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Stay.
Stay.
Stay.
His breath catches as the thread frays to one shining strand.
I scream for Aestrata with all that I am. Not in words now, not in any language that can fit inside mouth or mind. I scream as guardian, as mate, as the creature she shaped from root and bone and hunger and night-sight and then cursed with enough love to kneel helpless in her hollow.
I offer everything again. My years. My form. My name. My lantern. My place in the forest. My afterlife if such a thing waits under her roots. I offer the rage she cleaned, the balance I kept, the brother I killed, the grief I will carry if she refuses. I offer even the bond, though the thought rips through me like self-murder.
Lucas exhales softly, almost peacefully. His eyes stay on mine until they cannot… then the thread breaks, and Lucas goes still in my arms.
The bond does not vanish; it collapses inward with such silence that my mind cannot understand it.
For one heartbeat, I do nothing. I wait. His chest will rise. His eyes will blink. His fingers will curl in my fur. He will call me an idiot for looking like the world ended when it only tripped.
But there is nothing. His beautiful eyes are open; he kept them open for me, but nothing lies behind them. No life. No ember.
“No,” I breathe. I shake him once, too gently to move more than his hair. “Lucas.”
Nothing.
“No,” I say again, louder, and then I am sobbing over him, clutching his body to mine while the hollow blurs and breaks around me. “No. No. No! Give him back! Give him back! Take me, I offered! Mother, I offered!”
I hold Lucas tighter and sob without shame, because there is no pride left in a world where my mate is dead in my arms. “There is no life… no life for me without him… Please—!”
I can feel the Earth Mother look down at us, and the chapter of my life before her answer ends there.
45
Lucas
I think I’m dreaming.
That’s the first mercy of it, I guess. Dreaming makes more sense than dying, and my mind reaches for it with both hands because there are only so many impossible things a man can accept before he starts sorting them into categories just to keep from screaming.
Forest monster boyfriend-slash-fated mate. Fine.
Ancient goddess. Fine.
Evil brother with a lantern and a taste for human fear. Horrifying, but fine, apparently.
Dying in Onyx’s arms after being strung up in a mineshaft by my best friend while said evil brother monologued about eating me and killing Onyx. That one feels a little harder to file under fine, so my brain goes with dreaming.
It feels like one at first. There’s no pain, but that should be the first warning.
No tearing heat in my side. No burning in my wrists where the ropes bit through skin. No swollen throb at the back of my skull. No blood crawling up my throat, no cold stone under my knees, no darkness of the mine pressing around me. I’m standing upright, which is bold, considering the last thing I remember is trying hard to keep my eyes open while Onyx begged me to stay.
The ground beneath my boots isn’t ground, exactly. It’s black soil and moonlight and water all at once, firm only because I expect something to hold me. Roots pulsate under the surface like slow veins.
Above me, there’s no sky, only a darkness crowded with stars too close together to be stars. They pulse like seeds buried in winter, waiting for the world to remember them. The air smells like rain on hot stone, cedar smoke, fresh-turned earth, and Labrador tea so faint it feels more like memory than scent.
“Onyx?” I call, and my voice doesn’t echo.
Nothing answers, and the panic comes back. Not a full-bodypanic. I don’t have enough body for that, or maybe I have too much. It’s deeper, colder. A soul flinch, if that isn’t the most dramatic thought I’ve ever had. I turn in a slow circle, searching for antlers, blue eyes, a skull face, anything familiar, but the dark only watches with roots and stars and patient silence.
Then the world breaks open.
