Chapter 43
Chapter
Forty-Three
Reece heard yelling voices, but they were in the distance.
For a moment he thought he was a child again, playing with his friends at the clearing they weren’t supposed to be hanging out in. He felt the magic strong in the air, the scent cloying and overwhelming, but that was wrong.
Since when could he smell magic?
A snout booped his head and pushed him, trying to make him roll over. Reece’s eyes snapped open, and he scrambled back from the wolf that was about to fucking attack him.
Except when he looked at it, he saw himself staring back.
Not his own face, of course, but it was his soul. He knew this wolf, and this wolf knew him. He’d never seen it before, not like this. He hadn’t known it was possible, and it was in that moment he realized he had to be dying.
The wolf was gray, with black paws that faded lighter up the legs as if the animal had been pulled from the ground itself, and its gold eyes were the same ones that stared back at him when his wolf pressed close to the surface.
Around him, shadows of the battlefield played out in blacks and whites, mist rolling all around. Two women were barely more than outlines, one clutching a male form that was even dimmer than they were, the other holding the form’s hand.
He was the male form.
The ground beneath him wasn’t ground at all; there was no grass, no dirt, just a formless gray surface that gave slightly under his weight like standing on packed fog, and the air had no temperature, no wind, no taste.
“Am I dead?” He asked the wolf. The wolf tilted its head to the side and offered no answers. “Great.”
Stupid mystical dream wolf couldn’t even help him with that.
Pain blazed in his chest and, for a moment, the woman clutching him was illuminated by a light so bright it was blinding.
Not just a woman. She was his mate. Delainey.
How could he forget her even for a second?
He reached out for her, but his hand passed through her like she was a ghost, or maybe he was.
The light didn’t dim. It reached out to him, to his body, and wrapped around it like vines from a rose bush, the thorns digging in and pulling him tight against her, so tight there was no space to even breathe.
The vines encircled his body, then climbed down an invisible trellis until they found his wolf and wrapped around one of its legs. The wolf yelped and tried to back up, but the vines were as tight as chains. There was no way to break them.
Memories of the past weeks came rushing back. Their time in the woods, the manacle that had bound them, the tether that gave them just enough freedom that they didn’t murder each other.
But it was gone now.
With Reece standing outside of his body, he could see magic as he had never seen it before. There was nothing mystical tying him and Delainey together. She was free of him.
And that meant he really was dead.
But he was still a little alive if he was sitting right here, staring at his body. He knew that as soon as the scene dissolved he would truly be gone, with no chance to see her again, to keep her.
If she kept digging those vines into him, she would be bound forever to his soul, but also to his corpse, because this was wrong.
He sat down beside his wolf and reached for the vines. He didn’t know if this would kill him, but even if it did, it would free her. He wouldn’t save himself at her expense. Not now.
A thorn pricked his finger, but he didn’t bleed. He wasn’t a body right now. He was more spirit and force of will. Where the thorn had punctured his skin, there was only a pinprick of light, a brief white flash that sealed over instantly as if his form couldn’t hold even that small wound.
He plucked one thorn out of the wolf, then another, and another, until there was nothing holding him.
Each thorn came free with a faint resistance, and the wolf flinched with every extraction, its massive gray body twitching as the vines loosened and slithered away from its black-furred paw.
He placed his hand on the wolf’s head and felt the fur on his skin.
“You don’t belong out here, my friend,” he told it, and could feel a buzzing under his hand as his soul absorbed the beast that lived within him.
The first of the vines wrapped around his wrist, and Reece let them dig in. He needed them right now, needed a path back to his body.
But he couldn’t let them wrap so tightly.
He climbed back from the strange spiritual space and started picking thorns out of that shadowy masculine figure that had to be him, the one that looked like nothing more than an empty vessel.
Delainey was clutching him close, her form still illuminated by that halo of inescapable magic. In that moment, she was his angel, keeping him here, keeping him alive, showing her love in a way she might never be able to say.
He didn’t need her words, not when he saw this.
He plucked out more thorns, but as soon as he removed some, more were added.
He was going about this wrong.
Reece left his body as it was and knelt in front of Delainey, concentrating hard as he trailed his hands along her face.
At first she was nothing more than air, but he could feel a tingle in the ether when he tried again and got close.
He didn’t know if she could feel it, didn’t know if she had any idea he was there. He rested his hand and held still.
“You have to let this go,” he said. “Trust me to come back to you.”
Delainey’s eyes opened, her brown depths fathomless. “Reece?” she asked in a quiet voice.
He didn’t know if this would work. The thorns were mostly gone now as her concentration split. Around him the battlefield was becoming more faint.
He was fading, and he wasn’t back in his body yet.
He plucked one of the thorns and looked at it.
He could feel the magic radiating out of it, and it grew bigger until it was several inches deep.
It was a binding, not like the tether, but something deeper, something that would hold their souls together.
Not, he hoped, make it so that they couldn’t be physically parted.
He was letting instinct guide him.
This move would be irrevocable. If he did it, the only way to escape would be death.
But he was dying anyway. From the look in Delainey’s eyes, that was the last thing she wanted.
He looked at the magical thorn once more and furrowed his brow. “This is going to fucking hurt,” he said, and he drove it into his chest right over his heart.
The world around him went black.