Chapter 31 #4
I scrambled to my feet, legs shaking from exhaustion and terror. The grass was slick beneath my feet, treacherous, threatening to send me sprawling again. My clothes soaked through at the knees where I’d landed, cold water seeping into fabric and prickling my skin.
The field stretched out before me, dark and empty except for—
There.
Fifty yards away, at the edge of the tree line where the manicured equestrian grounds gave way to wilderness and state forest, I saw him.
Hyacinth’s form looked diminutive against the thing stalking him. His copper coat was stark against the darkness like a beacon, like a target, catching the moonlight that filtered through the clouds. His head was thrown back, neck arched, ears pinned flat against his skull in terror.
He screamed again—that same piercing sound that turned my blood to ice water and activated every protective instinct I’d ever had.
And then I saw the wolf.
My brain refused to understand what I was seeing.
It was too large. Twice the size any wolf should be, probably four hundred pounds of muscle and fur and nightmare.
Its coat was midnight-black with patches of dark grey, thick and coarse, standing up along its spine in a ridge that made it look even bigger.
The fur seemed to absorb the moonlight rather than reflect it, like the creature was made of concentrated shadow.
Its eyes glowed. Actually glowed a yellow-green. Even more frightening than their luminescence was the intelligence in those eyes, seemingly human in their focus and intent.
Rowan’s words echoed in my memory, his voice quiet and certain. “She smelled of blood, Violet. Fresh blood.”
The shifter he’d warned me about, the murderer, possibly a girl in my philosophy class. This had to be the thing that killed that student.
And now it has cornered my horse.
“Leave him alone!” The words tore out of my throat, raw and desperate and utterly useless.
I was too far away. The wolf didn’t even turn, didn’t acknowledge my presence at all. It just circled Hyacinth with the patient confidence of a predator that knew its prey had nowhere to go, that understood cornering and fear and the sweet anticipation of the kill.
Hyacinth’s sides heaved with exertion and terror.
Sweat darkened his coat, made it cling to the muscles beneath.
His nostrils flared wide, red-rimmed, breathing hard enough that I could hear it from here—the harsh exhales of panic, the kind of breathing that came before hearts gave out from sheer terror.
I ran harder, legs burning with effort, lungs screaming for air in the cold night. Each step felt like moving through water, time stretching and compressing wrong, the distance refusing to shrink fast enough, no matter how hard I pushed.
Move, move, fucking MOVE—
The wolf lunged.
The motion was liquid speed and brutal economy, covering the fifteen feet between them in a heartbeat—explosive violence that clutched my lungs, ceased my breathing.
Long curved claws flashed in the moonlight like black knives. They raked across Hyacinth’s side and made a sound like tearing wet fabric.
Bright red bloomed across his chestnut coat.
Blood. So much blood. It poured from the gashes in his flank, four parallel lines carved deep into muscle, soaking his coat and dripping onto grass already dark with rain.
The scent hit me even from that distance—copper and salt and iron, the particular metallic tang of blood that I’d smelled a thousand times in training accidents and injuries but never this much at once.
Never this much.
Never Hyacinth’s blood.
The sound he made wasn’t the whinny of pain from a cut leg or the protest of a horse being tasked to do something uncomfortable.
This was agony. Raw, visceral, the sound of an animal dying and knowing it, but fighting anyway because the body didn’t know how to do anything else.
His front legs pistoned upward, a thousand pounds of terror and survival instinct.
One hoof connected with the wolf’s snout, a solid impact that sounded like a baseball bat hitting a side of beef—hollow and meaty.
The wolf yelped and stumbled back, shaking its massive head.
Hyacinth spun as if to flee. The wolf recovered and lunged again, but Hyacinth delivered a powerful hindkick—the wolf was caught midair by a pair of horsehooves.
The sound of hooves striking the wolf’s skull thundered like a shotgun blasting a wooden barrel.
The impact echoed across the field, sharp and final. The creature cried—a sound too human for the body it came from, full of pain and outrage and surprise, almost like a child’s wail of betrayed hurt.
Then it turned and ran. It disappeared into the tree line in a blur of dark fur and glowing eyes, leaving only the scent of wet dog and musk and something chemical.
I was still ten yards away when Hyacinth crumbled.
His legs folded beneath him—first the front, joints buckling like they’d been cut, then the back following in slow motion.
He went down in a heap of red blood and wrong, wrong, wrong.
The sound he made wasn’t a scream anymore; it was a long, low, guttural moan, a soft noise for the broken and the dying.
No, god no, please.
His moan turned wet and gurgling. The sound of lungs filling with blood, of a body shutting down system by system, of consciousness fading like light through closing shutters.
“No, no, please,” I managed through sobs.
Tears blurred my vision, turned the world into watercolor streaks of darkness and brown and red. So much red. The grass beneath him was already saturated, crimson spreading outward in a pool that caught the distant stable lights and turned them rust-colored.
My boots slipped in mud and blood as I got nearer. Each step splashed, sent droplets flying. The smell was overwhelming now—copper thick enough to taste on the back of my tongue, sweet and metallic and nauseating.
I crashed to my knees beside him, hands reaching for his neck, his head, searching for some way to help, to fix, to stop this.
