But he couldn’t let Alex give in to Crom and Chambers… He just couldn’t.
The things they would do to her. It was like he had a glimpse into their minds as well, as if he could see their intentions now. Every promise was a lie. They were cruel and vindictive. He couldn’t let Alex give herself up for him.
He would never be worth that. He was nothing. Just a creature of the forest, a memory, a ghost of someone long dead, a simulacrum made of magic and promises broken…
He knew that now.
Somehow he loosened his grip on Alex’s hair and ran his hand instead in the gentlest caress down the side of her face that he could manage.
Know me, he wanted to say, but his voice was not his own anymore. He couldn’t speak. So, this gesture would have to be enough.
Please, Alex, please know me. Trust me this one time. Even if I failed you before. Trust me now.
Old words came to him. Words he barely dared to think.
‘Mo stór, mo croi, mo mhuirnín dílis.’Those words in the language that was written on his soul, expressing the only thing he wanted her to know. That he loved her. That he always would. The only words he would say if that was all he would ever be able to say again.
My darling, my heart, my own true love…
Alex shuddered in response, as if she heard them whispered on the wind, or in the beating of his heart, and she half turned to look up at him in wonder. She knew. She had to know. She understood the words and their meaning, and she had heard him. Part of him was still here. Still hers. She had to realise.
‘Nick?’ she whispered. Shehadheard. He saw that in the wonder filling her beautiful eyes. He had found his voice, in the wind and the storm, and now, when he tried again…
‘Call the wild woods,’he told her on a stolen breath.
‘But it’ll kill you. It’ll probably kill us both, anything to stop Crom…’
He winced, thought of Maeve, of her having to face this one day, and he knew what he had to do. What they both had to do.
‘Please,’ he whispered, and buried his face in her hair.
While it was still possible, she had to do it now, because he felt the power that possessed him exerting its control again. His grip on Alex’s body tightened and his free hand closed on her throat. Even as he tried to stop it, Crom, or Chambers, or perhaps both of them, surged through him and grabbed at Alex, ready to crush the life from her before she could do what had to be done.
But they were too late. Far too late.
Alex, his Alex, was brave and valiant. She didn’t hesitate this time. She called the wild wood as if she had always been in communion with it. She reached out with all that she had in her, stretching up to the canopy and down to the mycelium and summoning it all to her.
The wild wood responded with a roar that drowned out the storm.
As it rushed in on them, Nick tried to shelter her, pulling her down and shielding her with his body. It was all he had left, this form that had been created through magic and hope and need. And now he used all that he was in an effort to save her.
Even if it meant his own destruction.
So be it, he told the woods he had loved so much.Take me back, but please,he begged,please, let her live. She’s everything. Please.
And he prayed those words over and over until his mind was torn to pieces and scattered like seeds on the wind, and he knew no more.
CHAPTER 48
ALEX
The storm rushed back with a vengeance, screaming at her, tearing at her, trying to drive her into the earth, or rip the weight of Nick’s body off her and hurl him away so it could get to her. But he held on, and she held onto him, reaching for the wild.
There was nothing human here. There was no conscious mind that thought like hers, no morals or ethics. Whereas Alex had been able to sense the individual ghosts in the house, sense the people they had once been, this was something else, something vast and terrifying and so completely alien to her. It was wild, and endless, and remorseless. It was angry. So angry.
It blamed Nick, she could sense that. Saw him as a traitor and it would have retribution for that.
‘No, that’s not right,’ she tried to tell the wild wood, or whatever that vast consciousness was. But she was little more than a sigh in its screams of rage. She dug her hands into Nick’s body and found, instead of skin and muscle…bark, wood, and moss…
