Chapter 6
“What?” demanded Tallis, her face a mix of confusion and shock as she stared back at Darcy. She shot a brief, stunned look to Tombeur, then Willow, before looking back at her son’s mate.
Darcy tried to keep her voice level. “The equinox. Th-the re-binding is in twenty days. If I show up in human form—”
“Impossible!” exclaimed Tallis.
“Impossible, I know. But if Jack shows up alone—”
“Une enquête judiciaire.”
“Yes,” murmured Darcy. “An Inquisition.”
“But if you’re turned, your binding—”
“I know,” said Darcy, her heart beating faster as she heard the hope in Tallis’s voice.
For the first time, she realized that though she’d told Willow she was convinced of Tallis’s complicity, she wasn’t certain until this very moment.
Part of her must have wondered if Tallis would send her away, tell her to go home, but she heard the change in Jack’s mother’s voice.
The slight warmth, the tentative hope. “I know I risk the binding. But Jack will live. Either way.”
Tallis reached out her hand without a word and pressed it against Darcy’s chest, holding it still over Darcy’s heart.
“Your heartbeat is strong.”
Willow spoke up for the first time. “You think she’ll survive it?”
Tombeur stepped forward, pushing Tallis’s hand to the side, and pressing his own against Darcy’s chest, staring down at the ground in thought before lifting his eyes and nodding. “She has a better chance than most.”
“Pourquoi?” asked Willow.
“Because,” said Tallis, removing Tombeur’s hand and lacing it with her own. “Because her body can withstand the heat better than most humans. You can eyespeak, yes?”
Darcy nodded.
“You know Dansmatête?”
Darcy nodded again.
Tallis turned to Willow. “Because she knows some of our ways. The turn will be a shock to her body, but not her mind. She won’t be as frightened. The chance of a heart attack is less likely.”
Darcy swallowed, her heart racing as she understood their full meaning. “You’re saying most humans have a heart attack before they’ve completely turned.”
Tallis nodded slowly. “Oui.”
Tombeur gave Darcy a half-smile, half-grimace. “You asked Jacques to turn you, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Darcy.
“He knew,” said Tombeur. “He knew the chances of you making it were good, but not guaranteed. But mostly, I imagine he feared—”
“Breaking the binding,” whispered Darcy.
“We can’t tell what will happen,” said Tombeur sadly. “Good chance you’ll lose it.”
“But there won’t be an Inquisition, and I won’t be killed. I can be the turned Roug he was bound to when she was a human. Right?”
Tombeur took a deep breath and nodded. “They still won’t like it, but yes, theoretically, if we explain everything, both you and Jack should remain unharmed.”
“He worked all his life to honor your binding,” said Tallis, her eyes welling with tears. “All he ever wanted…was you.”
Tears slipped over the well of Darcy’s eyes, and she let them roll down her cheeks without swiping them away. “Then don’t you see why I must do this? This will honor our binding. I want his love. But I need his life.”
Tallis reached for Darcy’s arm, turning it over, eyeing the blue veins that coursed up her arm. “There can be no turning back.”
Willow grabbed Darcy’s arm back and took her shoulders, turning her so that they faced each other. “You’re sure? God, Darcy, you’re sure?”
She pulled Willow against her body and clasped her tightly. “I’m sure.”
Darcy released Willow and turned back to Tallis, gesturing to the parking lot. “Are you just going to do it here?”
“Yes. And then we’ll put you in the back of the car and take you to…” She glanced up at Tombeur. “Tombeur’s cabin. It’s in the woods, while mine is in a settlement. You’ll need space to turn.”
Suddenly, Tombeur grabbed Tallis’s arm and pulled her away from Darcy and Willow. For several long seconds, they appeared to be having a fairly bitter quarrel. When they stepped back toward Darcy, Tombeur stared at her but it was Tallis who appeared to have won the argument.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
Willow blurted out, “I’m coming with her!”
Tombeur flicked his glance to her. “No need.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Tallis and I will take care of her.”
“I’m coming. You can’t stop me.”
“Well, I could, but I imagine you might get feisty about it.” Tombeur shook his head, looking at her with respect. “It’s going to be ugly.”
“Which is why I want to be there. Maybe I can help.”
Tallis’s phone buzzed persistently in her pocket, but she never looked away from Darcy’s eyes. She asked again, “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Then say so.”
