10. Isolde
CHAPTER TEN
ISOLDE
S he couldn’t see.
Isolde’s lungs had begun to function again, but the minute the first gulp of frigid air poured down her throat, her breaths turned to frantic pants. Her heart pounded in her chest, the same way it had when she’d realized Bastian was a Wolf.
Because she couldn’t see.
The world around her was black. She couldn’t make out so much as the outline of a pine tree.
Gasping, she forced herself to roll to her stomach, and then find her knees.
She had to move. She had to get out of the woods, back to Bastian, to Selene, somewhere— anywhere —the beast couldn’t get to her.
She was a sitting duck out here in the snow, God only knew how far from the village, alone and blind .
She couldn’t see anything. She was blind .
“Get up,” she told herself between gasps. “Get up, Isolde.”
Somehow, she managed to stagger to her feet. The ground seemed to spin beneath her boots, too far away without her eyes to tell her where it was. And her chest ?—
Isolde couldn’t suppress a cry as she lifted a hand to the burning skin there and found it sticky with blood. The front of her tunic was drenched with it, and the cut itself… she couldn’t bear to probe it with her fingers, but the pain told her it was long and deep.
And it was still bleeding freely, despite the fact that her Vampire healing should have closed the wound by now, which made her even more of a target for the beast.
Isolde tried to force her breathing to slow, but the effort to control it only made it come faster. She couldn’t hear the forest around her over her wheezing gasps, could still see nothing but blackness, and she hadn’t felt this helpless since... since?—
A branch snapped somewhere ahead of her.
Isolde forced herself to go completely still. She held her breath, listening, ignoring the way her lungs ached and the gash in her chest burned.
Footsteps in the snow, coming toward her.
She couldn’t run, not blind like this. She didn’t even have a damn knife to defend herself with, because she was so arrogant that she thought her Vampire strength and speed were enough to save her from anything.
It was just like that day ten years ago. Helpless in the snow, pain radiating through her, her heart racing like the wings of a frightened bird.
The footsteps grew nearer. Isolde widened her stance, for what little steadiness that might provide. She raised her hands in front of her, staring blindly into the blackness?—
Something collided with Isolde, and she went feral.
A scream wrenched out of her as a vice locked around her middle.
She lashed out with her nails, clawing at whatever—whoever—held her.
Her fangs slid free as she gnashed her teeth, searching for flesh to sink them into.
She kicked and flailed and wrenched at the grip that held her, fueled by nothing but panic and rage.
Vaguely, she was aware of someone else shouting, but she couldn’t think clearly enough to do more than hope they were cries of pain.
Another scream tore free of her own mouth as the wound in her chest pulled, but she wouldn’t stop, she wouldn’t die, not here, not like this, not after everything, when the last ten years would have been for nothing ? —
“Isolde!” The sound of her name broke through the haze, faint over the frantic rushing in her ears. “Isolde, stop. It’s me! It’s Bastian.”
Bastian.
Suddenly, she could smell it: amber and woodsmoke. She recognized the familiar heat of his body. The arms locked around her middle were firm, but they weren’t hurting her.
“Bastian,” she gasped, and all the fight went out of her. She sagged against him, her fingers curling into the rough fabric of his shirt.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded, his voice filled with alarm.
He set Isolde on her feet—she hadn’t even realized he’d been holding her off the ground—and pushed her gently back, holding her at arm’s length.
“You’re bleeding.” Isolde felt his hands roving over her chest, pushing her cloak back and peeling away the bloodied fabric of her tunic.
When he spoke again, his voice had dropped an octave. “Who the fuck did this to you?”
“I don’t know,” Isolde whispered. She could feel her own hands shaking as she reached for him, groping blindly until she found his wrists and locked her fingers around them. “I can’t see.”
“What do you mean?” The words were just as low as before. “Isolde, what happened?”
“I can’t see,” Isolde repeated. It was all she could say, all she could think. She thought she might be crying, too, her cheeks damp and her throat tight. “I can’t see, Bastian. I can’t see. I can’t see. ”
“Fuck,” Bastian breathed. “Nightsbane.”
