Page 199 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

High in the tower, in the narrow slit of the window… a red as bright as blood, gleaming like a flame.

A red the same shade as the tangle of hair wrapped around my wrist, now torn and drifting away.

No.

I didn’t realize I’d spoken until Hakkon started laughing, the sound thick with bubbling blood.

The wargs were invading the tower, clawing and tearing at each other to be first, and Cirri… there at the window, she held out hands full of blood, her face as pale as the dead.

She still lived, and I had wasted my wings on this last chance.

Hakkon snarled, still laughing, and gouged his claws deep into my back, ripping away at my wings. “We die, my enemy, but the pack will live on.”

I thought I made a sound. Maybe I shouted her name. The world pressed in on my eardrums, a dying heartbeat that drowned out everything else, and the only word I knew was her name.

We fell.

My wings fluttered, bones snapping, collapsing in with the force of wind. I felt the snap of the joints, the rip of flesh as Hakkon tore at them, destroying the both of us, and felt nothing at all.

The earth rushed at us, and I squeezed Hakkon’s throat tight, driving him down.

We landed in the midst of the wargs, and I felt the life flee his body, the pulverized crush of ribs collapsing under my weight, his heart and lungs pulping like rotten fruits beneath my hands.

His eyes went blank, mouth still stretched to the ears in a mad, wide smile, teeth red with blood. His last breath rushed out in a soft gasp.

I stretched my shattered wings, leaving him for the carrion he was, and rushed for the tower, for the flame in the window—and instead they drooped, slumping off my back, nothing more than dead appendages.

“No,” I snarled, clawing wargs blindly, dragging myself through the sea of bodies. “No, Cirri!”

A warg latched onto a wing, ripping it free. I ignored it, gaining precious ground to the tower.

And there she was, in the window once more; but she was too visible, she was—

Falling.

Everything stopped, time slowing to an agonized bubble, and all I could see was Cirri as she fell.

Faster than wings could fly, faster than I could move…

And above the screams, the howls, the maddened laughter and sobs and groans, I heard the bone-shattering thump as she hit the ground.

It echoed, a sound like a bell tolling, ringing through my head.

I did not remember what I did to the wargs. They were there, and then they were not; my hands were hot and slick, nothing in my ears but the echo of that thump and the steady heartbeat that was slowing, dying by the second; I pulled free of bodies, stepping onto a carpet of thorns.

They plunged into my flesh, a sharper, brighter pain than any warg had inflicted, and there she was.

She sprawled atop the corpse of a warg, her chest stuttering as she sucked in desperate breaths; eyes wide and sparkling with tears as she stared skywards.

“Cirri, no,” I breathed, but she couldn’t understand this speech.

I knelt beside her, wanting to touch and terrified to cause her still more agony in these last moments. Her hands… I knew what the hammer had done now. He had ruined them.

Her eyes slid to me, and impossibly, a smile stretched across her bloody lips. Her mouth moved, shaping words, and I stared at them intently to read what she said.

Her mouth did not move as someone else’s would; it seemed unfamiliar and awkward to her.

And I couldn’t read them. Her last words… were impenetrable to me.

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