Page 143 of Keldori By Daybreak

“Then, I’ll die anyway.”

“What are the odds our blood matches?” Ciarán whispered.

“I don’t remember the numbers from class.” I screwed my eyes shut, trying to think, but the pounding in my head made it hard to concentrate.

Fingers wrapped around mine, and I opened my eyes to see Ciarán looking up at me.

“If it’s the only chance we have, then we do it.”

I nodded and swallowed the lump in my throat.

Ciarán pushed his sleeve up and bared his arm at me, and I laughed through my gathering tears.

“My Grimguard,” I said. “You’re either going to save my life or be the death of me, but hasn’t that always been the case with us?”

He took a steadying breath. “Every drop is yours, for better or for worse.”

“For better or for worse,” I repeated, then dropped my hands to his arm.

I pulled a vessel out of the air and draped it like a fragile thread between Ciarán’s arm and mine. It looked more like a thread, too, than a vein or artery, and it glowed a faint orange. Its ends sank beneath our skin, tethering us in a new way and highlighting our surrounding blood vessels with its light.

We held our breath, waiting, and then the thread’s glow pulsed, and heat tickled at my arm as I felt the ghost of Ciarán’s blood pumping into mine.

“It’s working,” I murmured.

Ciarán nodded and finally let himself relax. I helped him to lie down next to my body, propping him up against Una’s flank to keep him elevated and to help his blood flow to me.

His eyelids drooped, but he kept his eyes on my body. “I don’t have the energy to keep you here.”

“I know.” I tried to swallow the panic welling in my chest. Once he let me go, I wasn’t sure I’d ever wake up. “The vein between us will disintegrate after you’ve given me a pint or two of blood, and it should reseal your skin, so you won’t bleed out.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“Because that’s what I told it to do.”

His chuckle came out as more of a sigh, and he rolled his head against Una’s flank. “And it’ll save you?”

“I don’t know.” I scratched at the part of my arm that mirrored where my real body was connected to Ciarán.

He grabbed my hand and pressed it to his lips.

“Wren Warrender, I think—” he choked through a constricted throat, then sighed against the skin of my knuckles.

“Ciarán—”

“Don’t. I need to say it. Just once. Before it’s too late. I need you to wake up, but if you don’t, I want the last thing you know to be that you are loved. Deeply. Frustratingly. And despite all my best efforts.” His grip on my hand weakened, and the glow of his eyes was nearly completely muted. “My Lady. My Wren. If this is the last we speak, I want the final words I say to you to be that I love you.”

The words, while softly spoken, reverberated through our cave.

His eyes looked so much like Liam’s when they were like this, but all I saw was him. All of him.

“Ciarán, I—” I started, but his eyes fluttered and rolled. I tried to grasp for his hand, but it passed through mine as I flaked away into dust and nothingness.

Ciarán.

I had so much more I needed to say, I realized, but the dark swallowed me. I fell into its embrace, uncertain if I’d wake back up.

The nothing of unconsciousness weighed heavy, but I supposed that was a good thing. Death, I imagined, would be a much lighter nothingness. Instead I was trapped in an oppressive dark, devoid of feeling and thought but still tethered to the dirt I lay on.