Page 18 of A Reign of Roses
The sword was lodged too snugly inside her chest.
I yanked and tugged, dodging her stumped fingers and unhinged jaw. Her breath washed over my face—no warmth, as no blood pumped in those reanimated veins—and the stench…like carrion piled high in the sweltering sun. Like death, stolen from its peaceful void and forced to wander and search for eternity.
Stark understanding brought my eyes back up to the savage, frozen witch. The talismans and bone relics hanging around her neck. Tokens from a past life. And her sorrowful cloudy eyes…the unbearable, unending pain there.
The wraith released a viscerally unholy moan and lunged, faster now—
I recoiled too fast and landed on my ass, crawling backward as the wraith threw herself over the wheelbarrow, landing even farther onto the sword and eliciting another low, guttural sound.
Too close, too close—
Righting myself, I lurched up and back, fighting to keep that gap between us as wide as I could. I’d never outrun her, she’d never grow tired…and my only two weapons—one deep in the endless snow and the other lodged inside her body. One more step backward slammed my spine against the trunk of a tree, and I didn’t think as I spun and climbed.
Didn’t think, didn’tbreathe, as I dug one foot after another into bark. Up and up andup. Not as my hands grew raw and stiff from cold, burning and numb at once. Nor as pines and ice and bark cut through my vision and into my eyes.
Some voice in my mind, sunny and bright, pointed out that had I not climbed that wall of ice over and over, I’d never have the muscle memory to make it this high. That all my hard work had not entirely been for nothing.
Fair point, bird.
Up and up andupI rose as those desolate moans grew fainter. Higher still, as the snow wraith wailed, begging at the base of the tree for one taste, onelickof my soul.
When I was sure my hope had been proven true—that the wraith could not climb up behind me—I nestled myself between two branches spread in a V and sucked in lungful after lungful of freezing air.
That blur of matted white hair moaned from the ground, my steel shooting up through her back. Devastated. Brokenhearted. More sorrowful than I could bear to listen to. The earsplitting bellow of pain was too familiar.
Hours and hours passed.
The night grew from cold to frigid. Owls hooted. Snow fell.
My face was so numb the flakes that landed didn’t melt.
At some point my shivering became a hazard to my position in the branches, and I tied myself to the narrow trunk with my belt in case I passed out. But sleep never came. My adrenaline too insistent on my survival. That still-wailing wraith too ravenous at the base of the tree.
And no sleep—no sleep meant hours on hours of wretched thoughts. Gutting memories. Imagined conversations that hacked at my heart.
“I can’t live like this.”
Her full lips turn down. “I know.”
“Are you in pain?”
“No. I’m happier here.”
I reach for her warm, soft skin, but all I feel is night. “Are you lying, my little bird?”
“Do you want me to lie?”
By the time the sky lightened to a dull, barren gray—the only color of daylight in Gods-forsaken Vorst—I’d lost sight of the ground altogether. Everything had blurred—the white of fresh snow, the white of the wraith’s thick hair, the white of the clouds that misted across the peak.
But her wails had ceased and I knew that meant she’d abandoned me. For the wraith would never stop moaning. She’d wander these barren, frostbitten lands eternally. Stumbling through each day and night and day again. Sobbing for the life she’d lost. Begging for a soul to share. A mournful, weeping husk with a thick steel sword lodged clean through her heart.
I sighed, exhaustion and misery weighing heavy on my mind and thick on my tongue. My foot maneuvered to the nearest branch below to guide me down—
And missed.
Fuck, fuck—
Grasping at pines and branches, arms flailing, I fell—
