Page 121 of A Frozen Pyre
“Ophir!” Harland snapped. He began to drive his free elbow into the demon’s skull repeatedly as he tried to free himself from the beast’s grasp. “Don’t you fucking dare!”
Dwyn leveled him a challenging glare.
“I can’t lose anyone else.” Ophir’s panic broke into tears asshe begged on her knees.
Dwyn looked away as if the scene on the floor was too much for her to handle. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed in disgust. Refusing to acknowledge the vageth mauling the man, she flicked her fingers and told it to stop.
Ophir couldn’t stop the tears of helplessness from falling. She was the same broken deer that had limped through a glen all those months ago. There was no strength, no vengeance, no empowerment. Dwyn had wanted her to become a proud, dark, terrible snake. The moment she’d achieved the vision, Dwyn had taken it from her.
“Look,” Dwyn said patiently. “I stopped. I stopped, okay? Harland is fine.”
“Harland isnotfine,” Ophir said through ragged, mournful pulls of air. She turned to her guard and yanked the cinched belt from her wrist, tying it around his arm. He grunted as he looked up at Dwyn from where blood gushed from him into the slowly gathering lake below.
“Do you have any tonics?” Ophir asked, trying to keep the suffocating panic from her voice. Her question trembled as she reached for his bag.
“No,” he said through gritted teeth. “I used all three on someone else. Someone who’d also been gored by a vageth. The man couldn’t be healed.”
Ophir looked at him with confusion. She looked up at Dwyn, but the siren refused to acknowledge her. She had the audacity to act as though she were the one betrayed as they knelt on the ground. She mouthed, “Tyr?” But Harland shook his head.
“Are you happy?” Dwyn spun on them bitterly. Ophir glared up at her and watched as Dwyn’s face transitioned from anger to desperation. “Firi, I’m sorry. I never want you to feel pain. He was going to hurt you. This man had a blade to your hand. I can’t let anyone touch you like that. Please try to understand.”
“What I understand,” Ophir said through swallows of venom, “is that you and everything about you is poison. Iunderstand that I may create demons, Dwyn, but you have no one to blame but yourself for whatever made you the way you are. I’d rather be tethered to a sea of my evil creations than wear this shackle for another second.”
Dwyn lowered herself to the ground and scooched toward Ophir as if she were a frightened animal. She approached with caution, lifting a hand as her lip trembled. She reached out to touch Ophir, but Ophir flinched away. “You don’t mean that,” Dwyn said. Her mouth, her brows, her eyes kept twitching between a hopeful smile, worry, pain, and rage.
“I do,” Ophir bit. She positioned herself so that she bent protectively over Harland. “And if he dies, I will never forgive you.”
Dwyn sneered. “Until you do,” she said.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Dwyn’s eyes narrowed. A silver trail of water escaped the corner of her eye, but she wiped it away as she let the anger win. “What it means is that you don’t know who or what is good for you, Firi.”
“Firi is what my friends called me,” she said as she shook with rage. “You are no friend of mine.”
“Fine, Ophir,” Dwyn snapped. She kicked the logs closer to the fire and made a disgusted noise at Ophir’s flame. Ophir had refused to keep a fire going when she’d been in the cabin before. If Harland weren’t already shaking from the blood loss, she’d let it wink out again now. “But I’d be nicer to me if I were you. Do you know how easy it would be for me to make you forget about Harland? All I’d need is…well…Harland!” She laughed, the sound tinged with her anger.
Ophir blinked through her tears. “Don’t you dare,” she said.
“I’m trying to prove a point, Ophir. I’m not the villain you’re making me out to be. Can’t you see what I’m saying? I could take him! I could force your hand! But I want you to choose this life with me. I want you towantto rule together. I want us to work through this, Firi.” Dwyn stopped as Ophirbared her teeth. “Get over it, because it’s what I’ve called you since the day you swam into my life. Or did you forget that? Did you forget how you wouldn’t exist at all right now if it weren’t for me?”
Through a pained grunt, Harland said, “And she wouldn’t have wanted to die if it weren’t for you, either.”
Ophir cocked her head slowly at his words.
Dwyn’s eyes widened simultaneously. Her rage was replaced with the shaking of her head, with a fretting gesture of her hands. “Hush, hush,” she said nonsensically.
Ophir looked between Harland and Dwyn. “I wanted to end my life…because of you?”
Harland chuckled, but his eyes were only on the dread etching itself onto Dwyn’s expression. “Was there a part of the story you forgot to brainwash out of her, witch? Maybe she won’t react to the information that you killed Caris, but you did more than kill Caris, didn’t you. You drove her into the ocean that night.”
Ophir’s mouth dropped open. “You…you’re the reason I…”
She waited for a headache that didn’t come. The knife through her heart was rough and raw as it tore into her soft tissues, cracking her open.
“No, Firi, no.” Dwyn continued shaking her head. Her expressions flickered—a smile as if to laugh it off, a tremble as if to cry, an ardent denial as her dark tendrils of hair moved at her shoulders. Her eyes were as deep and tumultuous as the ocean from whence she’d come.
“It looks like you have a choice, Dwyn,” Harland said. He adjusted the grip on his arm as he groaned and forced himself to sit. “Drain me. Then what? Do you make Ophir forget about me? Or do you make her forget about this? Because you healed a painyoucreated. She wanted to kill herself because you murdered her sister. You weren’t a balm. You were the wound.”
