A soft touch to his face turned his head.Something softer still brushed against his ear.The sweetness of his dear one’s mouth, perhaps?That notion granted him what little ease there was to be had.“I am safe, Grant.I am safe.”
“Aye,” he whispered.Or he thought he did.With his head swimming and the demons raking their talons across his body, ’twas difficult to be certain of anything.“Safe.My love is safe.”
“Don’t you dare die on me!”
That made him smile.She sounded so far away that he feared his soul had already started its journey to the next place.
“Bind yerself to him, lass,” another voice said.“Rejoin yer soul to his.Lend him yer strength.”
The witch, maybe?He tried to blink his eyes open wider, but it did no good.Only darkness filled his vision, and the wind howled louder in his ears.
“Bind myself to him?I don’t understand.”
Ah, now he knew that voice, and he heard it as if she were within his mind rather than beside him.It was his precious Jessa.He reached for her, but the demons flexed their talons in his flesh and made him roar with the pain instead.
“Ye must say the words to him.Say them as I tell ye.Quickly now, afore the Morrigan returns and carries him off to the land of the dead.Bind him to ye and hold tight to his spirit so she canna rip him away.”
He fought to push himself upright.If the Morrigan was returning, he had to rise, had to protect his Jessa.
Then a sweetness of roses wafted into his awareness, chasing away the stench of burnt flesh, smoke, and singed hair.A velvety soft mouth kissed him, and in his mind, clear as the bell ringing in the kirk’s tower, he heard his dear one say the words:
Heart of my heart,
Soul of my soul,
We reunite,
To never let go.
Blood of my blood,
Bone of my bone,
We two are now one,
Our halves are now whole.
For the good of all,
With harm to none,
So let it be spoken,
So let it be done,
So mote it be.
“So mote it be,” he whispered, breathing easier as a familiar warmth, a comforting serenity washed across him like a soothing balm.Darkness and the suffocating pain no longer blinded him.Instead, a golden glow of ethereal light buoyed him, filling his awareness.“I love ye, my Jessa, my precious wee fox.”
“I love you, too,” she said and gave him another tender kiss.“Heaven help us both.”
* * *
Jessa was aboutto shatter into a hysterical mess.Maybe if she kept whispering,So mote it be, Grant would be all right.The oath had calmed him, and with any luck, it would send that dark monster straight to the deepest pit in hell.An earsplitting boom made her jump and clutch him tighter, sheltering him as best she could with his head in her lap.She struggled to keep him on his uninjured side.The last thing his ragged, bloody back needed was a roll in the mud.He had to live.She couldn’t bear it if he died because he had followed her into that fiery death trap.
A hiccuping sob escaped her as she gently rocked with her cheek pressed against his charred, matted hair.His thick, dark mane, once shoulder-length, had burned off in jagged patches, leaving him raggedly shorn and smoldering with faint wisps of smoke still rising from the longer sections.The wound on his cheek was even angrier than before, encrusted with blisters as though his raw flesh had boiled in the heat.
“I am so very sorry,” she whispered against his closed eyes before looking up at Mairwen.“Can we not take him to the twenty-first century to heal and then bring him back?”
