Raoul.
Blood sprayed hot across her chest. Hers she thought at first, until the wolf’s body fell away, her knife going with it.
She’d severed the Were’s jugular, the move accomplishing it one she’d practiced so many times with Matthew that it needed no thought.
Sudden weakness drove her downward, onto her knees next to the furred corpse. Blood poured over her hand.
She stared, uncomprehending at first.
Hers, she realized. Heart rate spiking, pumping more of it through the place where the Were’s fangs must have punctured her artery.
She had minutes before she’d bleed out.
She dropped her second knife.
Increasing weakness and loss of focus made it a struggle to free her belt and get it around her arm. Ropes and knots were second nature because of the Constellation. All she needed to do was—
Pain slammed into her, a thunderous blow to her head knocking her off her knees and to the ground.
The belt fell away from her arm.
Blood pulsed, escaped in a rush again.
Jurgen crouched over her, rage and victory in his eyes as he held his gun to her forehead, the bare skin of his wrist only inches away. “Tell me where your companion is and I’ll let you tie the artery off. Otherwise, bitch, you bleed out.”
Too late.
She was cold. So very cold. She could barely feel her arms and legs. With a thought she found the spider. It hovered over her heart and seemed to grow larger, as if it stretched to meet the blackness forming at the edges of her consciousness, as if it were anxious to escape the tether of a mortal body.
No! she screamed silently, impressions flooding her mind.
Tir finding her in front of the mirror after her visit to the witches and showing her with pleasure just how thoroughly bound together her soul and flesh were.
The spider repeatedly seeking his touch.
The sense of unity she felt with it when she entered the vision place.
At the edge of death, all denial slid away. There was no separation of soul and mark. They were mirror images of each other.
Her acceptance of it brought the fusion of name and body, mind and spirit. And using the mark was as easy as drawing her knife.
It came to her hand, to her fingertips—a manifestation of who she was, what she was. And with the last of her strength she touched the bare skin of Jurgen’s wrist.
He jerked away from her, the bullet from his gun hitting the dirt next to her head. And then he was screaming, writhing. But there was no room for satisfaction. Only regret.
Tir, she wept, her last thoughts of him as darkness engulfed her, bringing with it heat and the roar of the fire calling her home.
Twenty-three
ARAÑA. Her name whipped across Tir’s soul. Suddenly. Intensely. Making him rise from the chair so violently it crashed to the floor.
The force of his need to go to her refocused his fury, his terror at having translated the last of the glyphs and found no hint of how to free himself from the collar.
She was hurt. Dying.
Whatever bound them together, so often turning her emotions into his, was stretching, thinning, dissolving.
Regret swamped him. Hers morphing into his.
It was acute. Excruciating. Destroying.
The sense of loss drove him to his knees, the bookseller and shop fading away as if they no longer existed on the same physical plane he inhabited.
No! Tir screamed silently. Willing Araña healed as he’d willed the boy attacked by the chupacabra healed. Willing her whole, safely returned to him.
His scream of pain became one note among a thousand of them—jarring, discordant sounds creating an agony unlike any he’d known.
It lasted a lifetime and an instant.
Ended abruptly. Completely. As if the choice whether she lived or died was no longer in his power to change.
He rose to his feet. Shaky, swaying, empty of all emotion and thought, all awareness, until the bookseller’s movement brought him back to the present.
“Return the book to the safe. I have no further use of it,” Tir said as he hurried toward the door, toward the boat where Araña had said she’d wait for him.
“WAS revenge as sweet as you thought it would be, daughter? Was it worth the price you paid to gain it?”
The demon’s voice pulled Araña from blackness and into the same long corridor with its ever-changing tapestry where they’d met before. But unlike before, the threads were a vision seen through the shimmer of flames. They were like a reflection on water, there but not there, just as she was there but not there.
She was truly formless, her body an illusion created by her mind as it clung desperately to the memory of who she’d been.
Soon all vestiges of it would be burned away. She knew it as surely as she knew the demon behind her shouldn’t have been able to stop her descent into the fire.
It wasn’t the Hell she’d been threatened with and beat because of, or the place of eternal damnation and torment she’d been taught to fear, but the molten womb of the birthplace she’d dreamed about. And it held no terror for her, only the promise of rebirth.
Her soul had no place among the living, the proof of it was in front of her—in the fiery thread that extinguished in a flare of blue, as if in the instant of her death, when she’d called Tir’s name, he’d been aware of her passing and called her name as well.
Araña’s gaze lingered for only an instant before searching for the blue-black thread that was his. There was joy in not seeing it—in knowing the texts had contained the incantation to free him from the collar. But there was pain, too, intense regret at not having had a chance to say good-bye, to feel his body joined to hers one last time as they shared a final kiss, shared breath and spirit before being parted.
“Look further into the future if you want to see his life enter the weave again,” the demon said, and Araña obeyed, feeling the phantom tightening of her throat when she saw the thread enter the pattern. Disappearing and reappearing only when it was alongside another, this one jagged ice where hers had been flame.
“Is he free of the collar?” she asked, afraid she already knew the answer by how closely the twining of the two threads mimicked the way hers had done with Tir’s.
“No. Perhaps his future companion will discover a way to free him. Perhaps not.”
Araña felt the sharp stab of jealousy, but still she asked, “How long until he has another chance at freedom?”
“Do you care so much? He’s the enemy of our kind. In all likelihood he would have killed you if he’d gained his freedom from the collar.”
Memories swelled up, swamping Araña in moments of tenderness and passion, companionship and possession, filling her with bitter-sweet emotion that she’d never experience any of it again with him. “He wouldn’t have.”
“You sound so sure, daughter. But once you would have sworn vengeance against him in the same way you did to honor the two human men you loved.”
“Never.”
Tir’s name was so thoroughly woven into her soul she knew she was incapable of killing him.
Her confidence was met with laughter. “Once you would have looked at the collar around his neck and viewed it as a victory by the House of the Scorpion. You would have celebrated Abijah en Rumjal’s accomplishment along with the rest of us.”
Shock sliced through Araña, as well as the faded remnants of terror. “The demon the maze owner commands?”
“He may well be demon by now,” came the cryptic reply. “He’s been bound to human will for thousands of years. He remembers all the deeds he’s been forced to perform along with what came before. If the collar is removed, our enemy will also remember our shared history.”