Page 132 of Land of Monsters

Her cries were worse than any wound I ever had, digging so deeply into me, I knew even in death, I wouldn’t find peace. She wouldn’t allow me to.

Not until we found each other again.

Chapter 26

Raven

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Anguish yowled through my chest, my body shaking. I leaned over, putting my ear to his chest, his heartbeat growing softer, his life slipping from my fingers.

“How do I save you?” I tried to dig deep, to find the source that had bonded us before and saved me from death. I could feel nothing, our power draining instead of uniting.

“What do I do?” I wailed. “Help me.” He was my rock, my core, the tamer of my monsters, and the source of my strength. I couldn’t do this without him.

No,mroczny. You are all those things on your own.His voice was just a whisper through my soul.

“Ash…” My forehead dropped to his, my tears seeping over his skin.

I could hear our friends and family below, fighting for their lives, Sonya’s soldiers not knowing their queen was dead, while my soul was being ripped from me. I was dying even if my body continued living.

The story of my mother rebuking my father at first was well known. Their convoluted past and her dedication to his late nephew turned her away from her mate. They both suffered. But to us dwellers, it was equal to a slow, agonizing death sentence, and none of them had knotted to their mates like I had. It didn’t matter if I was supposed to be queen, if my role in life wasn’t supposed to include a tree fairy, if everyone in the world didn’t think we should be together.

Our bindings went beyond labels and titles.

“Ash,” I sobbed, rocking into him. “Don’t leave me.”

Something plunked on the ground next to my knee, my attention going to a stone coiled within a chain that fell from his pocket.

The Cintamani stone. A tick scurried up the back of my neck, rummaging around in my brain, trying to pull at my school teachings, the knowledge stored within its files.

“It gives you the opportunity and luck. And a source of nature’s energy.”I heard Dzsinn’s voice in my head. It was known to be the elixir of life.

My pulse thumped in my ears, my body flushing with adrenaline. Shakily, my hand reached out for the stone, sensing the vibrations brushing against my palm, the power emanating from it.

My lungs tightened, my heart racing. Hope burned like acid in the back of my throat. I plucked up the chain. Vitality sang from the gem on a frequency my dweller could hear and tickled at my bones.

Every wish I had to save Ash whirled in my mind as I clutched the chain and dropped it over my head.

Heal him!The stone fell against my breastbone, rubbing my skin like a genie bottle as my hand slammed over the arrow wound in Ash’s chest. The stone reacted instantly to my plea,performing like a lightning rod, pulling energy from everywhere and funneling it through me.

A scream wrenched from my stomach, pain splintering my nerves as nature answered my call. Life exploded behind my eyes, burrowing deep like roots. I gritted my teeth against flashes of us together; the blood we had spilled over this land fused us. It tied us to the earth, our own marrow a sacrifice to the gods.

The echo of tree branches cracked from the forest nearby, sounding like fireworks, popping and exploding across the sky, answering my call. We had pulled from nature before, drenched the earth in our cum and blood, and I could feel our essence pumping back into me, filling his veins with the connection we shared, and pulling the toxins from his blood.

A howl expelled from my lips, and my body shook, feeling the intrusive poison like it was being siphoned from my own body. The infected blood surged from his wound, slipping through my fingers and oozing to the ground, staining his shirt like a tattoo.

No line remained between us, no notion of individualism or pride. The dweller and obscurer wrapped around his soul like it was theirs while I took his pain, his life, his joy, and heartbreak and dragged it across the scorched land of death, yanking him back into life.

A scream belted out of Ash, his body jackknifing up, his green eyes popping open with blistering heat. He sucked in sharply, his chest heaving. Energy and life thrummed off him. His attention went to the pool of dark blood next to him, then his head snapped to me.

“Dziubus,”he whispered hoarsely, his gaze going from the necklace around my throat to my face.

His voice rocked through me, breaking me. I fell into him with relief, the weight of what I almost lost slumping me forward with a wail. He pulled me to him, holding me close.

“You saved me.” He leaned back to look at me, his thumbs wiping at my tears. “Again.”

“Of course I did,” I choked. “You are mine, Ash Hemlock Rowan. Every part, and I can’t be the bane of your existence if you aren’t around.”

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