by Roxanne Lee
"Ty!" I screamed at the moon.
His knees dropped to the ground, thudding into the mud, a grunt leaving his surprised mouth on impact. He blinked. A single strangled gasp of shock. A muddied haze that covered that ice.
Hands let go of the blond he held, slipping the tight grasp to send him sliding to the floor. Another grunt left his lips, a wheeze of breath that struggled to form. A look of confusion down at his chest and the small holes that dripped red through his shirt.
He locked those eyes with my own, blinked at my slipping feet, then fell to the side in silence.
Chapter 33
Nothing.
I am nothing without you.
Blood spurted from his mouth as he coughed.
"No, no, no." I held his head in my hands. "Come on, Ty. You're fine, you'll be just fine."
He gurgled, a weak laugh that only brought more blood to the surface. "Not...okay."
Tears fell from my face to his. "Don't be an idiot, nothing wrong with you."
His face paled as I watched. "Love you, Sash."
My breath stuck in my chest as everything within me broke. I heard the snapping inside my head, like shattering, fragile glass. Water welled to my eyes and clogged my throat, tears that flooded and drowned. I sobbed on heaving breaths, "heal dammit."
He looked up with a blurry gaze. "Think I'm...all outta juice."
I gave him a murderous look. "Then take some! Don't you fucking stop now."
His smile trembled in from its permanent position. "No one here but the wolves...your Alpha can't take it, and Irish is...on his own planet."
His wolf would heal him but the animal had taken a hit from those chains. "Shift."
He shook his head in a gentle twitch. "Tried...can't."
I should have paid better attention, made sure he had enough for the feeder inside him. Taken care of him like he'd always taken care of me. "Please don't." I crumpled completely, looked to Lane still laying on the floor. "Take from him, his wolf will heal."
Ty shook that head again and coughed a splatter of blood to his chin. "He can't handle it."
I shook my brother's body. "He stabbed you, he'll fucking handle it!"
"He can't even...wake yet."
I looked around frantically, finding Charlie swiping at the faery with his sword, swirling patterns around her that almost danced and had her swearing at him in confusion. Conall staggered to his feet, the animal wavering as he gained his bearings.
"Conall!"
The wolf turned black eyes to me.
"Help me." I whispered at the monster, pleading for him to listen.
He shook his head back and fore, clearing the vision that swam in circles, and looked to the Fae that tried her best to stand still for long enough to work her magic on Charlie. He growled, his mind all encompassed by white hair and blood red rage.
"No, please. Help him first."
The wolf wavered again, looked to me then back at the female, a monumental decision for the beast that begged for blood. He rumbled in disgust and turned to toward me, finally taking a step in my direction. I blew out a breath and shook Ty, "look, Conall is coming."
His body remained motionless.
"Ty...Conall will help." I looked down to see his eyes closed, marble overcoming animation, the shade of death that robs the soul.
I stopped breathing. Joined my brother in silence. Copied his stillness as his soul tried to leave, felt just as frozen as he must be as his usual warmth chilled to cool. The tears that ran down my face the only moving parts of me.
Red hair flickered to the right of my vision. Blonde that stood tall beside him. A mountain of Scotsman, proud as he stood next to grace.
"Tessa." The wolf rumbled through my voice, rage that rose to heap the blame, pulling all the ire that whirled a tornado to fling every ounce of accountability at her feet.
She shrugged without hint of remorse. "I told you, Sasha. It's all about who you want standing next to you." Her hand lifted to run fingers through Duncan's hair. "I'd like to stand next to my mate. I'm a Queen taking my rightful place."
I scoffed at her words. "Who the hell made him a King?"
She lifted one shoulder. "The same people who made yours one."
I looked to the blond still unconscious on the floor, grief twisting my soul to scowl towards him. Conall's wolf pulled Ty's body out of my arms and I found I couldn't look at the limp form as it left my hold. "No Kings left, Tessa."
She smiled, "wrong. There'll be one left after tonight."
I focused my stare entirely on her, not giving a single look to the Scot. He'd ruined my life since he'd been in it - some demon pulling strings in the dark. He thought himself a King?
I'll show him even Kings can die.
Royalty can fall just as hard as we can, be just as much the puppet to destiny and her will. "You think they're brothers?"
She nodded. "They are."
I shook my head and laughed, a little too high and a little too strained. "Not in any way that matters."
She looked at the blond on the floor. "Think he might feel differently when he wakes."
Duncan joined in to sour my soul, twist that knife in just a little further. "Lost him a long time ago, lass. Just taking him back to where he belongs."
