Page 124 of Property of Scar

Shit!

Then the rest of him follows, slow and inevitable as a tree finding the ground. The lab goes quiet except for the distant sound of the Kings fighting their way through the last of it, the faint hiss of something burning in the walls, and my own heartbeat, too loud and too fast in the ringing aftermath.

I drop to my knees beside him, my hand catching his jaw, forcing his face toward me as I search for something, anything, that tells me I haven’t already lost him.

His body doesn’t collapse.

He doesn’t hollow out the way vampires do when it’s over, when whatever animates them finally lets go. His body holds, rigid and contained, like something inside him has been forced into stillness rather than extinguished.

Relief hits hard enough to make my hands shake.

He is still here.

He is just not with me.

The cage has closed.

I press my forehead briefly against his temple and stay there for one breath, two, letting myself feel the full weight of whatever this is, the man who came into a burning compound half poisoned and still followed me through it, the man who has been carrying three hundred and fifty years of guilt like a wound he wouldn’t let close, finally allowed to rest.

Then I straighten.

I pull his arm across my shoulders, brace my legs, and lift.

The huntsman has completed her task.

The war she came here to fight is over.

But the monster who kept dragging her back to life is the one who won’t wake.

And that changes everything.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

SCAR

There is no darkness here.

That’s the first thing that registers through the haze, not that I’m unconscious, not that my body is somewhere cold and still, not that the toxin has closed its fist around my bloodline like a lock finding its key. What registers is the light. Pale, gray, and lifeless, the kind of light that exists in places that refuse to let you look away from them, the kind that strips the color out of everything until all that remains is the shape of the thing you cannot stop seeing.

Astrid is twenty feet away, and she is dying.

She is always dying.

I know that. Some thin, fraying part of me knows I am not here, that this field, winter-bare, the ground hard with frost that crunches under boots I haven’t worn in centuries, doesn’t exist anymore, and that the woman in front of me is three hundred and fifty years in the ground.

That part of me is so small now.

The rest of me is here, fully, completely, and without escape, watching her fall.

But she’s on her knees.

The violence is gone from her, burned out of her system, leaving only the aftermath behind. It shows in the way her body trembles, not with strength but with the uneven, failing echoes of it, like whatever has been driving her is finally losing its hold. Her hands hit the ground first, fingers splaying against the surface without control, and then the rest of her follows, her shoulders folding in, her spine curving as if the weight of everything inside her has finally become too much to carry.

I don’t remember deciding to close the distance, only that I’m doing it, my body responding faster than thought, faster than reason, driven by something deeper than either. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen this play out, how many times I’ve run it back in my head looking for a different outcome.

It never fucking changes.

I’m still too far away. Still too slow.