Arran.
My heart twisted inside my chest. Pain, longing. My eyes raked over him, checking every curve of muscle and long plane of his body.
His boots were clean of the mud and blood of battle. His leather trousers were immaculate as well, stretched across his hips. But his armor was gone… the vest that buttoned across his chest, the battle axe, the scabbard… nothing but the linen shirt he wore beneath.
A pale gray, fashioned in the terrestrial style, with buttons that started in the center of his chest and angled upward to where they ended at the shoulder. Open now, revealing a triangle of perfectly golden skin and the upper branches of the tree tattooed across his chest—his Talisman. The physical marker of the power within him, to bend even nature to his will.
He did not move. Not even to draw breath.
But it was his eyes that struck me the most.
His eyes were closed.
That strong, muscular body was prone. Laid out on a slab of granite. Utterly still.
I stumbled forward, my chest exploding with emotion. My eyes burned. I could barely see. The granite jarred my knees as I fell, but that pain was nothing.
Arran. Arran, please.
Arran, wake up!I cried down the bond. Screamed. Reaching for any shred of him on the other side of that precious golden thread.
But there was nothing.
Arran can’t be gone. I would have felt it. No one can die in Avalon. How can he… No… no, no, no, no…
Gentle claws landed on my shoulder.
I felt the brush of Isolde’s leg as she climbed up onto the base of the granite slab beside me. She lifted her other hand toward Arran, then paused, looking down at me.
“May I?” she asked softly, her voice barely audible through the keening of my soul.
Words were beyond me. But the plea in my eyes must have been enough.
Isolde’s white eyes shone. Sympathy, reverence, kindness – she showed more emotional depth with one glance than I’d ever managed with words and actions combined.
Then she turned that focus to Arran.
She laid her hand on his arm with a gentleness that belied the long, sharp claws at the ends of her fingers.
I felt her power before I saw it. A warm wave, washing over my skin, radiating from the white faerie. The glow beneath her palms was brighter than when she’d healed Lyrena. As if she was drawing from the latent magic of Avalon, humming all around us.
Later, I’d wonder if that was why my void power had carried us further onto the sacred isle than I’d intended. Some strange amplification…
But now, my thoughts, my eyes and heart—they were all for Arran.
Isolde’s hands drifted over his arm to his chest. The unbuttoned flap of his shirt fluttered open—
I doubled over, my stomach emptying itself violently onto the grass, bile splattering the edge of the granite slab.
I was wrong. Wrong about everything. He couldn’t live—not in Avalon, not anywhere. Not with that gaping wound his chest. His heart—
Another wave of bile rose in my throat.
Arran’s beating heart was visible, right there, through the woundI’dinflicted.
This was all my fault. I’d killed my mate, the male I’d finally allowed myself to love. I’d doomed myself. I’d doomed Annwyn.
Arran’s beating heart.
