No.
My eyes flung open, I had doneeverythingright.
I checked over Mirabel, my hands shaking, but nothing seemed to be amiss. The black veins were receding, the color was beginning to return to her cheeks, and her breathing evened out.
It wasn't her.
Glancing around the room, my focus settled upon the table diagonally placed from mine, where the man with hair the color of chocolate stood stiffly, watching as his patient's body writhed in pain. Black veins covered nearly the entire man's body, his lungs sounding as if they were drowning within his own blood and I felt my entire body freeze in horror.
He had brewed the potion incorrectly.
Fenrir was going to die.
Chapter Fourteen
Iknew death.
Knew death as intimately as a toxic lover's touch, a constant thing that forever flitted around the edges of my consciousness.
I knew death, knew it in the people that I treated. Sat with it and faced it as I held their hands when they crossed into the Kingdom of the Goddess. I held it when their friends and family cried in my arms. Saw it in the grief stricken faces and the fear of what would come after.
But I did not know death like this.
I had only seen it once.
Death that was not from illness nor from an accident that took a life swiftly.
Thiswas murder.
I stood frozen, once again a little girl with black hair hiding in the shadows of an alleyway, snow soaking through my tattered coat as my mother was tied to a stake. My lungs burned, my eyes watered as thosescreamsechoed in my mind.
I saw nothing, felt nothing,wasnothing.
This man was going to die in front of my eyes, just as my mother had. A life taken simply for a trial, for anerrorin an apprentice’s potion.
Stomach rolling, my breaths burned as I tried to suck in air. Yet the silence, the stillness of the room, seemingly stole it all from my desperate lungs.
"Daddy?"
My gaze snapped away from the writhing man to Mirabel. The little girl was shifting, her eyes opening as the last of the poison was beginning to clear from her system. Her green eyes—Goddess,so similar to the mother already lost—scanned over the room before stopping, an eerie stillness falling over her.
The crack that arced through my heart was so painful awhooshof breath escaped at the scream that cut through the silence. So razor sharp it sliced through my very being.
My hands reached for her as she stumbled from the stool, her steps clumsy and shaken as she moved to her writhing father, the screams still coming.
Or were those the echoes?
Goddess, no.
Horror raced through me as the guard I did not recognize stepped forward, his arm wrapping around Mirabel's waist. He lifted her into the air before she reached her father's twitching body, now laid prone upon the floor.
"No." Terror ravaged through her small body as she fought in the man's arms. “Somebody help him,save him, please."
I was moving, hands grabbing my cauldron before my mind could comprehend what Iwas doing.
Those devastating cries rung within my ears, muffling all other senses and thoughts. I shoved past the incompetent apprentice, hands shaking as I brought the whole cauldron to Fenrir’s lips.
Fenrir who had been so kind.
