Sera.
“Aldric!” his kirei cried out for him. In agony. Afraid.
“Sera!” He lunged toward the sound but was drawn up short. Heavy iron bit into his wrists and ankles, keeping him in place. Bound.
He was bound by chains.
“Where do youthink you are going, Crow?” a voice whispered, each word piercing his mind like a blade—sharp, merciless. “You are no hero. You’re a monster.”
No. No, that wasn’t true.
“No? Just look at what you’ve done.”
What he had done? His chest tightened as the familiar scent of death—sickly sweet—greeted his nose. No.
He didn’t want to look. He couldn’t possibly look.
…He had to look.
There Sera lay sprawled before him, her chestnut hair spilling loosely across the sands, her body limp, her beautiful gray eyes empty.
“No,” he rasped, shaking his head. He hadn’t. He wouldn’t.
“But you did.”
The dark dagger embedded in his wife’s chest—in her heart—gleamed, the crystalline jewel nestled in its hilt now swirling with iridescent hues. Taunting him with its prettiness.
Just as the voice taunted him with its cruelty.
“No!” he screamed, lunging for the blade and wrenching it free. But even with the unholy dagger now removed from her heart, his kirei did not wake. She did not move.
She remained…dead.
All the strength he had left him, sending him collapsing to his hands and knees. He forgot how to think, how to breathe.
She was dead. Sera was dead.
He had killed her.
“Sera…” he whispered, clenching the witchblade tighter in his grasp.
Withoutwarning, the corpse that had once been his wife jolted to a sitting position. Her head turned toward him. Her cold, dead eyes met his. Her bloodless lips parted.
She spoke.
“Yes…Master?”
Aldric jerked awake, a shout of horror catching in his throat—strangled before he could properly voice it.
The weak light of early morning streamed in through the chapel’s stained glass windows, dappling the rich wood of the altar and pews with kaleidoscopic light. His back smarted; his neck twinged.
Had he truly fallen asleep here?
Something warm and soft stirred at his side. “Aldric?” a sweet voice thick with sleep whispered, bringing with it the gentle caress of breath against his throat. “Are you all right?”
His eye fluttered closed as he breathed deeply of his wife’s familiar scent: warm, floral, with a hint of vanilla. She was alive. The witchblade was in Father Perero’s possession now. He hadn’t hurt her.
It had just been a dream.
