No.
Her aura is fading. Her lips paling, pulse slowing. With wild desperation, I look around, as if I can do something—anything—to make this not happen.
This can’t fucking happen.
My mother crouches beside me. Her wound is plugged with gold, hand held over the spot, her face tracked with tears.
“Help her,” I plead.
To her, to Annwyn, to the goddesses.Anybody.
Help her.
“Slade…” Auren whispers, and my eyes lock on hers. My heart locked on too. “I…love you.”
Her ribbons drift against my arms limply. Barely able to hold themselves up.
“You can’t leave,” I plead again, but this time, to her.
Because she is the only prayer I ever needed answered.
But her aura darkens more. The black tendrils muting, her shining gold fading. I want to wrap my fist around it and keep it here. Keep it glowing. But I can’t.
Ican’t.
My heart is breaking while hers bleeds out.
And there’s nothing I can do about it. No trick with rot could ever make her heart repair. I am death—not life.
She is life, and yet…she’s dying. Right here in my arms.
Auren looks so scared. So forlorn, and Ihateit. I have to help her. My pair bond demands that I save her, but all I can do is hold her and try to take away her fear.
Try to protect her in the only way I still can.
“I have to tell you something,” I say.
My hands stroke her sweat-slicked hair away from her face, my tone urging her to keep looking at me.
When her eyes focus again, my thumb drags across her wet cheek, though I can’t stop my fingers from shaking. “I knew you were my pair even without your aura.”
Her brow furrows and she blinks slowly, like she’s trying to hold on to my words.
Trying to hold on to her life.
And I need her to, because I fucking needher.
“I knew you were mine the second I laid eyes on you. Because someone told me. Someone who hasn’t spoken to me ever since,” I explain, my confession rattled and grieved. “One word. One single word. Spoken from the lips…of my mother.”
Auren’s eyes widen ever so slightly.
When I ripped the world and brought my mother with me to Orea, I think I tore her in half just as much as I tore myself. Because she stopped speaking. Her voice went mostly mute. Her mind, mostly muddled.
But it was there and then, beside a poisoned rip, in a foreign cave, where she said the last word she’s ever spoken to me.
Just one.
I had been pressing a cool cloth to her fevered forehead, trying to care for her after how sick she became from traveling through the rip. When suddenly, her hand snatched out and gripped my wrist with surprising strength, fingernails digging into my skin.
