Page 95
His body. I could heal bodies. Maybe with the power inside me now… I made a quick visual list of Goran’s injuries. His shirt was off, and his ribcage was crushed. His lungs were both punctured, though his heart seemed to be intact.
His big heart, the one he’d loved me with for so long. “Wake up, Gorgeous,” I demanded. “I need you.” I reached into myself, to the place where I felt all my mate bonds tangled together, and pulled, sending energy out to him.
To my horror, his lips moved. “Ma… bohin… ya…” Then he went still again.
My head swam, my vision going dark for a moment.
Skadi hissed. No. Rada, you are pulling too hard.
I can’t stop. I won’t. I love him too much.
Those wintry blue eyes landed on me for a long moment, the chill of them helping quell some of my panic. The sky above grew darker as Skadi shifted and kneeled beside me, placing his hands not on, but over Goran’s head.
A shadow fell across Goran and me. Lachlan and Kellin scrambled to their feet, drawing their knives. I didn’t look away from Goran. I couldn’t. If I blinked, he might be gone… like Lex.
Lusca went even more still. “She loves him,” Skadi said to someone. I wasn’t sure who. “And I love her, though it surprises me to know it. So there is no choice but this.”
Skadi leaned close to Goran and placed his blue-tinged lips over my Warlord’s bloody ones. Slowly, gently, Skadi blew a breath into Goran’s lungs, though it wasn’t only air he breathed. It was also power.
He lifted his face, drew in another breath, and repeated the breath. There was a sound, like crackling ice—Goran’s ribs moving. His leg shifted as well, and I moved down, adjusting the limb. I wasn’t sure I needed to, but it seemed right.
“Gorgeous, come back to me,” I whispered as Skadi breathed, moving Goran’s lungs, and Lusca carried his blood through his veins.
“I can’t live without you.”
EDAN
Stunned, I stared at my brother, who had somehow become a fool. Worse than a fool, a soft fool who would be easily crushed.
What had happened to him? He’d once been stronger and cleverer than me, had he not? He’d trapped me for centuries, after all. I knew that brother. Admired him, even if I would never admit it.
But the brother who was clawing his own soul into ribbons and using them to patch together the human warlord… I did not recognize him.
I looked to my side at the small black stone sarcophagus I’d blasted the Alldyns Vug apart to unearth. I wasn’t sure I recognized myself, either.
The dark-haired thief had done all this. Rada, the one I’d created to be mine, had not only managed to steal the Omegas from Pict, she’d stolen my brother’s heart.
And ours, Serak reminded me.
I was as much a fool as Skadi. I’d split my own mind and soul in two and reformed myself with Serak. It had released me from the prison of the Alldyns Vug, but at such a cost. I couldn’t count it a victory.
“Why, brother?” I asked. “Why are you sacrificing your own being for this human?”
“She loves him,” he said, still desecrating his power and sending it into the man. “And I love her, though it surprises me to know it. So there is no choice but this.”
I blinked as he opened his mind to me, sharing all the moments he’d lived with her. From the storm at sea, when she’d plunged the needle into his eye, to the moments with the male Omega in the ice. The battle and reconciliation with the kraken and the hunt for her. The binding of his power to her life, and his consternation at what he had done.
And then glimpses of the mating in the nest. Of sharing her.
“I cannot fathom that,” I confided. “How can you share your life, your… partner? How can you debase yourself in this way? What is she to you?”
He turned his head to me with a small smile. “Edan, she is my treasure.”
I struggled to understand. “A hoard, like the dragons who were born from our kind?” It was unseemly.
“My hoard, my treasure, my enemy and my mate. The little spy who crept into my life and stole my equilibrium.”
Stole his sense, perhaps. My head spun. Skadi had always been the cold one. He’d never felt passionately, as I had.
