30. Anatomy and Physiology
The red dagger flashed.
Red like pain.
Red like the blood spilling from my side.
Red like the furious panic that propelled me forward.
I grabbed my assailant’s wrist, but the man was strong. My shoulder and elbow gave under the weight of his attack, and I scrambled sideways to avoid the slashing blade.
Pain seared in my chest, side, and abdomen, and my legs buckled beneath me. I slumped against the cave wall with one arm pressed over the wound in my lower chest. I gasped for air, but nothing was enough, and the left side of my ribs refused to expand.
I had a half-second to register that my lung had probably collapsed before the man attacked again.
Ciarán screamed in my head, bellowing defense commands along our bond, but I curled into a ball on the floor as the man bore down with the weapon.
“A shield, Wren! A shield!” Ciarán screamed, and a blazing blue flashed between me and the man, staving off his attack before fizzling back into nothing.
Ciarán swore, and started yelling promises that he would be here soon, to just hold on, to fight.
“I thought you turned yourself in, Saergrim.” The gravelly voice was vaguely familiar.
Opal-rich tree roots dipping in and out of the cave ceiling, offering a dull glow, but my vision blurred with tears of pain.
“Lucky I came out here myself looking for your friend. Figured I’d find him nearby.
Didn’t think I’d be lucky to find you taking a nap. ”
A heavy boot slammed into my open wound, and I choked on air that refused to reach my lungs.
The man crouched down, and I met his gaze through watering eyes.
Kamryn, the Barony guard we’d left unconscious in the alleyway, grinned back, the corners of his beard turning upwards. The red of his weapon hid the discoloration, but ulcers pocked his face and the fungus I’d infected him patterned his skin in flaking ridges.
“How,” I wheezed, “are your fingers?”
“You tell me.”
He reached for my throat, and his Skal-healed fingers wrapped around my neck.
Blood, or maybe Ciarán, screamed in my head, and my blurred vision darkened. Kamryn laughed at me from the end of a closing tunnel. I tried to pry his thick fingers from around my throat, but my strength was failing, and Ciarán was starting to sound farther away…
No.
I would not die like this.
Sharp pain erupted along my arms, and the familiar weight of flaying flesh tugged at the serrated edge of my favorite bone blades.
Kamryn howled and scrambled backwards, bleeding from where I’d cut into his arms with my blades.
“Everyone’s calling you a god,” he hissed, saliva running into his beard. “But I know you’re a devil.”
My vision cleared, but only marginally. Blood poured from the space between my ribs, and the cave floor tilted beneath me but I stayed standing.
“I don’t know what poor fool you sent to give herself up in your place,” Kamryn said, “but I do know when I drag your body into the Highlander camp, I’ll be rewarded.”
“You have to kill me first,” I managed to rasp.
“Happily.”
Red light blazed in his hands, and I braced my back against the cave wall. It was all I could do to hold my bladed forearms out ahead of me and hope it would be enough.
I didn’t have the strength left for anything else.
Kamryn raised an arm to strike, his grin manic, and orange light burst through his chest. His grin faltered, and he staggered back, staring at the orange blade protruding from his guard’s uniform as it solidified into gleaming metal.
Blood dripped from his gaping mouth to dirty the steel.
Metal sang against armor and flesh as the weapon retracted back into his chest. Kamryn blinked wildly at me, and then fell in front of me, dead.
Ciarán stood behind him, wild-eyed, pale, and glistening with sweat.
“Ciarán.” I fell forward into his arms. The cave was so cold. Had it been this cold earlier?
“Come on, Wren.” Ciarán’s voice reverberated through his chest to thunder against my ear. “Wren, please! Stay awake. You have to stay awake!”
He laid me on my back away from Kamryn’s body. I was looking up at Ciarán’s glowing orange eyes. The taste of iron was thick on my tongue, and despite the oppressive cold of the cave, something hot and sticky slid down my chin.
“You-you can’t do this!” Ciarán begged.
Part of me wanted to laugh. I’d held him once how he was holding me now, when he’d been Liam and dying in my arms. I tried to say as much, but as much as I tried to form the words, no sound came forth.
I reached up with the last of my strength to hook my fingers on Ciarán’s dark cowl and pull it away from his face. I wanted his face, his whole face, to be the last thing I saw.
I smiled, or at least, I thought I did, and my eyes fluttered shut.
Sobbing.
The afterlife was full of sobbing.
I didn’t like it.
But the pain between my ribs was gone and I could breathe again, and—
And I was above my dead body, watching Ciarán cry over it in the light of the glowing tree roots while Una looked on from where she curled in the cave’s corner.
