Page 61 of Raven in Midwinter

“I couldn’t do that. I already explained to you that I needed her power to make my escape. It happens so much faster now. I used to be able to stay for weeks anywhere I wanted, exploring and learning, but now it’s merely days. I’m having to run through my life.”

“Then why would you change Corvus, why hurt it if it could sustain you?”

“I hate Corvus,” he yelled. The force of his anger hit me like an electromagnetic pulse and tore Lorne from my side, throwing him ten feet away from me.

Checking frantically, looking over my shoulder, ready to stand up even if it cut off any fraction of a connection I might have made with Corvus, when Lorne lifted a hand, I could breathe. Immediately, I turned back to the slowly advancing Giles.

“Corvus could have sustained you,” I told him.

“Yes, but at what cost? To be here, yoked to the land like a dumb animal for the rest of my life?” he bellowed, and this time, he brought the wind up, and the arctic gust blew all around us, loud and whistling.

Lorne stumbled back, and when he fell to his knees beside me, I noted the blood on the right side of his head trickling down behind his ear.

“Can you make it to the house?” I asked him.

“I won’t ever leave you,” he said, lifting the rifle, taking aim at Giles.

“This devotion to the land, to guarding the rift, is obscene,” Giles ranted on, and I saw something in his hand a moment before he flung it at Lorne.

I screamed, but instead of it hitting the man I loved, it impaled Argos. He had changed into his daemon shape, so he was as big as a grizzly bear, but the six-foot icicle skewered him and flung him back into the snow.

“No!” I cried out, the pain in my chest instant.

“Argos!” Lorne gasped, charging unsteadily over to his pet and dropping into the snow next to him, hands in the daemon’s fur. “No, buddy, please. Use your magic and stay with me.”

“You see!” Giles roared, lifting both arms, hands above his head, before pulling both down hard.

Lifting my hands from the earth, knowing I had to use everything in me save the man I loved, to not let Argos’s sacrifice be in vain, I was stunned when the earth rose to keep the contact with me.

Save my love.

Save my pet.

Nothing.

Please.

Save the guardian, came the reply.

Everything moved at once. Snow, ice, and earth, and both Argos and Lorne were gone from sight.

Save the man, restore my pet.

They will rest with us.

I didn’t like the sound of that at all, but it was possible we were on the same page; it was just hard, as the communication was disjointed.

“This won’t work,” Giles yelled at me. “I will kill you here and now, Xander.”

I had no doubt he could.

“I’ve seen other timelines, Xander, and we Coreys were not meant to lead little lives in this tiny town. We were meant for greater things.” He was close now. “It’s not you. You didn’t begin this travesty. You were indoctrinated into this hiding of who we truly are and what we could do.”

“I’m not that bright,” I said when he was five or six feet from me. “You’ll have to be clearer.”

“A witch of the woods,” he spat at me. “A healer, a gardener, one who makes candles and spell bottles, one who is a part of the community…it’s all a defilement. This is not what our line was destined to be!”

“Tell me, Giles, what are we supposed to be?”