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The vines wrapped around my arms hug me close, but they don’t pull, they don’t pinch. They seem to fit around my body like sleeves would if I ever had clothes that fit. And as I stare at the back of my hand, I start to notice something strange.
New vines grow, these soft and green. They twirl around the brown rope vines that snap and bend, and on all of them appear little flowers.Flowers. I’ve never seen a flower before this.
The ground in front of my blade splits open with no prelude or hesitation. It just opens like a huge mouth that gobbles up bears and Alphas and dirt and trees and everything else as it widens, splitting all the way up to the ridge in the distance. The Alpha who’d been in front of me tries to sink his claws into the ground and claw his way back up, but Adam gives him a kick in the face that sends him flying down, down, down…
Adam.
“Adam!”
Adam’s clawing away from the huge split in the earth, flinging the Alphas off his back as he moves towards me, clawing and fighting his way over the rumbling dirt. His brown and honey fur is matted and streaked with black, inky venom and dark red-brown blood. I can smell it and it reeks of bloodlust and metal as he comes to cover my vine-entrapped form, his beastly body smothering mine while the whole world in front of us swallows up everything — all the undead Alphas and their dead bodies, and all the bears, except for one.
I blink and the bear vanishes, becoming a woman once more. She watches me from the edge of the trees where the split doesn’t reach her. I can hear clawing and inhuman shrieking coming from below, muted as the sounds are absorbed by the soil. I can hear them coming closer though, and I meet the witch’s gaze, only I know she isn’t a witch as her ice-blue eyes look me over.She’s an Omega.
I inhale deeply as Adam’s huge, furry limbs fold around me. I exhale, relieved to just be wrapped up in them. Even if we both die like this, and it’s likely we will. My fever is setting in, but I keep staring at the Omega that was once a bear, and the longer I stare at her, the easier it feels to breathe through the agony streaking across my chest.
“Move,”dark lips whisper. The cave is clammy and cold.
Omega.
“Omega.”
Omega.
I press my palm against the soil. The flowers growing across the back of my hand are already dead. The ground shivers as the dirt moves, sealing up the great scar in the soil until it never was. Until the only evidence that something happened here is fresh, overturned soil speckled with bright green vines that weave in and out of it like stitches. I know all about stitches.
The Omega tips her head down at me and disappears on my next blink. Time passes. Feels like a lot of it. Adam is still in his Berserker form. His breathing is shallow.
I open my eyes and jerk. The Omega is kneeling on the ground directly in front of me. She looks at the knife hilt reaching out of the ground like a tombstone with no epitaph. Short of her, no one will know what happened here. Adam and I are going to die. Not alone though, as we’ve both always been our entire lives. For the first time, we’ll be together.We have each other.
“You saw…him, too,” she whispers, “the man…in the cave.”
I nod. “Freya.”
“Echo.” She licks her lips. They bloom pink for a moment before returning to a paler shade. And still, they’re the only bits of color on her. She does look like a witch. Like the witch of the woods. Maybe she’s the one the other Alphas at the troll bridge were looking for. “We…must find the…others.”
“Others?”
“The Fallen Omegas. We cannot defeat them if we are just two.”
I sigh, confused and very sure that this must be a dream. Or the afterlife. Because she’s speaking in riddles, but in a pleasant way that makes me feel so much less alone. Even less alone than I do in Adam’s beastly grasp. “Defeat who?”
“The dead army.”
“We just did.”
“No.” She shakes her head and then her head snaps forward and I hallucinate that she’s a fox, but nope…she’s back. “You need to see. Go to Mirage…City and then…come find me in the cave.” Her stilted speech gains in volume the longer she continues talking. It still takes me too long to piece her words together, but that’s not her fault. That’s mine. I’m fading.Dying, probably. Maybe even for good, this time.“I will meet you there…when you are healed. Come alone. Don’t bring your…Berserker. You must kill him.”
“No.”
She snaps at me with fanged teeth and I wince, but when she rears back her teeth are square and normal. I must really be losing it. “You should have killed…him now. Take him into the earth…with the others.”
“He’s mine,” I say, forcing my eyes open a little further. I meet her gaze and see her snarling at me, her lips pulled back, her fingers bent at unnatural angles. She wears claws on her fingertips. She looks like a wolf, or just half. “I decide if and when to kill him.”
“Decide soon.”
And then she sprints off into the murky, grey daylight most definitely wearing the skin of a snow-white fox, the crafty little witch that she is.
Meanwhile, Adam isn’t moving and I’m not sure if I can move. But I don’t sleep. I fight. I keep fighting until the daylight begins to dim around us. I keep fighting, but the fight is only mental. I can’t move. My limbs are all weighted and his warmth is intoxicating, dragging me down and making me feel all kinds of cozy.I guess it’s not a bad idea to just die here.
