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She recognizes immediately what is happening, and she rushes over to me. She is keeping us safe with her branches, creating a cage around us, but I know it won’t last forever. They will break through it. Besides, I know that breaking those branches will hurt her. They are a part of her, after all. A part of her own being. I need to protect her. It shouldn’t be the other way around.
She sits down next to me, and a single branch slides underneath my neck, helping me sit up.
“Are you alright?” she asks more tenderly than ever. “When I saw that shifter strangling you, I thought I lost you forever.”
“You will never lose me,” I manage to say, my voice down to a raspy whisper.
“I love you,” I hear her say, in the most inopportune moment, as the shifters around us are trying to break down the cage of branches she has created around us, to keep us safe.
“I love you, too,” I say back. “I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you.” I say all of that, although every word hurts like a stab in the throat. But she is worth it. She is worth knowing all of that, and if we end up dying here, I want her to know that I died with her in my heart.
Suddenly, she closes her mouth, and her body strains as if she’s about to vomit.
“Bianca?” I ask. “What’s going on?”
Her eyes widen in shock. She gags a few times.
I’m petrified. I don’t know that much about dryads to be able to figure out exactly what is happening to her right now. Maybe she’s overexerted herself. After all, she didn’t know how to do any of this, and now she was forced to protect both me and herself. It probably came at a cost to her body.
I look through the branches, around us. Kano is still on his feet. So are a few of my other vampires. But it doesn’t seem like it’s good news. They are still outnumbered. I don’t know how long they will be able to hold on. I need to be out there, fighting alongside them, not be protected in this cage of branches.
At that moment, Bianca opens her mouth widely, and gags two more times. Then, she spits out a white flower. An orchid.
“It’s… the ghost orchid!” I exclaim, incredulous at what I’m seeing.
She looks at the beautiful flower with disgust at first, then her facial expression changes.
“What is it?” she asks. “A flower?”
“It is the healing flower of dryads!” I exclaim, still unable to believe that this is happening.
Ghost orchids have become the rarest flowers in the world. Dryads have always been able to magically conjure up one, and legends claim, if one is to eat one of these ghost orchids, it is even better than drinking the water from the well we’ve been looking for all this time.
“You made it,” I whisper, my voice at the point of breaking. “For me.”
“I… I think so,” she nods, looking at the flower, then back at me. “What are you supposed to do with it?” she asks.
“Eat it,” I say.
Without thinking, I grab the flower, and shove it into my mouth. I expect it to taste like sand, like grass, like dirt, but instead, it melts on my tongue like sugar. Instantly, I feel my body react to it in incredible ways. My throat stops being sore. My lungs spread out and I can finally inhale properly. I sit up on my own, feeling power restoring in every part of my body.
At that point, I notice that the cage around us is starting to crack. She can’t hide the pain any longer. I lean over to her and kiss her on the forehead.
“Let them in,” I tell her.
“Are you sure?” she asks, her voice quivering.
“Yes,” I nod. “You did what you could do. Even more than you could. Now it is my turn. Let me protect you, the way I promised I would.”
I can see all the love in those beautiful blue eyes. I know she is mine forever, just like I am hers. I want to keep repeating this to her over and over again, for as long as we are alive. But there will be plenty of time for that later. Now, it is time to kick ass.
Instantly, the cage around us disappears, as if it never existed in the first place. I stand up, feeling rejuvenated, feeling as if I possess the kind of power I never imagined, not even in my wildest dreams. I attack instantly, like an enraged animal, not even looking where I am hitting.
“Go hide,” I tell Bianca.
But instead of doing that, she stands by my side. My warrior queen. The kind I always wanted for myself. Now I finally found her.
I can’t take my eyes off of her. I loved her before, when I thought she was just a human. Now I think I love her even more, more than I thought I could ever love someone. She belongs to my world. Although I didn’t know that in the beginning, neither of us knew that, but now we do.
