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“There!” Robyn shouted.

Footsteps as someone ran towards me. There she was. Robyn. My mate. I refused to call her anything else.

“Approach him from the front,” Cairn warned. “He may move suddenly when he wakes.”

“He’s not going to attack me.”

“No, but he crashed the last time.”

Even now, he was teasing me.

“I remember.”

Her voice was breathless. Angry. Frightened. But I could feel she wasn’t scared of me. For me.

She stopped directly in front of me. “Sten?”

I tried to answer.

Robyn put both hands against my face. Heat flooded into the stone.

My eyelids softened first.

For several seconds, I could feel Robyn’s hand against my face without being able to move. Warmth spread beneath her palm, turning the stone back into flesh, but it stopped at my neck. The rest of my body remained cold and rigid.

I forced my eyes open.

“Sten? Can you hear me?” Her face hovered above mine, pale and frightened. “Come on. You’ve already scared me enough for one day.”

I tried to answer. My jaw moved, but no sound came out. The warmth from her touch was already fading.

Robyn pressed her other hand against my chest. “Why isn’t the rest of him changing?”

“Your touch woke him, but it may not be enough to reverse the petrification,” Cairn said from somewhere behind her. “He needed your blood before. He may need it again.”

“I know.” Robyn looked down at me. “I was hoping that wouldn’t be necessary when I was right beside him.”

She pushed back her sleeve and held her wrist against my mouth.

I managed to turn my head away. The movement sounded like stone grinding against stone.

“Oh, don’t start being stubborn now,” she said. “You can barely move.”

My lips had softened enough to speak, although forcing out the words hurt. “I will not take your blood after what you said.”

“What I said was that I don’t want this to be the only thing keeping you alive. I didn’t say I’d stand here and watch you turn to stone rather than help you.”

“You should not have to keep doing this.”

“No, I shouldn’t, and you shouldn’t have to depend on it. That’s why we’re going to find another solution. But until we do, I’m not letting you die on a wet hillside to prove a point.”

She held my gaze as she brought her wrist back to my mouth.

“I’m choosing this, Sten. I need you to believe me and take what you need.”

The fear in her scent remained, but there was no uncertainty in her expression. I opened my mouth and pressed my fangs against her wrist, hesitating until she gave me a small nod.

Then I bit.