Page 139 of Keldori By Daybreak

No.

I would not die like this.

Sharp pain erupted along my arms, and the familiar weight of flaying flesh tugged at the serrated edge of my favorite bone blades.

Kamryn howled and scrambled backwards, bleeding from where I’d cut into his arms with my blades.

“Everyone’s calling you a god,” he hissed, saliva running into his beard. “But I know you’re a devil.”

My vision cleared, but only marginally. Blood poured from the space between my ribs, and the cave floor tilted beneath me but I stayed standing.

“I don’t know what poor fool you sent to give herself up in your place,” Kamryn said, “but I do know when I drag your body into the Highlander camp, I’ll be rewarded.”

“You have to kill me first,” I managed to rasp.

“Happily.”

Red light blazed in his hands, and I braced my back against the cave wall. It was all I could do to hold my bladed forearms out ahead of me and hope it would be enough.

I didn’t have the strength left for anything else.

Kamryn raised an arm to strike, his grin manic, and orange light burst through his chest. His grin faltered, and he staggered back, staring at the orange blade protruding from his guard’s uniform as it solidified into gleaming metal.

Blood dripped from his gaping mouth to dirty the steel.

Metal sang against armor and flesh as the weapon retracted back into his chest. Kamryn blinked wildly at me, and then fell in front of me, dead.

Ciarán stood behind him, wild-eyed, pale, and glistening with sweat.

“Ciarán.” I fell forward into his arms. The cave was so cold. Had it been this cold earlier?

“Come on, Wren.” Ciarán’s voice reverberated through his chest to thunder against my ear. “Wren, please! Stay awake. You have to stay awake!”

He laid me on my back away from Kamryn’s body. I was looking up at Ciarán’s glowing orange eyes. The taste of iron was thick on my tongue, and despite the oppressive cold of the cave, something hot and sticky slid down my chin.

“You-you can’t do this!” Ciarán begged.

Part of me wanted to laugh. I’d held him once how he was holding me now, when he’d been Liam and dying in my arms. I tried to say as much, but as much as I tried to form the words, no sound came forth.

I reached up with the last of my strength to hook my fingers on Ciarán’s dark cowl and pull it away from his face. I wanted his face, his whole face, to be the last thing I saw.

I smiled, or at least, I thought I did, and my eyes fluttered shut.

Sobbing.

The afterlife was full of sobbing.

I didn’t like it.

But the pain between my ribs was gone and I could breathe again, and—

And I was above my dead body, watching Ciarán cry over it in the light of the glowing tree roots while Una looked on from where she curled in the cave’s corner. My body’s head lolled to the side and my mouth hung open. I looked terrible, and maybe it was a sign that I was already adjusting very well to death because I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed by it all.

I stepped away, and blue hair fell forward over my shoulders. I grabbed a fistful of it, still connecting the dots in my head when Ciarán, with his head still bowed, spoke.

“Save her.” His voice, despite his sobbing just a moment ago, was edged with the grit of a hidden threat.

“I think I’m already dead,” I blurted.