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She could so easily succumb to it.
But something kept her from plunging into the abyss. Faces flickered in her memory. Treasured moments in time. Medda snuggling with her in bed. Rig as he wrapped his arms around her waist. Kora’s feckless grin. And Jael.
That moment in her bedchamber when he’d kissed her to chase away the shades, to tear her from their dark hold. She could almost feel his mouth against hers once more, his heart beating in tune with hers as if an invisible thread bound them together, something that went beyond the rune bonding, beyond the Bifrost. Something deeper and more precious.
Anrid clung to that memory and tore herself from the darkness as it tried to swallow her. She wouldn’t give up on him, or on any of them. She would fight to her last breath to save them if she could.
She gasped for a stabilizing breath and ripped the apron from her shoulders, the string of beads snapping and pinging across the floor. After she wadded her hands in the fabric, she beat at Kora’s chest to extinguish the flames. The heat nipped at her fingers, at her exposed wrists, but she ignored the growing discomfort.
He recovered his wits and rolled onto his stomach with a yelp, to smother the flames she hadn’t been able to touch. She caught him by the arm and helped him to his knees, but he didn’t say anything to her or acknowledge that she’d kept him from turning into a goblin torch. Instead, he scrambled to his feet and sprinted toward Jael and Talos. The goblin prince and the dark elf were deadlocked, Talos trying to hang onto his book, Jael to his runestone, as they pushed and shoved with their free hands.
Kora stumbled into the fighting pair, knocking all three of them to the ground. Anrid took a step forward as the book flew from Talos’s grasp and skidded across the floor of the cavern. But it came to rest against Teague’s boots. The dark elf stared down at the book, as if stunned.
“Get the book!” Jael shouted as he grappled with Talos alongside Kora. They barely had him contained, the dark elf screaming obscenities as he ripped one arm from Kora’s grasp. “Anrid, get the book!”
She took two steps but wasn’t fast enough. Teague stooped to snatch up the forbidden volume and cradled it in his weathered hands. He looked entranced by it, held captive, even.
She skidded to a stop mere feet away, heart in her throat. “Teague...” She put a bit of warning into her voice but didn’t know how to convince him to give up his prize. She held out a trembling hand as the shades howled all around them and battered against the protective barriers with renewed determination. “I need that, please.”
Teague met her gaze then, something torn in his expression. Was he trying to choose between doing what his people wanted him to do and what he thought might be the right thing? She hoped so.
Skadi’s frost, she hoped so.
“Teague, please give me the book.” She let the words fall from her lips as gently as she could and offered a compassionate smile, only for him. “If you wish to save your family…your people…you cannot keep that book. It isn’t the way. Please. You need to let it go.”
The look in his eyes shifted then, over the space of one blink. The tension in his face eased, and he closed the book and held it out to her, willingly.
She grasped the weathered cover with both hands and curled her fingers around the spine. It felt…heavy. A buckling sort of heaviness, as if she held the entire universe in her hands.
Her lungs failed her, chest tightening as her knees weakened and gave out. She collapsed into a seated position on the ground as darkness encroached from the corners of her vision, squeezing the light into a pinpoint.
What an inconvenient time to faint.
“Hold those!” Jael shouted from the shadows. “You! Keep him down! Hurry!”
An eternity of moments passed before strong hands caught hold of her elbows. Gentle fingers ran down her arms, across the backs of her hands and pried the book from her grip. “Let it go, Anrid. I’ve got it.”
She let him take it. The darkness receded, but it didn’t want to release her. She blinked and fought to focus on Jael where he kneeled in front of her, so close their knees touched. He held the book open in front of him, but his eyes were on her.
The last of the shadows vanished from her sight, and the screams of the shades seemed to fade away as she thought of Jael, and only Jael.
“I don’t know how to send them back,” he rasped. A pained expression twisted his face, one filled with hopelessness and regret.
“Yes, you do. We’ll do it together: you, me, and the Bifrost.” She braved a smile for his sake and positioned herself more securely on her knees. “We’ve done it before.”
His eyes fluttered closed, lashes brushing his pale cheeks before he opened his eyes again. “Not like this. There’s too many of them. I don’t want to hurt you. Or the children. We’re all bound to this now, Anrid. You and me and the children.”
Somehow, she knew that.
She could risk her own life without a thought. But the children…she glanced toward Rig and Medda. The boy held his sister tight to his chest, cowering beneath the fading light of Math’s runestone. The apprentice appeared about to collapse from the strain.
“Use me.” Kora’s voice echoed toward them, low and grating. They looked at him as one. Kora kneeled on the ground, his knee pressed into the small of Talos’s back as he and Teague held him down. The elf still would not concede defeat, uttering curses that made Anrid’s toes curl. “I got us into this mess. Bind me to that blasted book, as well. The more the merrier.”
“And me!” Math called, smile weak and forced.
“Me as well.” Teague looked from Jael, to Anrid, and back to Jael. “It’s our fault this has happened. I need to help fix it.”
Talos bucked and screamed in dark elvish, dark words that could only be curses.