I stood from the ground and sneered at him, taking a step towards Tessa and ignoring the Scot. "You won't be around to find out." The wolf fed the empath, taking that rage and dousing it in accelerant, twisting fury until it became some unnameable thing - something so mutated, it was a new kind of raw power. Something black that birthed in fire, substance that crystallized and reformed, became something greater than the original. As the fire burned, I pulled it higher, allowing it free reign to destroy as it willed - a conscious choice of pure destruction.
And in this ferment I wallow, giving life to waste and despoil.
A desolate end and shattering ruin, as everything turns to ash.
The feeder sent its fear. That smoke that built in black, so filled with temper it broke the lock on the wolf's cage and forced itself through the human. A smog so thick it veered from my pores to find an outlet through my eyes and mouth, spilling that despair and soiling the earth with nightmare. So completely it thrived, until I became the offender, the devil to their fleeing victim. It wrapped itself around Tessa and Duncan, utterly free from my control, wrapping black wisps shaped as hands around their faces. Sending them to their knees before me.
Look at the crown that takes a servants role; how easily they bend under my will.
Tessa begged as tears flooded her eyes. Pleaded for me to cease, so overwhelmed by true panic I doubt she even understood what she was doing. I smiled at her stricken face - the one that had looked at my own in deceit, and unsheathed the claws the wolf whispered to take, talons to split her skin. My lips moved of their own accord, dancing around the smoke that poured, telling the female her darkest sins and just what she'd now owned. "Life for a life, Tessa. Reap what you sow."
I pulled her blonde hair by the roots, stretching her body up from its knees. Saw Duncan's eyes watching as I took my claws to her throat, and ripped through muscle, ligament and tissue. His sight widened in horror, a scream dying on his lips, awake in his own nightmare as reality knocked to take over a dream. I dropped her throat to the floor, blood that spurted like fountain, and dug those claws back in to cut through the bone to her spine. Her head tumbled to the mud, her body falling in a heap, as I released both halves like rubbish to be discarded. I turned to the Scot on his knees, holding his head in his hands, rocking as if he watched his own death over and over again. I puffed out a cloud of smoke, laughing as it settled above his head, entranced by the heavy fog that built dread in its purest form.
I knelt beside him, waiting until his eyes were on me - staring in terror at the black that spilled from my face. "He took my brother," I tapped him on the shoulder. "I'm going to take his."
Such a big wolf brought down to earth. A strong male that fell so far alone.
I suppose I should have been concerned over my actions, but as I held his face in one hand and stabbed a claw into his left eye, I found nothing to be overly concerning. I lost my way in my vengeance, became everything I'd sworn not to be, I held his head under thick black water as he suffocated himself in fear. The wolf wanted his head - this man that had taken her mate, I was more interested in torture, a drawn out end to his intricate games. I tapped a path to his chest, found it heaving in panicked breaths, a body so overcome by falsities of terror its responses forced him to weakness. I clawed a hole in his shirt, found skin that begged to be red, and slowly pushed a talon in to match the one that pushed at his brain.
I found his heart with my claw, like he'd found mine with his. Destroyed it with stabbing slices - like he'd destroyed mine to pieces.
I turned his brain to nothing, just greyness riddled with holes, no chance of repair for the organ that died with each scar from the wolf and her knives. She got hers as I got mine, some duel work of revenge, a synchronization of attack and a vindictiveness that froze. I pulled my hands free of blood, covered in that accusing colour, and turned to the wolf at my back.
Conall lay on the floor, curled on his side with claws spread wide, a few strands of pure white hair stuck between his teeth. Charlie sat to his right, sword across his lap, leaning against a rock in the mud with his head thrown back to the night. Ty lay on his back, eyes closed to the stars, skin that glowed in the moon's embrace and shone some bright light of soul.
Lane slumped to my right, face covered in mud, arms thrown out to the side with claws that were stained in blood.
Ty's blood.
I narrowed my eyes at the wolf, seething that fury once more, a never ending pit of the darkest hate that fed a being so wrapped up in reckoning.
"Charlie." I hissed at the guard in the mud.
He turned my way and raised an eyebrow.
"Get that wolf," I pointed to Lane. "Wake Conall up, we're leaving."
He squinted his gaze my way, probably a little curious about the raving beast that turned my voice to stone. "Are you alright, Sasha?"
I smiled at him, slightly off. Like the black fire had melted and twisted my features to scorn. "Oh. I'll be just fine, Charlie."
He stood to pick Lane's body up, nudging Conall's sleepy wolf with his foot. I stared as he grabbed the blonds bicep and hauled him up off the floor.
Just fine.
Epilogue
"We should call Katherine." Arya eyed me carefully as she spoke. "She got through to him last time."
Let him break.
"What do you think, Sasha? Should we call her?"
Leave him to rot in there.
"We could try it at least, see if he remembers her." She turned those green eyes on me again, perhaps looking for something more than the numb kind of fury that seemed to hover over my expression and turn it so cold.
