A plea.
The darkness is complete.
I am dying.
And the last thing I know—the last truth that remains as everything else fades into the nothing—is that I’m not alone.
He’s here.
He stayed.
The cold closes in. The world goes silent.
But his arms don’t let go.
And neither do I.
TWENTY-THREE
KASTER
Her breathing stops between one heartbeat and the next.
One moment her hand is on my wrist, fingers curled around my pulse like an anchor. The next, that grip goes slack. Her head lolls against my shoulder. The shallow rise and fall of her ribs—barely perceptible even before—ceases entirely.
She said yes. I carry that with me.
No.
The creature is again tearing through the ice barrier behind us. I hear it—the wet sound of flesh reforming, limbs punching through frozen stone, the chorus of voices that have been screaming for her blood since this nightmare began.
I lay her down. Press my ear to her lips.
Nothing.
I press two fingers to her throat.
Thump.
Weak. Irregular. But present.
Her heart is still fighting even though her lungs have surrendered. The poison has progressed to her respiratory system—diaphragm paralyzed, her body too busy dying to remember how to live.
I have minutes. Maybe less.
The abomination breaks through.
Ice explodes. The creature forces itself through the gap we used for shelter, its bulk compressed into a narrower configuration than before. Pieces of it are missing—chunks I tore away during the canyon fight that it couldn’t regenerate fast enough. But the core remains. The overlapping faces. The reaching limbs. The relentless purpose that has driven it across miles of frozen territory to kill one specific woman.
I don’t think.
I rise and meet it with fire.
Strategy has failed.
Every strategy I’ve used against this creature has been learned, countered, adapted. It’s built countermeasures from my own attacks—reinforced the joints I targeted, thickened the hide where I burned it, developed new limb configurations to replace the ones I destroyed.
So I stop being strategic.
