hunt to cull the unworthy.”
Faun and I met eyes. Hers were wide and questioning. Confused. Probably as confused as I’d been when she had told me to run.
“And it is the right of the worthy to protect whom they will,” Dorian said from behind me. He breathed hard, with strain.
Silence fell. The spectral woman didn’t move—until she did.
“The male speaks true.” With a breath like a chill breeze, she turned away from Faun and her partner.
Her footsteps sounded over the stone, and I was vaguely aware of the fae woman crossing the cave’s interior and picking up her bloody spear from beside Faun.
She took languid steps with spear in hand back to her horse’s side, and in one motion she was mounted.
The horse’s hooves clopped over the rock. The wolves padded after her. They left the four of us in the cave behind the waterfall.
I remained unseeing on my knees for seconds or minutes—I couldn’t tell how long.
Then I dropped onto my back and stared up at the cave ceiling.
My eyes drooped, and no matter how many questions I had, no matter how desperate our situation, I couldn’t fight the tiredness sweeping through me. My eyes shut.
A voice sounded above me. Someone was speaking my name.
I opened my eyes to a slender form. Faun. Her shoulder had been bandaged tight with a strip of cloth.
Her eyes scanned my face, lingering longer than necessary. “She’s still breathing,” she said. Not a question. Then, softer, “She’ll live.”
I tried to speak but my throat was hoarse. I forced out: “Dorian?”
“He’ll live, too,” she said above me. “We stopped the bleeding.”
I blinked up at her, and she seemed to hesitate, as if she wanted to say more. Instead she turned, and her form disappeared from my view. Their footsteps echoed as she and her partner left the cave.
It was just Dorian and me. Alone.
They hadn’t killed us. They’d saved us.
“Dorian,” I whispered into the depths of the cave, even though I knew he was somewhere behind me.
I heard his footsteps approach, slow and effortful. Finally he dropped to a seat in front of me. He was a mess; a makeshift bandage crossed his shoulder, and another had been wrapped around his bare chest. His hair was wet, streaked over his bloody face.
He was battered, broken open and dark and beautiful and alive.
He didn’t speak. He just looked at me—really looked at me. Like he couldn’t believe I was still here.
“I thought I’d lost you,” he said at last, quiet under the waterfall.
There he was, the man I’d seen under everything.
In slant-glances, in the curl of his fingers when he thought I wasn’t looking.
In the dead of night in Thalassa’s hovel, when he’d stared up at me with poisoned eyes like I might have a drop of the gods in me.
I’d seen it in the old cottage last night before he’d swept it behind the stony wall of his eyes and mouth.
He’d come for me. He’d found me here. He stared at me just like that—like I was Caelara the nightmother come right down from the sky.
I could get drunk on that stare.
The heat that moved through me wasn’t like before. Not anger, not fear, not anything I’d felt before.
It was desperation. It was want. It was need.
I reached out without thinking. My good hand found the clasp of his cloak, and I pulled him toward me. “I’m here.”
“Eury—”
I didn’t let him finish. My mouth closed over his.
His lips were warm, and I tasted the copper of his blood from a cut on his lip.
Tangy, him. He went stiff, unmoving—shock and hesitation in every part of him.
And then something gave way. He grunted, and his hand slid to the back of my head.
The other wrapped around my waist and held me carefully against him.
The moment our tongues met, something inside me cracked.
It wasn’t gentle. It was like a dam giving way, water crashing like it had into the cave.
My chest tugged inward, then filled too full—so full I could barely breathe.
My whole body surged toward him like I’d been waiting for this, needing this for longer than I’d realized.
His mouth was warm against mine, and my fingers dug into the folds of his cloak. There was a pulse in my throat I couldn’t control, a trembling in my stomach like something essential had come unmoored. My whole body wanted to give out, and my skin flushed.
But I didn’t pull away. I leaned in harder. Because gods help me, it felt like coming home. Not to the old one—a new one. A different one. His scent came into my nose, safe and intoxicating.
He kissed me with a groan, his throat rumbling. His hands threaded through my wet hair, gentling it away from my face. He kissed my lips, my jaw, my closed eyes, and then my mouth again. And I let him.