I turned back to the window, the amber glow of morning spreading life on a landscape still clinging to ashen frost. Women walked the far wall, talking in hushed whispers among themselves, hiding their voices from beasts with big ears. Perhaps they wondered where one of their members had gone - what had happened to the pale, blonde female. Maybe they speculated on the three bedraggled figures that had carried two limp forms, a return journey in the early hours of the morning so few days ago. Or possibly their thoughts turned only to their brand new Alpha, and just what had taken him away.
I took him away.
"You need to tell me what you're thinking, what you're planning to do."
I sighed with my back still turned, wishing she'd just leave me alone. I found the constant presence of people a drain on fragile patience. "I'm not going to do anything."
She coughed quietly. "You can't just leave him there, Sasha. It's not right."
That fine thread of patience snapped just a little. "I can do whatever the hell I want. He's mine, and that means It's my decision."
She shuffled her feet, a soft swishing by the door. "You'll regret this, I know you will. It's not meant to be this way."
I laughed, letting that coldness seep through my voice. "No. It wasn't meant to be this way, but this is what I've been left with."
Bitter.
Is this bitterness? Is that what I feel? I know it's not pain - never that. I know how anger grows, its mutating path of destruction. I know how sadness falls, its suffocating flow of unbearable depletion. I flit between both emotions, as if the empath were broken and felt only these two. Some vicious circle of doom that only brings more anger and sadness, in greater quantities than the last pass around.
"I know you're angry - it's okay to be angry, but don't let it turn you into this person."
I understood where she was coming from, I could even take the advice she threw at me - only from this girl that knew such anger herself. But how do I stop something that I don't want to stop? "I can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved."
"Are you talking about Lane, or yourself?"
Smart woman.
I don't even know the answer to that one.
I gave her a noncommittal shrug and allowed the conversation to wither away, a debate I had no solution to. Surely this isn't what she wanted - fate. I couldn't imagine the lesson she was trying to teach me. Hadn't I lost enough already? At what point is it okay to give up and waste away? Stop fighting the hurdles she throws my way, stop taking the beatings she doles out while smiling...just stop. Perhaps that's all she's asking for; a bitter end to my muddied life.
Arya huffed from the doorway, "this is bullshit."
I managed a tilt of my head in question.
"You're annoying me."
I snorted rather roughly.
"I feel like I'm talking to myself." She huffed again. "Your choices are simple: you can kill him, forgive him or walk away. It's not the choices you don't understand, it's the answer."
Heavy thuds came from the end of the long hallway, a large body that made its way to the office.
"It's all about choices, Sasha. And they're yours to make. In the end, the only thing that matters is what will make you happy, what you can live with. Ignore everything else - it's bullshit."
I gave a slight nod in acknowledgment, allowing her some response for breaking it down to its simplest terms.
That heavy tread stopped beside Arya at the door.
"Feeding time?" She asked.
A grunt came in answer. "I feel like a zoo keeper." Conall's lilting voice thawed that chill the tiniest amount.
Arya huffed a small laugh and hummed. "I'd imagine so." She took a step back as I turned to see the large Irishman holding a tray of raw meat. "Carver and I are going back with the guard," she swept her eyes to me. "Charlie needs to stay here for a while, figure out some things."
Yes, that wolf certainly needed to sort out a lot of his issues. I nodded at her retreating figure, "he can stay as long as he likes."
She turned with a tiny smile and left to find her mate, a man I'm sure was waiting not so patiently for her return.
"What do yer say, little pirate? Want tae feed the beast wit' me?" He scrubbed a hand over his stomach as he spoke, a wince twitching on his face. "Bastard Faery been repeating on me fer days."
I screwed my face up and grimaced at him, truly disgusted that he seemed so unconcerned his wolf had eaten the female. Although, I'd never rubbish his stories again.
I looked to the tray in his hands, blood dripping from the edge, and nodded at his question. "I can do that."
He waited for me to follow him out of the office, walking the long road to the basement, my boots tapping a rhythm on the wooden flooring. The switch from light and airy to dank and dirty was so completely absolute it seemed a different place. Like I'd been taken from the house and dropped into some prison of torture, a fitting surround for the beast I housed inside. My tapping shoes became scuffling scrapes as wood changed to dirt.
"Yer want tae be alone, little pirate?"
I shook my head, "no. I'm okay with you s
taying."
He opened the steel door and let me enter first, shutting it tight behind him. The rumbling growl filled the room as soon as my scent breached the air. The cell was partitioned in two, heavy metal bars that caged a twenty foot square and sectioned off in the middle - a single cell made double by the solid steel wall in the centre. Black chains ran the length of the metal, wrapped heavily around each bar, melted to each individual pole and impossible to break for a wolf.