“How long?” Adrissu rasped, holding his hands tightly in front of him to keep them from shaking.
The doctor shook his head. “An hour, maybe. At most.”
The air left Adrissu’s lungs. An hour. Probably less. And then he would be alone, maybe another two decades, maybe more.
“I know you are practiced in the arcane, of course,” the doctor continued, his voice still low. “If you know any healing magic...”
Adrissu’s stomach lurched again, his heart squeezing painfully in his chest. His knowledge of healing magic extended only to superficial wounds. A deep, mortal wound like this was far beyond his capabilities. Could such a thing be healed by even the most accomplished magicians? He did not know. He had never cared before.
The man was still looking at him expectantly, a tiny, irritating sliver of hope on his face. But Adrissu shook his head once, shame flooding him as he did, and that hope dimmed from the doctor’s eyes as he looked back at Volkmar.
“I’ll leave you alone,” the doctor sighed, stepping back. His tone was more brisk now, a cool veneer over the sympathy he had just shown. In a profession like this, Adrissu supposed, that was necessary; but part of him burned with rage that his mate was dying and this man no longer cared. “A nurse will be just outside. You should say goodbye while you can.”
Adrissu only nodded, stepping past him into the room without looking back. When he heard the door click behind him, he took another slow, fearful step toward Volkmar, sitting down on the edge of the bed at his side.
A tiny sliver of his eyes was visible, eyelids flickering with movement as if he were sleeping. Adrissu reached up to brush his sweat-soaked hair out of his face, and Volkmar’s eyes flew open, bloodshot and frightened.
“I’m here,” Adrissu murmured, ignoring the way his lungs constricted at the way the human’s eyes fluttered frantically around the room. “Volkmar. It’s alright. I’m here.”
Volkmar’s eyes found his, focusing now, and immediately his breathing quickened. Weakly, he lifted one hand and grasped Adrissu’s wrist where he was touching Volkmar’s face. It trembled violently against his own. Instantly he stank of fear: whether Volkmar was afraid of him, or afraid because he knew he was dying, Adrissu did not know. He did not want to know.
Volkmar made a soft noise in the back of his throat, lips parted, but when he managed to speak it was barely a whisper. “S-Sorry.”
Adrissu squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head. The last thing he needed was to cry now, but tears burned his eyes all the same.
“No, I’m sorry,” he murmured, reaching with his other hand and continuing to push hair out of Volkmar’s face. “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. I’m sorry I let this happen. I’m—I’m sorry I hurt you.”
Volkmar nodded, eyes sliding away, as he allowed Adrissu to pull back his hair and tuck it behind his head against the pillow. He almost looked worse with his face more visible–his skin was waxy and pale underneath the sheen of cold sweat. The skin under his eyes was blotched and dark like a bruise, yet the color seemed to have drained entirely from his lips.
“Hurts,” he groaned, his voice rasping. His free hand came up to press against the bandages packed tightly to his side; a red patch had started seeping up through the center, even in the few moments Adrissu had been beside him.
“Let me help,” Adrissu murmured, pressing his fingertips to Volkmar’s forehead. This, at least, he could do. Reaching out with his magic, he could feel a sharp burst of agony in his own side, a mirror of where Volkmar had been wounded. He winced, nearly wrenching his hand away, but kept the contact long enough to draw all the pain to him. Volkmar let out a long breath and sagged weakly against the pillows that propped him up, the relief obvious in his face.
“Took the—the gold,” he rasped, eyes a little wider now. With his free hand he weakly patted at his collarbone, before letting the limb slide back down onto the bed. “My necklace. Should have—listened to you—sorry.”
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Adrissu said, shaking his head, even as the mention of the necklace sent another spike of despair through his chest. If Volkmar had continued to wear the necklace, maybe he had brought it intentionally after all. Maybe there would have been hope after all. “You know I don’t care about the gold.”
Volkmar nodded silently, closing his eyes. He was still for a moment, Adrissu watching him, then he whispered without opening his eyes, “I’m—I’m scared.”
“You have nothing to be afraid of,” Adrissu said, though his voice cracked as he spoke. “You came back to me. You’ll always come back to me.”
A tear slid out from beneath Volkmar’s lashes, but he nodded. The smell of fear still permeated the room, but his hand was no longer trembling where it rested on Adrissu’s wrist.
It took less than an hour, as the doctor had said. Adrissu managed to pull Volkmar closer to him, so he could wrap both arms around his small frame—could feel the slight expansion of his lungs with each shallow, labored breath. He spoke softly with Volkmar’s head leaning against the crook of his shoulder, telling him all the places they would still go, and the things they would still do together. Volkmar had nodded or murmured every so often at first, but before long his responses became less and less distinct, with longer and longer delays.
When it had been several minutes since Volkmar responded, Adrissu fell silent, listening closely for the sound of his breathing and the beat of his heart. He remained sitting perfectly still, silently counting the seconds between each breath.
Finally, after one last shallow gasp, his breathing seemed to stop. Adrissu squeezed his shoulder.
“Volkmar,” he whispered, voice breaking. The human did not stir, did not breathe. He could no longer feel the faint flutter of his heartbeat. “Volkmar.”
He was gone.
Adrissu was still holding Volkmar’s body when a nurse came back in to check on them, and everything after that was a blur. He could not remember the exact details of how Volkmar’s body was taken away, nor describe the face of the mortician who had come to make burial arrangements. He did not know how he ended up back in his tower, curled on the chaise lounge with Vesper coiled tightly in a ball that he held to his chest.
His body was leaden with grief. He regretted ever letting Volkmar leave his sight, regretted ever trying to bring back his memory, regretted ever keeping the truth from him in the first place. The thought that someday his mate would return to him did not soothe him at all, the way it had when Ruan died. That too was now tinged with its own pain, knowing he would be alone until then, when he had grown so used to having his mate at his side. That hope had been tainted with the fear that he might somehow drive his mate away from him again in the future.
The idea of going to the funeral was entirely distasteful. In all his years he had been to only a few; when Cyrus had died, Adrissu had attended his funeral as one of his advisors, but that was a notable exception. He did not like them. Dragons did not have anything comparable to them. Most dragon deaths involved more violence, and vengeance on whatever killed it, than any sort of mourning for the dragon itself. Their bodies were burned, not buried, with little ceremony. No, most dragons believed that eventually a dragon’s soul would be reborn, so deaths were not mourned the way humans mourned.