His coat was soaked—blood and rain and the cold sweat of shock making him slippery beneath my fingers.
Warm. Still warm. Still alive even though he shouldn’t be, even though the amount of blood spreading beneath him said his heart was still pumping even as his body was failing.
His eyes found mine. Brown and liquid and beautiful, framed by lashes that were matted with blood now. But the light was already fading at the edges, awareness dimming like someone was slowly turning down a dial.
He knew me. Still recognized me despite the pain, despite everything. His ear flicked towards my voice, the small movement taking effort that cost him.
“Please, baby, please don’t—”
My hands found the wound. Four parallel gashes torn through his flank, each one deep enough that I could see the layers—skin, fat, muscle, and oh god—
His bowels hung out.
Intestines grey-pink and glistening, spilling from the cavity in his belly where the wolf’s claws had ripped him open. They steamed in the cold night air, still warm, still technically alive even as the rest of him was dying. The membranes were intricate and complex, and never meant to see air.
Blood pulsed from torn arteries with each weakening heartbeat. Not spraying anymore—the pressure wasn’t high enough—just welling up and spilling over, adding to the pool beneath him.
I sobbed. Deep, shuddering, wracking sobs. The sound tore out of my chest, grief and horror and helplessness all woven together into an atavistic animal noise I didn’t recognize as coming from me. It sounded raw and primal.
Footsteps behind me. Running steps splashing through blood and mud. Rowan’s voice was sharp with shock and grief that matched my own. “Violet! Are you hurt?”
He dropped beside me, his hands immediately moving to Hyacinth’s belly, trying to hold—to what? Put the organs back? Stop the blood? Keep his intestines from spilling further onto the saturated grass?
There was too much. Too much damage. Too much red soaking into the earth and running over our hands and seeping into our clothes as we tried uselessly to stem the tide, to hold back the inevitable with nothing but desperation and willpower.
Hyacinth made another sound—softer, wetter, gurgling.
His breathing became labored, each inhale a titanic struggle.
His sides heaved, ribs standing out in sharp relief beneath blood-soaked hide.
Foam flecked his muzzle—pink-tinged, blood-mixed—and his tongue lolled slightly, going pale at the edges.
I stroked his neck, his mane, and felt his pulse against my palm growing weaker with each beat. Thump. . . thump. . . thump. . . Each one fainter than the last, the rhythm stuttering, failing.
“Please, baby,” I choked, “please don’t leave me.”
His eyes were still on mine. Still aware. Still there enough to recognize me, to know that I was here, that he wasn’t dying in this cold field alone. His breathing slowed, his pained moans of suffering quieted, and a silence—silent save my hysterical sobbing—began to settle over us.
Then Rowan’s shout shattered that gathering silence.
“Damien!” His voice cracked on the name, desperate and furious.
His hands were still pressed to Hyacinth’s belly, fingers slick with blood.
“Demon!” He screamed it louder, rage tearing his throat.
“I will sign your contract! I will visit your damned Strega! I will get you into The Library! But save this damned horse!”
Hyacinth’s breathing changed. Became shallower, more ragged. His pulse beneath my palm was barely there now—just a faint flutter, inconsistent, failing.
No no no no—
“Damien!” Rowan screamed again, louder. “Rip the fucking relic from my chest! Tear it out! Kill me if you have to! Just save him!”
The offer hung in the cold night air, terrible in its sincerity. Rowan was offering himself. He was willing to die if it meant saving a horse.
This horse. My horse. For me.
Because Rowan understood. He knew that losing Hyacinth would shatter parts of me that would never recover from his loss. He cared enough about me, my health, and my happiness to make that offer.
He cared enough to die for me. Again.
I was too broken to process it properly. Too shattered by the sight of Hyacinth dying beneath my hands, too overwhelmed by the sheer volume of blood and the wet sounds of his labored breathing and the knowledge that I was watching another thing I loved slip away.
But somewhere beneath the shock and grief, I felt it.
Gratitude. Love. The knowledge that Rowan would sacrifice anything—had died for me already tonight—and was willing to do it again.
My peripheral caught movement at the portal door we’d come through. Reality rippled like a heat shimmer, and the air distorted as Damien stepped through with the casual grace of someone taking an evening stroll through a garden rather than a muddy field full of horse shit.
He strolled across the field towards us, unhurried, taking his time. He took in the scene with those amber eyes that saw everything and felt—what? Amusement? Satisfaction? Sympathy?
I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t care. I could only hold Hyacinth’s head as his lifeless body grew colder. I begged—aloud, internally, or perhaps both—for this to be a nightmare, for this to not be happening.
Please god, please. I can’t lose my baby.
“Demon, I will pay whatever boon you deem appropriate.” Rowan’s voice was raw, stripped of everything except desperate sincerity. No pride. No bargaining. “If it is within your power, save this horse.”
Damien stopped a few feet away, careful not to step in the spreading pool of blood. He tilted his head, studied us with a look of curiosity as if trying to understand human attachment, human love, human grief.
His smile was a crescent moon on a cloudless night. “Very well, mi aves fénix. Let us discuss the terms of our contract.”