Page 93 of Untethering Dark

As she stared up at him, watching his heart break, each new breath was a harsh, hard-fought rattle. And when she coughed, cracking her open like an egg, blood wet her lips.

Tears streamed down Gudariks’s bony cheeks, her name a raw, choked sob. “Astrid.”

She’d never seen him cry—didn’t know he could.

If only she could reach up and wipe those tears away, to console him, but her body no longer recognized what her braincommanded. Everything felt so heavy. Her limbs useless logs. Her eyes shuttering as black spots dotted her vision.

It wasn’t until she sucked in a deep, agonizing breath that she realized she’d forgotten to breathe. Every inhale and exhale after required concerted effort. Mutter Holle, how could she have taken for granted something as precious as breathing?

Voices approached.

“Got her,” came a familiar declaration of triumph, followed by the fetid stench of cigarette smoke. “Right between her tits. Would’ve been a shame to blast those apart.”

Cigarette Man? But he was tied up in her cottage...

Unless he’d been rescued by the other poachers.

Astrid silently begged her magic to answer her call, to lash out, to protect, to slay, but she couldn’t feel the forest, the cold winter’s night, let alone her fingertips. At the edge of darkness, she was forsaken. This man was lucky he got in his cheap shot, because if she had the strength to enact her will, he’d now be a gory puddle in the snow.

Murder gleamed in Gudariks’s eyes, but he was almost as powerless as she. The dart that had protruded from his shoulder before he ripped it away, must’ve been dipped in cursed poison, as his strength was rapidly draining away. Even in her wrecked state, she sensed the caustic magic oozing from it.

“Enough of that.” This new voice was gruffer. “Keep your focus, or I’ll put you back where I found you and leave you to rot. Heldin needs the big guy alive to complete her spell, or all this trouble has been for nothing, and we’re as good as fucked.”

“Take a chill pill.” Cigarette Man took a more menacing tone. “Or it’s you who’ll rot.”

“Whatever. Let’s just get this done.”

Scheiße.

If the poachers and Wiedergänger they served were here, that meant they got past the forest rangers and their traps.

And Johanna and Suri...

Tears stung her eyes.

They were supposed to have more time.

“Run, Liebe, run,” Astrid begged, more with her eyes than her words, because sound emerged from her mouth in an unintelligible rasp.

Gudariks’s expression hardened, and he braced himself over top of her. While she might not have said actual words, he understood, and he was having none of it. “I’m not leaving you,” he growled.

They got her, but they didn’t need to get him, too. Or Mutter.Oh, gods.Mutter, and Oskar, and Fritz and Liesel. Who would warn them? And take care of her darlings?

Cold seeped over her, and she tried to tap into it, to harness it once more. Maybe in one last-ditch effort she could protect them...and yet, this wasn’t a cold she could control, but an insidious numbness creeping up her extremities.

Even a mistress of Winter had no sway over Death.

Chapter Forty-Four

No, no, no, no. There was so much blood, too much. He knew what this much blood meant. He’d spilled plenty of it, after all. And yet, he kept both hands pressed to the wound, trying to contain it all, wearing denial like armor.

He hated how her face twisted in a rictus, but he needed to stop the bleeding. Somehow. He never had to stanch a wound before. This sort of thing worked on humans, didn’t it? And if the bullet hadn’t killed her upon impact, that meant she was too strong, too full of potential to have her life ripped from her now. She couldn’t be struck down at the precipice of greatness.

She would pull through. She had to.

He could save her.

A numbing sensation rippled out from his shoulder, seizing his limbs in lethargy.

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