Page 138 of Beds and Blades

One tear, moving down the face that was Varia’s face, from an eye that was briefly, incompletely, partially hers.

Her hand moved to her sword.

She drew it in the arc I had watched for four months. The motion she had spent sixteen years refining and four months teaching me. It was hers alone. No one else in the garrison moved through it in quite that way.

Neither vampire reacted.

They still believed she belonged to the bond.

Varia took the head of the vampire on my left.

Then the one on my right.

Two motions. Clean.

Their bodies fell almost together, their hands releasing me as they dropped.

I caught myself against the council table. My legs held. That was enough.

Varia stood before me with her sword in her hand and her eyes blue. Her face flickered between the woman I knew and the thing the dark bond had made of her.

“Meghan.”

Her voice. Her actual voice.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too.”

“I can feel it closing again,” she said with an urgency that sharpened every word. “The dark bond. I can’t hold it off forever. Meghan, you have to free me. My soul is still here, but as long as this body lives, the dark bond holds me. Morvanna holds me.”

Her voice broke. Only once. Then she steadied it.

“Free me. You know how.”

The blue in her eyes began to fade. Red bled back into them. The window was closing.

“Ride or die,” she whispered.

She offered me the sword.

I took it.

The arc was hers. The technique was hers, given to me across four months of mornings in the cold and practiced until it lived in my body rather than my mind.

I used it exactly as she had taught me.

My feet found their position. My weight moved through the turn. For one final instant, her eyes were blue. The blade passed cleanly through her neck.

Varia’s body fell.

But in the instant the blade passed through her, I felt something release. Warm. Clean. Distinct from the claiming bond’s empathic current.

I had felt it with Mira in the corridor. I had recognized it without logic or reason, the way you recognize something true.

This time, it was Varia.

The warmth lasted only a moment. Within it was something I had never been taught to recognize, but would spend the rest of my life knowing was real.