Isolde’s knees buckled. Bastian caught her, one arm curling beneath her legs and the other across her back as he lifted her. His chest was strong and warm against her, and she clung to his neck like a lifeline.
“I can’t see,” she repeated, her voice cracking on a sob.
“I know,” he said as he began to walk. “It’s alright, Isolde. It’s the nightsbane. Whoever cut you must have laced their blade with it. Once the effects wear off, your vision will come back.”
Isolde latched on to the sound of his voice, using it to calm her pounding heart. “Nightsbane?”
“It’s a plant,” Bastian explained. “Deadly to humans and Wolves, but for Vampires, it just neutralizes your strength and ability to heal, and compromises your vision. It must have been a high dose if you’re completely blind.”
“I’ve never heard of that,” Isolde said. “Selene never…”
Surely Selene knew about nightsbane. If the Wolves knew about it, no doubt they’d used it in the war. She had to know about it, and yet she’d never mentioned it to Isolde. Not once.
Isolde couldn’t think about that. Not right then, when the sharp buzz of panic still lingered in her veins, and the pain in her chest made it hard to breathe. She focused instead on way she rocked with Bastian’s gait, the warmth of his body like a furnace against her chilled one.
After a few silent moments, Isolde asked, “How did you find me?”
“I tracked you,” Bastian replied. Isolde heard him inhale deeply, and his fingers curled against her ribs as he said, “Your scent. It’s… hard to ignore.”
“My scent,” she repeated.
I tracked you.
That should have frightened Isolde. Tracked was just a polite way of saying he’d hunted her through the woods.
And his admission that her scent was tantalizing to him in some way —enticing enough that he could use it to track her—was proof of everything Selene had ever told her about Wolves.
That they were predators, Vampires their prey.
But it didn’t scare her. Not in the way it should have. Right now, she actually felt grateful that he’d hunted her down—that he cradled her in his arms, carrying her away from that frigid clearing where she’d been felled.
In that moment, Isolde would have let him hunt her all he wanted, so long as the hunting looked like this.
“Did you catch up with the beast?” Bastian asked, drawing Isolde out of her head.
“I was close,” Isolde murmured back. “I was about to catch it when… I don’t really know what happened. Something hit me—a knife, I think, with the nightsbane on it. I went down, and by the time I realized what had happened, I was blind.”
“It was—” Bastian’s voice came out a fraction too loud. He stopped, cleared his throat, and tried again. “It was someone else who cut you?”
Isolde nodded against his shoulder. “I had my eyes on the beast when it happened. It was still running.”
“That would suggest that there’s a human—or someone with a human form—involved,” Bastian said slowly. “That someone is helping it.”
Isolde sucked in a breath. She hadn’t had time to think it through yet, but Bastian was right. It obviously hadn’t been the beast itself who’d cut her, which meant there was someone else there who’d stopped her before she could catch it.
The shiver that racked Isolde’s body had nothing to do with the cold.
“Almost there,” Bastian said, misinterpreting the reason for her trembling. “We need to clean and wrap that wound. You’re still bleeding.”
At any other time, Isolde would have bit his head off for this uncharacteristic kindness. So far, he’d barely been anything but tolerably civil at best, and downright hostile at worst, and now he was carrying her in his arms, comforting her?
Isolde knew she ought to have been horrified by his tenderness. She probably would be horrified in the morning. His predatory nature aside, Bastian was still Bastian—still an ass, and an oaf, and a Wolf . In any other circumstance, she’d be clawing his eyes out to get away from him.
But he’d found her and calmed her and taken her away from that place in the forest, where she’d felt like she was dying all over, and she didn’t have it in her to stand on principle just then.
A few minutes more, and Isolde heard the creak of a door’s hinges.
Then the scent of coal and steel and something acrid and earthy hit Isolde’s nose.
Bastian had brought her back to his forge.
He didn’t set her down in the workshop, though; he kept walking, his boots quiet on the stone floor, and then loud on a flight of wooden steps.
Isolde didn’t dare say anything. She still couldn’t see—could only sense the motion of Bastian’s body, and hear the sounds of his feet on the floor. Wood, then carpet, and at last she was being lowered onto what felt like a settee.
