“She’s not gone!” I screamed as the man gasped for breath. “You’re going to do whatever it takes to bring her back. Use surgery or potions or healing magic— I don’t care! I’m not walking out of this room without my wife!”
The man clawed at my fingers and spoke in a strained tone. “Then you can… take her in a… body bag.”
Rage flared through my veins, and I tightened my grip on his neck, until I felt the air leave his lungs completely.
“Charlie!” Kallie yelled. She yanked on me, but I siphoned her shifter strength so she couldn’t move me. “Charlie, stop! You’re gonna kill him!”
I didn’t fucking care. Ava wasgone.This fucker couldn’t save her. He could perish with her for all I cared.
“Charlie!” Marcus yelled. I felt his hands on me, but he wasn’t strong enough to drag me away.
Magic shocked my entire system, and I lost control of my body. I stumbled backward and landed flat on the floor. The ground seemed to tilt back and forth below me, and I realized Marcus had hit me with a stunning spell.
“Asshole,” I growled at him.
“I had to,” Marcus said.
I heard the doctor sink to the ground, then the scuffle of his feet as he hurried out of the room. I swore he muttered something about acrazy fuckerand about calling security. Screw him. He was a lost cause anyway.
Kallie reached out and helped me to my feet as the spell wore off.
“I know this is… it’s unbearable.” Kallie’s voice cracked. “But there’s nothing that can be done.”
“She’s… she’s in a better place now,” Marcus added weakly.
Fuck him.She didn’t belong anywhere that wasn’t with me.
Nearby, Ava’s parents sobbed. Oberi let out a long howl. He padded to the surgical table, and through our bond, I felt him weakly nose Ava’s hand.
“If you believe in your culture, you’ll accept that it’s her time,” Kallie said, and she choked back a sob. “The Great Spirit must’ve wanted her on the other side. He… he must’ve needed her.”
“No. I need her more than he fucking does.” My friends were just saying vapid, empty things that everyone said when somebody died. I knew they were trying to comfort me. None of it meant anything, because it couldn’t fill this fucking void. I shoved past Kallie and returned to Ava’s side. I lifted her hand, but her whole body was limp. Tears streamed from my eyes as I pressed a kiss to Ava’s fingers.
“We’ll give you some time to say your goodbyes, before we take the body to the morgue,” a nurse stated quietly. The doctors and nurses shuffled out of the room, but their voices and footsteps seemed distant. I barely noticed they’d left.
Even through all of that, I waited for Ava to respond. I expected her to get up off that table right now, and yell at all of us that she was fine and we were being overdramatic. I wanted her to call me a stupid bastard and demand that I cart her down to Commissary to buy her chocolate, just because she wanted some and because she felt like bossing me around. All I wanted more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life— more than I wanted food when I was starving, or warmth when I’d been freezing to death— was to take her back to our cell, curl up in bed with her and hold her, so she could stroke back my hair and tell me this was all a bad dream.
She did none of those things. Because I realized… she was no longer here.
Thiscouldn’tbe how this ended. We’d hardly been married for three months. It had been the most blissful part of my life, but it would never be enough. Ava and I had a life to live together. We had plans for when we left this place. Sure, we hadn’t set anything concrete, but I always assumed we’d spend time traveling before we settled down and Ava dove into her anthropology work. I’d become a supernatural bounty hunter. And maybe, somewhere along the way, we’d start a family. We’d have kids. We’d piss each other off every day and make love every night and grow old together.
We couldn’t have any of that in the Ancestral Lands.
Every moment of our future had been stolen from us. All the lessons we’d come here to learn had been ripped away. We had failed to fulfill the prophecies we were destined to achieve. This life meant nothing if we didn’t get to live it. If this was the end, I didn’t know why we’d been sent here in the first place.
I refused to believe this was it. We’d come here for a reason. The gods didn’t create this realm for nothing, and our lives had meaning— whether I knew what that meaning was or not. Ava-Marie’s life mattered, and it was too soon for it to end.
I wouldn’t live a life without her. I hadn’t died yet, which meant it was possible I could survive without her. Oberi’s portion of our soul continued to keep me alive. I realized, with a bout of horror, that I could live for decades with Oberi, and continue to exist even without Ava here. As we’d guessed, he only needed one of us to survive.
I didn’t want to live without Ava-Marie. My half of our soul yearned for hers the way my chest yearned for air. I couldn’t be without her. One way or another, we would be together— whether I had to die, or bring her back.
But Oberi needed one of us to survive himself. If I killed myself, I’d kill Oberi, and I wasn’t going to do that.
I was going to bring Ava back. Call it intuition or desperation, but I knew deep within my soul that it could be done. Great Spirit be damned. He didn’t own Ava-Marie.Iwas the one who shared a soul with her.Iwas the only one with a right to determine her fate.
“Ava-Marie is mine,” I growled at Kallie. “The Great Spirit can’t have her.”
I stood at the head of Ava’s gurney and rested my forehead on hers. Oberi whimpered as he climbed onto the gurney beside her. He splayed his paws over her chest, and his forehead came to meet mine, until all three of us were touching.
