Page 201 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

I held Cirri close, keeping her from their reach, but it wasn’t her they wanted. It was me they tried to take, and I left more of myself behind with every step.

But as thirsty as they were for my blood, they cleared my path. The vines snaked beneath the earth, and I could hear the screams of the wargs as they were caught in the ravenous brambles, trying to flee and failing.

I passed over a scattering of petals that shivered, sprouting into hungry new vines, and looked up at a warg caught in the towering brambles overhead, his eyes dull and dead, a hundred long thorns piercing his heart.

Strangely, what occurred to me in that moment as I carried Cirri from the forest of brambles was the letter, the one I had disavowed and burned to ashes the night I decided that she was mine, and that I would have her, one way or another.

They knew fiends and wargs come from the same dark place.

The thorns, the brambles, they saw no difference between me and the wargs.

And they were right.

We were things that should not be.

But that meant nothing to me now, because if I had been a man, I would not have been able to carry her from this killing field. If I had been a vampire, I would not have been able to tear away from the grasping thorns. I would have been swallowed whole, Cirri in my arms, both of us to perish on this bloody ground and rot together.

It had taken a monster to save her life.

The thorns hissed behind me, nothing but the wind in their branches, but it sounded almost like a voice, furious that its prey was escaping.

I held her closer, tighter, hearing nothing but the weakened beat of her heart with every step, further diminished with every step, until I finally took the step that led onto solid, unshifting ground and open air.

I exhaled, blinking as I was pulled from my daze of determination.

The open plain before me had been transformed into a camp; the legions had caught up in full. They’d built barricades before the softened earth that hid the wargs, scarred by battle, but still standing.

Knights had gathered behind them, bloody and exhausted, some slumped on the ground, but none of them watched the field.

I turned, and saw nothing but a sea of brambles rising high overhead, and in the distance, the tower stood like a lonely lighthouse on a sea of thorns.

A thousand wargs were pierced on them, dangling and loose, the brambles drinking them dry.

The war was… over.

I cast my eyes back over the camp, looking for one person. Visca was there, a gory sight from head to toe, on her knees as she panted for breath. Andrus, each antler point bloody,clutching his pendant close as his lips moved. Wroth, still pacing, red in tooth and claw. And Voryan, looking all too pleased as he took apart a dead warg, rearranging its limbs as he had the rabbit.

I was glad my brothers had escaped the ravenous thorns, but I needed Wyn…

And there she was, emerging from a tent. The last legion had arrived, and more than half the knights were peering out at the field of brambles with no small amount of alarm.

Wyn herself was a crone, stooped and round-shouldered, and she let out a dusty squawk as I stumbled to her, fumbling several vials.

“Wyn.” Gods, without lips, with several rows of teeth, there was no way to form understandable words. “You must save her. Above all else, save her.”

Wyn peered at the woman in my arms, her eyes colorless and lost in a mass of wrinkles behind her spectacles. “What in all the hells did youdoout there?”

She hurried as fast as her newly-old bones would allow, dragging the tent door aside, and my whole body ached with protest as I ducked under and brought Cirri into the dark.

There was a cot for the injured, blessedly empty, and I laid my wife on it. I held a hand over her stomach, feeling for the rise and fall of breath, and there it was—faint, but perceptible.

“It was her.” I touched my wife’s tear-stained cheek, knowing Wyn could not hear me. “It was all her.”

Wyn sucked in a sharp breath at the sight of Cirri’s mutilated hands, the terrible twisted masses of flesh and bone they’d become.

“Take my blood, Wyn. Give it to her and keep her alive.”

The world was becoming darker, too much of me gone into the bellies of wargs and the roots of thorns.

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