“Is this… where you live?” Isolde asked, desperate to distract herself as the warmth of Bastian’s arms disappeared and the panic threatened to set in again.
“Only you could walk into my living quarters for the first time, unable to even see the place, and still sound judgmental,” he joked, his voice coming from some distance away. It could have been a jab, but his tone still lacked his customary thorniness.
“I’ll render a more thorough opinion when my sight comes back.” Isolde’s own tone didn’t come out with the same teasing brevity as Bastian’s, the fear creeping back in.
Bastian must have heard it, because he didn’t quip back. A moment later, his hands brushed gently over her knees to alert her of his presence.
“Can I take off your cloak?” he asked.
“Yes.” Isolde tried not to squirm at every little brush of his fingers as he undid the tie at her throat, then pushed the fabric off her shoulders.
“And your shirt? So I can see the wound.”
“Yes.”
Bastian’s hands found the hem of her tunic and guided it gently upward. Isolde hissed as she lifted her arms, the motion pulling at the edges of her wound, and then again when the sticky fabric pulled away from her ravaged skin.
“Sorry,” Bastian murmured. “I have something that will help with the pain.”
“No,” Isolde said quickly. She fought the urge to cross her arms over her chest, feeling suddenly vulnerable in nothing but her camisole, with no way to see what Bastian was doing. “I don’t want anything that will dull my senses any more.”
“It won’t,” Bastian said. “It’s just an ointment. It will help with the scarring, too.”
“Vampires don’t scar,” Isolde said.
“No?”
“No. Even the ones I had when I was human disappeared when I turned.”
“I see.” There was a sloshing sound, and then the press of something cool against the bare skin of Isolde’s chest. She flinched, not expecting the contact. “I’m just cleaning some of the blood away,” Bastian explained. “It’s only water.”
“Okay,” she breathed.
Gently, Bastian sponged around the edges of the wound. The sharpest part of the pain had eased off, at least, though Isolde could tell she was still oozing blood.
“This might sting a bit,” he warned after a moment. “It’s a type of disinfectant, to clean the wound. That okay?”
“Yes,” Isolde agreed. “Vampires don’t get infections, though, so—” She broke off on a hiss as sharp-smelling liquid sloshed across her chest. The burn erupted seconds later, worse than it had been when the wound was fresh. “ Fuck! ”
Bastian hummed in response, and then he was dabbing around the edges of the wound again, drying her off.
“Sorry,” he murmured. One hand dropped to her knee and squeezed, and though Isolde should have recoiled at the comforting touch, she found herself grateful for it.
“Though I have to admit, I like the sound of that word on your tongue.”
“What?” Isolde blurted, the word slipping free before she could even begin to think of a more dignified response.
Still, she couldn’t deny the bolt of desire that shot straight to her core at the implication in his tone, at the instant vision of the other scenarios in which he might be able to draw that word from her mouth.
“You heard me,” Bastian said, and then, as if he hadn’t just driven all the frightened, vulnerable thoughts from her mind and replaced them with the haze of desire in a single sentence, he added, “Took your mind off the wound, didn’t it? Do you want the ointment to numb the pain, or no?”
It took a moment for Isolde to make her mouth form comprehensible words. “You promise it won’t make me sleepy?”
“Promise.”
“Alright, then.”
Bastian’s fingers were gentle as he smeared something sharp smelling across Isolde’s chest. Once again, the pain flared at Bastian’s touch, but then it faded. Gradually at first, and then abruptly, completely to nothing.
Isolde sighed, leaning her head against the back of the settee.
She felt… heavy. Her head spun as she closed her eyes—for what little difference it made.
At least this way she could pretend the blackness of her vision was purposeful, and not something that made her heart race and the back of her neck prickle with fear.
Bastian wrapped the wound with strips of linen, and then brought her a shirt to replace her bloodied camisole.
Isolde had no choice but to take his word that he kept his back turned while she changed, but somehow…
she believed him. Despite the fact that she was sure they were covered in blood, she didn’t have the energy left to remove her trousers, though she did consent for Bastian to take off her boots.
Finally, he draped a blanket over her lap and settled beside her on the settee to wait for her vision to return.