My body’s head lolled to the side and my mouth hung open.
I looked terrible, and maybe it was a sign that I was already adjusting very well to death because I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed by it all.
I stepped away, and blue hair fell forward over my shoulders. I grabbed a fistful of it, still connecting the dots in my head when Ciarán, with his head still bowed, spoke.
“Save her.” His voice, despite his sobbing just a moment ago, was edged with the grit of a hidden threat.
“I think I’m already dead,” I blurted.
“I can’t summon the Nightmare of a dead person. If she were dead, you wouldn’t be here. She is alive.” He balled my real body’s bloodied tunic in his fist, still not looking at the me I currently occupied. “Now save her.”
I looked back at my body, taking in her slack jaw and vacant brow. I frowned. Maybe I’d watched too many movies, but I thought I’d look cooler after going down in a brutal fight to the death.
But no, I looked so…
Stupid.
I wished Ciarán would look away and let me die ugly in private.
Instead, he stared at my face as if trying to memorize every detail before I faded out of existence. As if looking away might make me die faster. As if he’d never seen something so perfect and beautiful in either of the two worlds.
It didn’t make sense.
A numb acceptance of the circumstances settled over me. I was dying. I was watching it happen. Some of the blood in the dirt was Kamryn’s, but I knew most of it was mine. My left lung was collapsed. I could feel damage to my other organs.
No amount of healing magick could save the girl on the floor in front of me, but there was one last thing I needed to do before it was too late.
“Ciarán,” I said gently. “I would like to say goodbye to my mom. You can summon her, can’t you?”
He shook his head. “If I do, I won’t have enough magick left for you to heal yourself.”
“I can’t. Ciarán, look at me, I—”
“In Vanderfall. I should’ve died, but I didn’t,” Ciarán croaked. “You did something to me. You need to do it again.”
“That was different! You were dying of an infection, not holes in your vital organs!”
“Then figure it out!” he begged.
“I— my body, I mean…” I stared at my pallid skin, my slack jaw, and the pool of blood I rested in. “Ciarán, even if I fixed my injuries, I don’t have enough blood.”
“Make more!”
“I don’t know how!”
“Then take mine!” He clutched at my unconscious body’s tunic as he sobbed at my side. “Take it. All of it. It’s yours.”
“I need my mom. Please. I want to see her before—” I cut off to try to calm myself with a shuddering breath. I’d died so many times as a Nightmare, but I’d always come back. This time it would be final. And Mom—
I needed to see her. For me and for her.
“I won’t waste my magick,” Ciarán said.
“It’s not a waste to let me hug my own mother one last time!”
“She’d rather I save my magick so you can heal yourself.”
“I demand it.” I choked back a sob. “Ciarán, as your Saergrim, I command you to summon my mother.”
“No.”
“You’re my Grimguard. You have to listen.”
“Then I revoke my duties and title of Grimguard,” he said through a soft, wavering laugh, still looking at my slack-jawed body.
“I don’t accept.” I fell to my knees at his side. “Now summon my mom.”
“No.”
Rage and desperation boiled over. “Dammit, won’t you at least look at me? This me?”
Ciarán tore his face away from the real Wren to finally meet my eye. His chin wavered, but a jumping muscle in his jaw betrayed just how hard he was working to keep it still.
“Save her,” he hissed again.
“I can’t fix that.” I pointed at my body. “I’m not powerful enough. No one is. I’m going to die. Tonight. I won’t waste magick trying to stop the inevitable when you can use that magick to bring me my mother.”
“But if I summon her, I won’t have enough magick left for you to even try! You have to at least try!”
“I won’t! And you won’t call my mom. So what? We both stand here too stubborn to give in to each other until I’m dead and it’s too late for either of us to get what we want?”
“Except we both want you to live, don’t we?” he snarled. “So why aren’t you trying?”
I crouched so we were eye-to-eye. “It’s okay, Ciarán. I’m okay. Just let me say goodbye.”
His eyes wavered, jumping between mine, and his mouth opened and closed as he searched for the right words.
When they finally came, they were hoarse and broken. “You’re dying because of me. I was too late to save you. Liam, he—he made it in time when Ferrin attacked you at the school. He died so you wouldn’t. But I—”
I shook my head and took his face in my hands to wipe at his tears with my thumbs.
“No. No, Ciarán. You were perfect. From the moment you threatened my life on the parapet my first night in Skalterra,” I laughed through my streaming tears, “to the day you stopped me from turning into a rotsbane, and all the way to right now. Perfect. In every aggravating way. In Skalterra and in Keldori. As Liam and as Ciarán. My Grimguard. My friend.”