Alex
There is nothing in my head but red violence as I sprint out onto the ice. Students out for a stroll in their wolf forms dart away, but I’m a blur of motion. I’ll pay dearly for this. I can’t return to campus, that’s for sure. The ever-present darkness is my only cover. I have no idea where I’m going, but forward is my only option. Forward, forward, running miles in minutes I’m not sure I have. I’m a fucking idiot. I underestimated her. I think I underestimated her love for me, if I’m being totally, brutally honest with myself. Skye protected my secrets with her entire soul. I should have seen it in her eyes when she began to notice something was gravely wrong when I asked her to marry me. I should have seen it in her eyes when I left her this morning.
She knew Kai tried making a deal with me. She’s so powerful. She might have had a shot at fixing this for both of us if Kai wasn’t like me–but worse.
Wind rips over the ice, nearly knocking me on my side, but I keep going, ignoring the warning bells skittering through my tangled mind. My wife is out here. The woman carrying my child. The woman I love. I won’t stop. I’ve run further and longer than this before.
The wind changes direction, carrying the heavy scent of blood that is all too familiar, and I feel my body curling into a version of myself I haven’t felt in many, many years. My brain shuts down entirely. The Alex I was before–the scientist, the man with diplomas hanging on the gray slate walls of his office–fades, replaced by the monster I was born to be. My fangs elongate, slicing my lips open, but I don’t feel it. My mouth is already soaked with my own black, undead blood when I see yellow on the ice. Bright, neon yellow that settles in my bones and explodes into rage I feel in my soul.
A dark shadow curls over Skye, trembling and grunting with each gulp of her blood he takes. I scream with fury. My mind shuts off entirely. I am nothing but moving parts propelled by instinct, and that instinct is to kill.
I collide with the other vampire, rolling over the ice. We’re dragged to a stop by the wind, but I have him pinned to the ground in a split second. Kai’s fangs are jagged, one tip missing. He hisses and fights my weight, but I rip his tattered coat open wide and slice through his chest with my fangs.
His screech of pain is lost in the wind.
He grabs my hat and yanks it free, clawing at my hair, ripping open my scalp with his elongated nails. He yanks my mouth free from his chest and rolls us across the ice, but I fight, focusing on the reason we’re here. I need to kill him. That’s the only thought in my mind. Killing another vampire royal is almost impossible. I have no weapons. I am untrained in comparison to him, but it doesn’t show. He tries to bite through my parka and gets a mouthful of goose down, choking on it. I shove him off and lunge, tossing us further and further away from the bundle of yellow and red in my peripheral vision.
“You’re done,” I rasp, biting down on his neck, trying to tear him open. “This is over. I win. I win, you fucking monster. Red River is dead.”
But he–his blood–tastes like… Skye.
“She was worth it. Now I know why you wanted to keep her for yourself so badly,” he chokes out and uses my moment of clarity to push me off.
I stumble to my feet, frantic, my eyes locked on the body a hundred or so yards away. Skye lies motionless on the ice, the yellow parka she stole from Abby stained with so much blood it’s almost impossible to tell its color anymore.
I look at Kai, who scrambles to his feet, his hand pressed to his neck. Black blood oozes between his fingers. His mouth, however, is coated with her red blood.
I imagine my mother, her dark eyes and calm voice. I think of my father and his sarcastic drawl. I think of Drake and Emma–the last moment I saw them. Emma’s tears and Drake’s determination to ensure I had a chance to run.
All for this. I ran for this. For her. For a life with her.
Kai snickers. I slowly look from Skye to him.
It’s impossible to kill a vampire. I told her that. She tried anyway because she’s a better person than I am. I would have run. I would have taken her to the ends of the earth to try to keep her safe. I would have hidden her and subjected her to a life like mine–lonely, away from her family and friends.
She is a better person than I. A braver person.
I snap. It happens quickly. My mind and body separate again, and before my rational brain has a chance to catch up with what I’m doing, I have Kai on the ground. He’s surprised as well, his eyes wide and open, a glint of fear behind those orbs of red. I doubt he’s ever been afraid before.
I don’t have a single thing to say to him.
“Alex!” Skye cries out. I’m not sure if it's actually her calling out for me or a memory, but it’s the reason I grip his mouth with both hands, his fangs sinking into my flesh, and rip his jaw to pieces. He can’t even scream.
Blood gushes, spraying me in a torrent. Her blood. The blood he drained from her. He was going to kill her, draining her to the last drop. He was going to take her from me as punishment for my actions against his mother.
I scream into the feeling of his skull caving in under my wrath.
And then the ice is quiet. The wind howls in the distance, carrying the last notes of Kai’s life.
I rise, shaking, the puncture wounds on my hands healing so quickly I don’t even feel any pain. I turn to the body across the ice. Skye. My wife. My mate, if I could choose.
* * *
Skye
Alex slides on his knees across the ice. The scent of blood flooding off his clothes is sharp, fresh, just like the cracking sound of a jaw being broken apart that still echoes through my mind, blurring my senses to highlight only one sensation–his hands on my broken skin. Warm and damp, they close around my cheeks, then lower, to the gaping wound where my throat should be.
