Page 94 of Untethering Dark

Two should-be-puny humans wrenched him from his love, and he was too weak to thrash as they shackled his wrists and ankles in iron. Even if he weren’t drained of all his strength, the magic radiating off those things jabbed into him like fiery thorns, biting into his flesh, a searing sensation that worsened even with his paltry struggles. Busting out of them would be agonizing, if not outright impossible.

Anguish ripped through him as Astrid’s bloodied fingers twitched, barely lifting off the snow, reaching for him as much as her dying body would allow. Lips moved, but no words came.

Her chest rose and fell with a sudden ghastly wheeze.

Then it rose no more.

Gudariks howled, swept away by an avalanche of fury and grief.

They jerked his arms above his head, lashing his wrists to the back of an all-terrain vehicle. The cigarette smoker who made lewd comments wanted to go back for Astrid’s body.Should’ve killed him the first I ever saw him.

“We can strap Blondie across the back and take her with us. There’s gotta be a little life left in her. Did you see the way she took that brute? I want a piece of...”

His companion made a disgusted noise, cutting him off. “You’re fucked up in the head, you know that? Now shut up and get on. Quit wasting time.”

Rage warred with grief as he imagined ripping out the poacher’s tongue, followed by his would-be-offending appendage and shoving both down the man’s throat. To speak and threaten such evil deserved brutal retribution. Yet the fatigue from that cursed dart and the magic in the iron shackles stole all movement from his limbs. His brain said, “turn, lunge, eviscerate,” but his body barely twitched a muscle. These humans might as well have ripped out his claws and teeth for all the good they did him now.

Astrid needed him.

The engine roared in his ears, the stench of grease and exhaust choking his lungs. The beastly machine lurched forward, nearly yanking his arms from their sockets as it dragged him across the ground.

And yet he barely felt any of it.

Astrid had died in a pool of her own blood.

That she lingered as long as she had must’ve been the result of residual ritual magic and adrenaline—her body’s last-ditch effort to power through. Its final denial.

As he was dragged through his own forest, body battered by rock and tree with every sharp turn, and there were many, the magic in his shackles leached what little remained of his will,sapping all the fight out of him, leaving only grief. Or was it the other way around—the grief that robbed him of the rest?

Useless. Helpless. He failed his love.

His love.

That’s what he was trying to say—right before they murdered her—that he loved her. It was the seedling sort of love, the kind that sprouted and grew with time, but was love, nonetheless. There could be no other explanation for the certainty in his heart and soul that his place was by her side for the rest of their immortal lives...

Not so immortal after all.

Not for her and maybe not even for him.

He wasn’t dyingyetbut being brought this low longevity felt the furthest from a guarantee. He’d questioned his immortality, sure, but wondering wasn’t the same as the sinking feeling in his bones that time was quickly ticking down. Forever was a long time until it wasn’t.

By the time they reached the campsite, black spots dotted his vision, and he barely felt his body as they trussed him up on a tanning frame, limbs splayed wide. Dizzy and half-conscious, his head lolled about his shoulders as he tried taking in his surroundings. A roaring bonfire, trees black in the backdrop of that infernal flame, pillars of icicles scattered across the campsite, humans whooping, dancing, and hacking at them with axes. Several people hung in the air, backs bent at an unnatural angle, bodies skewered by Astrid’s magical trap—good, she’d gotten a few—but despite the glaring reminder of their fallen comrades, the others didn’t pay any mind.

There were others trussed up like him—the forest rangers and Johanna. One had already been flayed, their wet, meaty corpse hanging limp from the wooden frame. That must be how their enemy’s number had grown, how they were celebrating and dancing circles around the fire.

Not Suri. He hoped they’d escaped and had seen none of this ugliness.

The Wiedergänger—once humans,friends, people he’d called his own, and hadn’t seen in millennia—turned their attentions to the impaled corpses. Bodies that twitched and wriggled upon closer inspection.

A fresh crop of screams pierced the night air.

Bile rose at the back of his throat. They were still alive. And these fiendish humans turned their knives and their ugly work on the forsaken, flaying, opening their backs, chanting, cheering. Brutally slaying their own.

Pain shot through his temples—ice picks driven through brain.No, no, no, no.It was happening all over again.

A man coughing up bloody, foaming spittle and clutching his throat was dragged across the ground by the scruff of his coat. Unlike the others, save for one of the impaled, he carried modern weapons and wore modern dress. They sacrificed him, too. One of the poachers, perhaps. If their own were fair game, it came as no surprise their allies were, too.

One after another, groups of the newly resurrected bounded from the fire, whooping their triumph.

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