Page 1 of Heart’s Rescue

Rowan

The End of Everything

“He’s not dead!” I scream.

Charay reaches for me, but I pull away. Tears stain her cheeks. Tears and other, darker liquid.

“Rowan,” she whispers. “His arm.”

As if I couldn’t see. As if I hadn’t noticed my brother’s voids-damned arm lying at her feet. Her gaze softens, turns to pity. I spin away.

No. There’s no time for that, for pity. I stagger away from the golden pool of light cast by Charay’s lamp and fall to my knees beside my brother’s body. He’s curled up against the snow, his scarlet cloak black on white in the failing light of the glowsoft orbs. I reach for him, my heart hammering against my ribs, the rest of me cold and numb and paces away.

It was too late for the others, the three broken bodies we’d stumbled over as we ran, following the screams. But those had been farmers, shepherds. They weren’t fighters.

They weren’t my brother.

He’s facedown in the snow, my brother Phaedron. My vision blurs and flattens as the hissing shadows of my magic stretch across the blood-stained snow. I close my fingers around his shoulder, his existing shoulder, some hideous part of my mind whispers, and then I roll him over as gently as he used to when we were children and I’d fallen asleep in his bed again, chased from my own by the dark shadows of my nightmares.

He groans as I push him over. My throat closes around whatever words I may have said. His face is almost as pale as the snow, and his right side is a huge, bleeding hole but, by all the beasts and whispers of the void, he lives. My brother still lives.

“Phae,” I whisper. “Phae, I’m here.”

His breath is rasping, erratic. Snow clings to his blue lips like frost on the windows. A helpless blind rage rises in my chest, swallowing my throat. Voids damn it, I should have been here. It should have been me. If only I hadn’t lingered over that second mug of tea or stayed to stoke the fire. If I hadn’t been late. If I hadn’t been lazy—

Voids, this isn’t helping. I force myself to stare at Phaedron’s body, to actually assess the situation. The right half of him is a wreck. There’s so much blood I can’t even tell where his injuries end and the snow begins. Rage and anger rise again, trailing the inky black tendrils of my magic as they wind through the dark forest.

I hiss through my teeth. A warm hand closes on my shoulder; Charay, bless her. She alone kept up with me as I raced toward the screaming, past the butchered bodies of the men and women who’d lived here in the World’s End for my entire life. She alone hadn’t fled when my magic had exploded that barn, reached through the dead, frozen trees, and tangled the monster responsible for the murders.

So, yeah. Great. The monster who’d done this was now trapped in a web of my rage while my brother bled to death in front of me.

“Rowan,” Charay whispers again.

My vision blurs. Voids, no! I ball my hands into fists and call my magic back, all the hissing darkness and anger that’s never far from me. It yields slowly. This magic may well be part of me, but it’s not entirely mine. And it really, really doesn’t want to let the monster go.

But what good is all this cursed magic if I can’t even save Phaedron?

Charay gasps, and I force my eyes open. The light of her lamp has retreated; her hand is no longer on my shoulder. The snow at my feet swirls and churns with the slithering whispers of my magic. Dark tendrils climb the dead trees and drown out the faint violet light of the glowsoft orbs. It’s all darkness here, now.

I’m dimly aware of my lips curving into a grin. Charay has never seen this before. No one has ever seen this, save my brother. But I’m beyond caring what anyone thinks of my powers, the full horrifying extent of my freak magic.

I let my gaze soften and turn to the mess of Phaedron’s right side. Blood is still spurting onto the snow, oozing from somewhere deep inside of him. I draw my hands together and pull magic toward my brother’s side. My skull throbs as my magic surges forward; pale blue fire bleeds from my eyes, rising up to intertwine with the tendrils of my magic, making my brother’s body a silhouette of ebony and silver.

The work is slow, and my magic is sluggish and unresponsive. It’s so quick to catch and tangle, to kill and destroy, but I’ve never asked it to do this before. I’m not a healer, for the void’s sake, but how hard could it be to mend instead of to destroy?

Sweat rolls down my face and stings my eyes. I don’t dare move my hands. My magic laps against the broken places on Phaedron’s body and slowly, reluctantly, begins to pull them back together.

Phaedron moans, long and low and horrible, and some part of me worries that I’ll hear that sound for the rest of my life, in the quiet moments when I’m searching desperately for the embrace of sleep.

“I’m sorry,” I hiss through clenched teeth.

My magic burns, always has, always will. Controlling it burns my eyes, my hands, the very marrow of my bones. And I know it must be burning Phaedron too, searing his skin as it yanks what’s left of him back together.

What’s left of him. There’s a gaping hole there, in my chest, in my mind, a terrifying abyss I don’t dare touch, something born out of the twisted arm at Charay’s feet and the bloody mess I’m currently forcing back together. Phaedron has always been the best of the two of us, the strongest, the most beautiful.

Magic hisses across my palms as I tug on it, feeling for the warm places on Phaedron’s body, the open places, and then forcing my magic to close them. To pull my brother back together.

“Don’t be too long,” he’d said to me this morning, just hours ago as he’d pulled his cloak off the hook by the door. He’d thrown back his stupid red hood with a flourish, showing off the hilt of the ridiculously huge sword he wore.