The sky dances with stars beyond his silhouette while he whispers what we already know we don’t have time to accomplish. We’re so far away from campus and the clinic, where it’s unlikely they’d be able to save my life as it stands. In any other circumstance, I’d be bleeding out, a lost cause. Dead on arrival.
I have no blood left to bleed.
“Skye?” His voice is impossibly broken as he lowers his face to mine, pressing his hand against my throat like he can stop whatever blood loss is left. I’m limp, barely able to lift my arms to clutch his blood-soaked jacket, curling my numb, trembling fingers into the soft cotton spilling from the torn seams.
Frigid air bites his exposed skin as much as it’s sinking its teeth into mine.
I want to tell him to go back, to leave me, but it’s fruitless. Alex will never leave me. He’s made that perfectly clear at every turn. I am his. He is mine. This isn’t a mate bond. It’s bigger than that. Our threads weren’t woven together from the moment of our first breaths. There is no single star of fate shining down on us as death sweeps over the ice, creeping toward me like a long-taloned shadow, waiting in silence to strike.
We wrote this. Willed it into existence with every breath, every word. In every stolen moment of silence, locked in each other’s arms. In every promise, every laugh, and breathy sigh.
If I had a mate, it would be him.
If I could choose, I’d choose him. Over and over again. Forever.
And for that, I’m so sorry.
He has… centuries to live.
I have… seconds.
I’m not ready.
“I’m going to get you out of here. It’s going to be okay. I promise. Look at me, Skye. I’ve got you. You’re going to wake up, and everything is going to be okay, and I’ll be there, waiting for you. Just keep–” His voice breaks with a sob that strikes me in the heart, forcing it to beat once more. “Keep looking at me. Please. Don’t close your eyes. I’m here. Look at the stars, Skye, aren’t they beautiful? I can see the Cerridwen Galaxy, just like you said. I get it now. I understand.” He presses his lips to mine and cries out in utter despair. It’s gut-wrenching. My fingers twitch. I want to make it better for him. Isn’t that what we do for each other? Make it better? Make it tolerable?
“I love you. Don’t leave me.” He shakes me violently, and I don’t feel a thing, because I’m already gone, aren’t I?
Above me, the tapestry is a hazy stream of flickering lights against the stars. I count the threads, following the lifelines of those I love, finding mine… breaking. Splintering into pieces, carried away on a soft, phantom breeze, piece by piece, atom by atom. Me–and our baby. Our miracle. Both threads just… fading.
I know what he’s thinking. It’s already shining in his eyes. He doesn’t need to voice it–an option he wishes he had. Kill me. Make it quick. Painless. Then drag me somewhere underground until I rise again–made in his image. He’s thinking about it, struggling with trying it, even though we both know it wouldn’t work, praying that it might, because I’m already leaving him. He’ll lose both of us that way. I’d never be the same. He’d never forgive himself. But it doesn’t matter anyway. I am a mystic, but I’m also a wolf shifter. Wolf shifters can’t be turned. We both know it. My fingers slacken, beginning to slip from the fabric of his parka. He has mere seconds to decide to try it.
And I already know he won’t because he’s a good man, but he’ll live the rest of his long life wondering what it would have been like if he’d made the selfish decision to try to turn me into something like him, but colder, deader.
Like his mother.
His gutted, sharp cry of anguish follows another violent shake, like he’s trying to jolt me back to life.
My heart beats once, then twice, before the tapestry slowly begins to fade.
He’s out of options and out of time.
I have one option. Just one.
“Forgive me,” I whisper with my dying breath. “Do not let go of me.”
I clutch his parka with the last of my strength and let my severely diminished powers warm my broken body until the ice beneath us cracks and sizzles. The stars fade to black. The world around us ceases to exist. It’s a violent journey. Too sharp. Too bouncy and uneven, unlike anything I’ve ever done before, but it’s my remaining powers dictating our path, and I have no choice but to let go and let them lead the way.
Hazy, rainy sunlight fills the space behind my eyelids. I open my eyes to slits–to Alex, groggy, bearing his weight against my upper arms to keep me pinned to the floor, which is no longer a sheet of unforgivingly cold ice.
It’s carpet.
A hazy figure in black shoots up from behind a desk made of shadowed glass.
“Forgive me,” I mouth when Alex opens his eyes, startled and confused. Behind him, papers lift and twist to the floor in the wake of the man leaping over his desk and racing toward us.
I know what this looks like. Alex is pinning me to the ground. I’m missing my throat. We’re both covered in blood–so much blood, and it’s mostly mine.
None of it is Alex’s blood.
Yet.
This was my only option. I’m not done here. I want a life with him, whatever that looks like. I have to at least try.
“Forgive me,” I mouth again, my eyes slipping closed to the moment Dad’s powers erupt, and Alex is torn from my body and is lost in a shower of glass as his body shatters through one of Dad’s bookshelves, and then my eyes fill with red before the light fades entirely.