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Fear made a home inside her. Something was wrong.
That web turned cannibalistic, tearing and shredding itself like gauze left in a damp wind. Each fracture felt like a gut-punch. Was she still screaming?
One by one, the broken ends turned black and withered. Her world was shattering apart. Her soul was devouring itself.
She began to feel light once more, the pain fading, her soul breaking away from its corporeal form.Sweet freedom.
That wrecked voice echoed around her, a tortured soul crying out.Come back to me. Please come back to me. That voice called to the remaining shreds of her existence.
Tristan.
For a man like him, love was a rarity. Yet somehow he had fallen in love with her. Plain, mortal, human June. A nobody from an inconsequential rock on the opposite side of the galaxy.
For some reason, after kicking her around for a bit, fate had finally given her a boon by bringing her to the one man she could not live without. A man who made her heart dance with joy.
Now, like a cruel child with a toy, fate wanted to take him away.
He’ll be so sad when I’m gone. He would be so alone. She couldn’t stand the idea. She wanted to stay with him. With everything in her being, she wanted to stay with him.
Fate could go fuck herself.
With the last of her waning strength, she mentally reached out to mend those broken connections, stabbing them together, forcing them to stick. Amazingly, they stayed put. But so many continued to snap apart. She rushed to repair them, jumping from one axon to the next, fighting to keep up, begging whatever force was at work here to have mercy and allow her to return to Tristan.
“Let me live!” she cried out.
An unimaginable power bloomed in her essence, vitality sweeping through her. As if her prayer had been heard, the connections stopped breaking and the axons lit up once more, energy flowing free. She felt strength return to her, reaching its zenith as the fire in her cells subsided…replaced by an unfathomable alien sensation, a potentiality she could not describe or explain. She was no longer June of Earth. She was something else.
One thing she was certain of…
Nothing would ever be the same again.
* * *
Tristan was on the edge of losing his mind. Draped over June’s lifeless body, he let the last of her warmth seep into him. Her blood barely trickled out now. She’d lost too much.
Orik sat against the wall, nursing a broken nose among other wounds. When he’d moved to stop the witch, madness had taken over, and Tristan had lashed out like a caged beast. He could have killed the man if June’s harrowing scream hadn’t distracted him. He’d glanced back in time to see the witch shoving what she had claimed to be a dragon’s soul into June’s abdomen.
Was he a fool to trust the witch? Had he cosigned June to a hellish death? June’s screams had sounded like she’d been flayed from the inside. Pure hope had kept him from snapping the witch’s neck himself, and ending June’s torture.
But now she was silent.
It had all been for nothing.
June lay dying, her skin cooling. His heart breaking. All he could do was lie next to June, hold her one last time, stroke her hair, take her scent into him so that he could lock it in his brain and remember it always.
Despair crawled through him like poisonous wriggling thing.
He couldn’t imagine life without June. The future seemed bleak and tiresome. A burden. With no reason to live, would his kingdom fall to ruin? His mother would never let that happen. His brother, Lear, would step in. Tristan wasn’t needed. He could fade away, like Gavin was trying to do. Maybe he would fly away and never return, stay in his dragon form forever. Things were simpler as a dragon, emotions less extreme. Maybe this gouge in his chest wouldn’t hurt so fucking bad. Maybe he would find a fierce coven and sacrifice himself so that he could be with June in the afterlife.
When June let out her final breath, Tristan roared in agony and let despair devour him.
Soon anger joined in and his furious gaze snapped to the witch. She watched him now, hopelessness etched in her features, her gray eyes glistening.
His anguish demanded vengeance.
Just as red coated his vision, a glimmer caught the corner of his eye. Slowly, an otherworldly glow seeped over June’s skin, warn and rich. Radiant. It spread from the tips of her toes to the top of her head and through each individual strand of her hair until she was but pure light.
Going to his knees, he scrubbed a hand down his face as he watched her wounds begin to knit together. Yes! Her body was healing…
