“I have been. It lacked charm.”
“Then stop trying to redecorate it with yourself.”
The laugh that leaves Corin is strangled and appalled. “Gods spare me, she is still arguing.”
The second immortal strand coils around my heart like a serpent refusing capture. I seize it, and it bites back. My vision fractures into pieces of moonlight, Sable’s face, red script, and black sky. When I yank, the crack down my chest widens. Heat pours from me in punishing waves, blackening the grass inside the circle and filling my mouth with the taste of copper and lightning.
Sable presses both hands to the barrier again, and this time the barrier bends toward her.
Corin sees it. “Sable, no.”
“I am not standing here watching him die.”
“He is not dying yet.”
“That is not comforting, you ass.”
“I was reaching for accuracy, regrettably not comfort.”
The circle gives a warning pulse sharp enough to rattle the cracked windows in their frames. Sable steps closer instead of away, stubborn as sin and twice as dangerous.
I bare my teeth. “Do not enter.”
She stares at me through the burning wall. “Then stop me.”
I cannot. I can command armies, break curses, burn remnants of dead gods from the air, and tear immortality from my own core, yet I cannot command Sable when she has decided love is a battlefield and I am the idiot bleeding in the middle of it.
She drives her shoulder into the barrier.
The circle flares, rejecting her with a snap of power that throws sparks across her coat. She gasps, but she does not fall. Corin lunges toward her, then stops at the circle’s edge, torn between duty and the knowledge that restraining her would make him the next thing she destroys.
“Sable!” he shouts. “It will take skin if you force it.”
“Then it can have mine too.”
The words cut deeper than the severance.
“No,” I snarl.
She pushes again, and the barrier bows inward. The runes scramble, confused by her blood in the bond, by her refusal, by the merger refusing to classify her as outsider. The circle was designed to isolate the immortal body from its anchoring conditions; it has no answer for a mortal woman who has become part of the anchor by sheer, magnificent defiance.
Corin’s face changes as he realizes it. “Oh, hell.”
Sable slips through.
The barrier tears around her like burning silk. Sparks catch in her hair and die as she stumbles once, then runs straight for me.
I try to rise and fail. “Sable, get out.”
“Make me.”
“I will hurt you.”
“You already are.”
She crashes into me mid-severance, arms locking around my neck, body pressed to mine with no caution at all. Her warmth hits the cracks in my flesh, and the bond roars. Her magic floods the circle, furious and alive, smelling of rain on hot stone, ink, and the faint sweetness of her skin. My immortal strands, half-torn from my core, lash in every direction like severed cables seeking a storm.
“Sable,” I choke, trying to hold myself away from her and failing because she is everywhere. “Let go.”
