Page 202 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

I looked up at Wyn, tapped my bloody wrist, touched Cirri’s soft lips. I couldn’t speak, but I could give everything I was to her. The last bit of life I had left inside me.

“I love you,” I told her again, the truest words I had ever spoken in my life. “Too much to allow death to have you. The ancestors will have to wait for a very, very long time, because you are mine.”

Wyn came to me, a blood-letting blade clutched in ancient hands.

I no longer felt pain. With every drop of my blood she spilled, I felt only the bloom of fresh hope.

With every drop of blood she spilled, Cirri’s heart beat stronger.

Chapter 49

Cirri

When I opened my eyes, I didn’t feel as though I’d woken from sleep.

It had been something deeper, colder, a sensation of absolute nothing—an abyss, rather than the comforting darkness of true slumber.

But when consciousness returned, that feeling of icy null slipped away, and for a time I couldn’t quite place where I was.

My mind skittered over memories, flickers echoing in the dark: awakening in a swaying wagon, weakened by poison; Miro’s self-satisfied pride as he demonstrated his treacherous hidden skills; the eye-smarting darkness beneath the mountain. I thought I remembered the wind whipping through my ears as I fell, and the sight of an ancient crone bent over me, scowling and snapping words that came from a great distance.

And then Hakkon’s face came to life in my mind, his gaze thoughtful but cunning, assessing me as either a sheep or a wolf.

Hunt or be hunted, he whispered in my ear, the memory of his feverish, rancid breath so vivid my back arched up, my body uselessly trying to roll itself away.

And the hammer.

The hammer coming down over and over, Hakkon’s excited panting, the all-consuming agony…

I gasped for breath, shooting straight up, and looked at my hands, expecting to see the bloody, shattered stumps he’d left in their place, terrified that Hakkon would loom out of the darkness, hammer in hand.

But there were no stumps at the ends of my arms, no useless twists of flesh. They were bandaged severely, from fingertip to elbow, in soft cocoons of cotton and salve. Straight sticks stuck out from the ends, still smelling of fresh sap.

A shiver ran through me; what did they look like under there? But there was no sensation to tell me whether they were still attached at all; a pleasant sort of numbness filled me. I stared down at my hands with the odd sensation that they weren’t a part of my body at all.

A coarse wool blanket had fallen into my lap when I bolted upright. I was in a bed of sorts, the kind of camp cot I’d seen in Wyn’s tent before. There was no light but a single lantern, flickering weakly in the dark on top of a chest next to a glass of water.

“Cirri. You’re awake.”

His voice was heavy with relief, almost choked with it. But his words sounded thicker than usual, formed by a mouth that wasn’t meant for speech.

As Bane emerged from the shadows, I saw why. My breath caught in my throat at the sight of him, fully fiend, the face he hated above all else.

It had always been simple to pick out the parts of him that seemed more human than the rest. The general shape of him, the way he smiled… the vampire he used to be had been hidden in there, just glimpsed from the corner of the eye.

There was not so much as a whisper of that vampire now. His lips were gone, his jaw distorted with distended fangs, the bridgeof his nose giving way to a blunt snout and slitted nostrils amidst the crags and valleys of his face. A crown of horns spiraled from his skull, and the sharp tips haloed him like armor. A fine down of black fur gleamed on his ashen skin.

And all of him had been torn to pieces. Harsh scars covered his smooth skin, half of his face ragged and shiny with newly-healed tissue.

He was hunched over to fit within the tent, resting on feet and hands as deformed as the rest of him, bulkier and more monstrous than I’d ever seen before.

And gods, what a sight I’d missed.

I held up my hands without thinking, but my fingers didn’t move at all, splinted and bandaged as they were.

Cold fear trickled down my spine. What if they never moved again?

I was grateful to be alive, unsure of how it had happened, but if I couldn’t communicate for the rest of my life… it would be a small death in itself, consigned to the one thing I’d always feared most before I met Bane.

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