Page 156
Come back to me.
The Vault darkens. My pulse flutters under his hand.
‘Lyra,’ he says aloud. ‘Eira. Tesoro. My little hunter. Come back.’
The words follow me down as my body goes limp. His roar shakes the chamber.
I feel him clutch me harder, feel his mouth press to my forehead, my cheeks, my lips, his fear and grief turning the bond into a storm around us.
‘If you choose Netheris,’ he whispers, and the words sound dragged from him with hooks, ‘then wait for me there. Do you hear me? Wait for me, and I will tear the underworld apart until I find you.’
A sob breaks through his voice.
The last thing I feel is his hand around my throat, holding the fading beat of my pulse like a prayer.
Then my heart stops.
26
VALENTIN
For three days my hunter’s heart has stopped.
Three days in which the Tower sits in eerie, devastating limbo.
No one laughs in the corridors. Luca attempts it once and receives such a look from Aaron that even he discovers reverence. My sireds move like ghosts through my domain, every order completed before I finish speaking it. Rowan sleeps in intervals of twenty minutes, wakes cursing in three languages, and returns to her circles and pacing with bloodshot eyes and ash on her hands.
The Heartshard Glass no longer screams, but it watches. Its fractured pieces glow low and red over my chambers, measuring breaths that are not mine.
My mate lies in my bed.
Her body breathes because I command the world to permit it. Her heart beats because I have made that rhythm the law of my Tower.
The ritual took.
I felt it in my blood and bones. And Rowan confirmed as much after the first hour, after the wards stopped convulsing and the Vault’s candles burned black from root to flame. The bond locked into place. My mark changed. The near-black lines that had crawled towards my jaw withdrew from the edge of death and settled against my throat in a dark red and silver pattern like a blade kissed by moonlight. The poison burned back, though not fully away. Morrighan’s path through my sleep snapped shut with such violence half the lower wards split and had to be reforged.
The ritual took.
But… Eira did not wake.
That is the fact around which my world has rebuilt itself.
I lie beside her now, my hand spread over her stomach beneath the blanket, feeling the slow rise and fall of her breathing. Her skin has warmed. Her colour has returned by degrees. The glamour is gone completely. She looks like herself in the only way that matters: Lyra’s hidden truth and Eira’s hard-won defiance braided into one devastating woman.
Her face is turned towards me, her lashes casting shadows on her cheeks.
There are no marks on her throat from the spell. Rowan healed the torn vessels. My blood sealed what magic would permit. The bite from the mating ritual has become something else entirely: two faint silver-edged marks at the place where her pulse lives, answering the dark silver lines on my throat whenever I touch them.
A bond mark. Mine on her. Hers on me.
Beautiful.
Terrible.
Insufficient, if she does not open her eyes.
I have not left this bed except to take blood, issue commands, and threaten Rowan when she speaks too long about mortal adaptation rates and threshold states. Eira’s body lives, but the part of her that followed me into the bond has not fully returned.
