Page 69 of A Reign of Roses
“I’m here,” she murmured. “Though I’d rather not be. This place is…” She wheezed. “Nightmarish.”
A morbid grin twitched at my lips. It was true. Among the tangle of parched trees, thick red ooze spilled from the creases where the branches sprouted and some pooled down by the roots.
I nodded toward it as Arwen and I trudged onward. “When I was young, my brother’s brute friends would call that stuff ‘viper come.’ It was an awful name, a play on a slur used for Fae that draw their lighte from blood.”
“Hemolichs,” Arwen supplied.
“Good memory. Nastier boys than Griffin and I would dare each other to eat it and find the consequences of that curiosity on the other side of a two-week stay in the infirmary.”
Arwen’s weak laugh became a steady cough and I urged my legs quicker.
As if sensing my rising anxiety, she reached a clammy palm up to my neck. I brought my lips over to the back of her hand and pressed them there once as I hurried. “It would be such a disservice to my grief to say I’ve missed you.”
“I know,” she murmured. “I don’t think I breathed properly the entire time we were apart.”
I hadn’t, either.
“What did you mean when you said you wereremade? Why were you mortal?”
Was now the best time to tell her everything? Hunting for Hart’s elusive compound, black, spindly trees around us taking the shape of lurking ghouls and foes? Stumbling through snapping twigs and the rustle of cracked leaves while she struggled to stay awake?
But I had to keep her conscious somehow. Distract her.
“I went to see the White Crow. Mortality was necessary for me to become full-blooded.”
“You’re…like me?” Her eyes fluttered at her own words. “A full—”
Arwen’s words were swallowed by her violent shaking in my arms.
“Shh,” I murmured to her as she convulsed, brushing dark hair from her clammy forehead. She was hot. Running a fever.
Fuck.Fuck—
Her lighte wouldn’t regenerate for another few hours at least. It wouldn’t be enough time—the wound was working faster than her Fae healing could keep up with. My pulse quickened.
“We need help,” I called out into the empty Dreaded Vale. My voice was too low. Gravelly and hoarse. “Anyone?”
Silence, save for the wind snapping and sighing through cracked, brittle branches leaching red gunk. Silence, save for the squawking, hungry crows, and for my feet pounding on what was once grass.
Arwen went limp in my arms, passed out.
My mouth tightened. There was nobody here.
“Hello?” I called out again, louder this time, hefting Arwen more evenly into my arms. “Hart? We need help—this woman.” I studied Arwen’s too-pale face. Mouth slack. Eyes sunken. “This woman needs help.”
My words were swallowed by that wretched dry wind. My lips cracked. My throat ached.
I said to her, “You’re going to be fine, bird.”
She didn’t stir.
My legs moved faster. We passed more branches. More long, gnarled trunks of trees and shattered stumps. More roaring wind. No sign of Hart or his clan. No sign of any life at all.
“Hello? We need…” I was—I wasshaking.
We were too far from Aurora now to go back. Nobody there could help Arwen anyway. It was unlikely anyone had healing lighte—a rare ability. And if there were witches in Aurora or any of the other slums, I didn’t have time to find them. They could be anyone. Anywhere. Or nowhere at all.
The sun was beginning to rise.