“I, Darcy Turner, bound mate to Jacques Beauloup, human from the Southern Bloodlands, asked to be turned.”
“So be it,” said Tallis, reaching for her arm.
Darcy closed her eyes, concentrating on an image of Jack’s face, feeling his phantom arms encircle her as she tried to steady the fierce beating of her heart, assuring herself that there was no other way.
But suddenly Tallis’s fingers were wrenched from her arm, and stronger, larger fingers clamped around her skin.
Her eyes flew open as she felt the unworldly, agonizing pain of Tombeur’s fangs sinking into her arm.
“Tombeur!” shrieked Tallis from where she was sprawled out on the concrete. “Non!”
Like the rest of the world moved in slow motion, Darcy stared down at the dark, wavy head of hair bent over her arm, the way her blood dripped in two strong streams from his lips to the ground.
The initial sharpness at the site of the bite subsided, and she started to feel dizzy, light-headed even, as the pain changed course.
It sluiced through her veins like white-hot lightning, electrifying her, burning her from the inside out.
She felt the shock of darkness coming and turned her desperate eyes to Willow, who stood, fixed and loyal, beside her.
It’s okay, she mouthed, tears sliding down her face.
Darcy’s eyes rolled back in her head and images of Jack suddenly filled her dying consciousness.
A dark-haired boy sitting alone at a table in the library, a teenager kissing her on a high school stage, a grown man eclipsing the sun at her cousin’s wedding, in the woods, in bed by the fire, in her heart, in her soul.
A gnawing ache, so hungry and brutal that it bypassed everything Darcy felt happening in her bones and her blood, started in the innermost reaches of her heart and swirled outward like a tornado destroying everything in its path.
Her throat couldn’t swallow. Her lungs couldn’t breathe.
Her knees gave out, and strong arms—the wrong arms or the right arms—caught her as the ache grew stronger and more unbearable until it broke in a massive explosion, covering her body in waves of unimaginable pain.
Darkness.
Jack had been in Canada for one hour when he felt the first tremor zap through his body, preceding his own personal earthquake.
His hands went lax on the steering wheel, and his car swerved off the road into a ditch flooded with rainwater.
His muscles convulsed in pain and fury, and Jack desperately tried to catch his breath, but it felt like someone had reached into his chest and pulled out his heart.
His eyes rolled back in his head.
Darkness.
Snippets of conversation, garbled and dissonant, as though underwater, surrounded her.
Should have let me! Knew why I had to…Leave her with the Enchanteresse…Darcy? Darcy?…Elderflower and thyme…Will never forgive you…
Her body felt heavy and hot, then freezing cold and shivering.
Her skin itched and burned, and her jaw and fingertips ached like they’d been cut open and left bleeding and seeping.
Her heart beat so fast, it was like a drum in her ears, and visions of her mother and Amory, her father and Willow, scuttled through her head.
And someone else. Someone else, but who?
She couldn’t see him. His was a murky, undefined face from long ago, fading like chalk drawings in the rain.
She was forgetting something, losing something. Something important that she couldn’t—
A blast of intense heat and pain ripped through her, and her body started convulsing as she lost consciousness again.
When Jack’s eyes opened to the dim dawn light, he jolted upright in his seat with a start, which he instantly regretted.
His head throbbed almost worse than his chest, pounding with a steady and debilitating rhythm that made his breath catch.
He’d never experienced anything like it before in his life, and his body had experienced the gamut of pain and deprivation during his years preparing for service on the Council Enforcement.
Pushing open his car door, he gulped in deep breaths of the cold, fresh air, trying to orient himself.
His car was on an angle, the right front wheel still on the pavement of the breakdown lane, while the two back tires were mired in mud.
Twisting his body, he stepped from the car, his boots sinking into the wet sludge.
He looked back and forth along the quiet highway, feeling disoriented, trying to remember what had happened before he drove off the road.
Driving north. Sudden pain. Darkness.
In his heart, Jack knew, in a moment, what it meant.
He could feel it in the way his blood burned his veins, in the way his heart throbbed and head ached in protest, but after twenty years of feeling her every minute of every day, he refused to admit that she was gone.
Bracing his hands on the top of his car, he leaned his forehead onto the metal roof and closed his eyes.