“Thyra’s blood.”
Her Oracle blood must have stopped the vampyric poison from fully claiming my mind.
It’s the only explanation I have for why I’m in control.
Why I’m not mindless anymore.
But Thyra…
She told me to fight for my soul, and I terrorized her, bruised her, traumatized her, ripped her throat like the fucking monster I am.
“Is she safe?” I raise my gaze to Azul, trying to breathe through the silence as he remains still and unmoving, giving me neither a shake of his head nor a nod.
Sudden, sickening dread washes through me.
I wounded her. Badly. Before I passed out, she was alive. She was moving and speaking. But what if…
The longer Azul’s silence extends, the harder my newly blooded heart thuds in my chest.
I raise my voice as if I could command fate. “She’s alive.”
Stellen wouldn’t willingly let her die. He needs her as much as I do, even if his reasons will be vastly different from mine.
But what if…he can’t save her?
Azul’s continued silence is an answer I can’t stand.
I launch myself to my feet, preparing to race along the mountain ridge in the direction I’m sure Stellen would have taken her, fear driving me forward.
What if she’s already dead?
A roar pushes to my throat, and I lift off the ground again, levitating without effort.
Azul is faster. In a flurry of feathers and outstretched talons, he shoots off the ground before I can get past him, colliding with me and knocking me back to the rock.
Thump. I land on my back, one of his sharp talons impaling my left side, a strike that should collapse my lung but does nothing more than wind me.
“Get off me!” My fangs shoot down, and I attempt to gnash at him. “I have to get to her! I have to give her my blood. I have to turn her.”
Azul’s deafening shriek rips through my hearing as he risks the cut of my sharp fingernails to lower his head to mine and scream into my face.
His forward movement impels his talon all the way through me, pinning me to the ground as surely as Stellen’s sword jammed me against the ice wall now melting behind me.
Azul shakes his head at me, a slow side-to-side motion, his crimson eyes gleaming fiercely.
His intentions are clear: he won’t let me go.
I thump my fist on the rock at my side because he’s right to stop me.
Even if I could reach Thyra in time and fightmy way past Stellen, turning Thyra into a vampyr would be an unforgivable crime.
She doesn’t have the Vividari ancestry that I have. She would be condemned to the bloodlands, mindless and starving. Or, worse, her Oracle blood could combine with the vampyric poison in terrible, unforeseen ways. I have no idea what she could become.
“Fuck.” My voice rises as I thump the rock again. And again. And again.
I don’t care that I split my skin with every strike until my fist is a bloody mess and my voice is a choked rasp and the moment comes when I force myself to ask Azul for a truth that could break me.
A truth that Azul has every right to hate me for.
