Page 113 of Her Dreadful Will
“Achan, you exquisite monster,” she whispered, patting his face. “Wake up.”
He didn’t seem to be breathing. She tore open his shirt and scraped the necklace of teeth aside, but her shaking hands couldn’t gauge whether or not his chest was moving, so she held the screen of her phone near his lips and then wiped her finger across it. There was the slightest bit of condensation on the screen from his faint breath.
Gingerly she prodded up one of his eyelids—and nearly screamed. The eyeball beneath was flooded entirely black.
“Why is this happening?” she muttered. “Chaos feeds on chaos. Taking it in should make him stronger, right? Unless—” He had said something about varying his magical “diet” with moonlight energy, for balance. To keep himself sane and protected from the chaos swirling through his system.
“I need to be a channel again,” Soleil said aloud. “I have to channel moonlight from me to you, you stupid man, sweet man—why did you have to show off? Idiot.”
No time to find Rick, if he was even still in the park—no time to contact anyone else for a proper circle. She would have to manage alone.
Cursing, she stripped off her shirt and jeans, and then she undressed Achan down to his boxers. Of course when she needed a pen, she didn’t have one, but she had a stick of eyeliner, so she used it to sketch a few symbols for life, energy, and vitality on his body.
Then she sat beside him in the grass, her throat tight and eyes aching, and she looked up at the waning moon.
“I don’t want to dance,” she whispered. “I don’t want to hear music, unless it’s his voice. So just—give me some radiance already, would you? I’m trying to be a channel. I’m as open as I can be. Come on.”
Nothing.
She felt nothing, no response from the slim silver crescent overhead.
“You’re going to make me do it all by myself, aren’t you?” she said. “Fine.”
She unlocked her phone and selected the Spotify app.
“All right, you skinny bastard,” she muttered, staring down at Achan. “It takes two to do this. So you’ll have to dance with me.”
She activated her Viking ring, and its power surged through her tendons and muscles, swelling them with strength. She hooked her hands into Achan’s armpits and lifted him upright. With the magic flowing through her, it was surprisingly easy. Achan’s head sagged, nodding against her shoulder. She kept one arm around his back and clasped his wrist with the other, and she began to dance, a slow sway from side to side, and then a careful turn, carrying him with her.
It was clumsy, and pathetic. Anyone watching would have laughed. But the music crooned and curled around them, tinny and mechanical through the phone speakers, but no less entrancing. The light of the waning moon limned their bodies in silver and gleamed off the shiny leaves and pale blossoms of the unnatural spring he’d created. The forest was quiet, stripped of the crawling things that made it home, things that didn’t dare return, not yet. Even without her bog oak ring, Soleil sensed the traumatized stillness of the forest, its stunned paralysis in the wake of its nightmare. The reversal of the pain didn’t make it any less real.
But if the end result was better, and more beautiful, maybe the agony was worthwhile.
She kept swaying with Achan, holding him against her, dipping and swerving. Her strength was wearing thin; as the Viking magic faded, Achan’s flesh and bone grew heavier. She closed her eyes and searched for the glimmering white magic of the moon, so much fainter now that it had waned nearly to nothing.
“Je vous en prie,” she whispered. “Please. You’re his last chance.”
A sliver of brilliance opened inside her—a hairline crack through which radiance seeped into her soul. She welcomed it, widened it; she tightened her grip on Achan’s hands and whirled him in a tight circle with her. The magic trickled through, a weak shadow of what she’d received during the other dances, but it would have to be enough. Soleil didn’t let herself absorb it; she thrust it outward immediately, pushing it through her skin into Achan’s, hoping that the influx of radiance would dilute the chaos inside him.
Her muscles were weakening. She was losing her grip on him. His hair slid soft against her shoulder as she fought to hold him up, to infuse more radiance into him. How the hell could a guy this skinny be so damn heavy? Finally her legs gave way and she collapsed on her back, with Achan’s body draped over hers. His skin was smooth, and cooler than she’d expected. Cooling, because—because he was—
No, he couldn’t be dead.
But his face—propped half on her arm, half on her breast—looked so terribly white. Like the face of a beautiful god carved from ice. She couldn’t look at him, so she rocked her head back against the grass and stared up at the waning moon instead. A hot tear traced over her temple and ran into her ear.
She could call 911. Maybe someone could help him. She should try CPR—she hadn’t been trained for it, but she had seen it done on TV enough times. It couldn’t be that hard, right?
But there was nothing physically wrong with him. This was a magical malady, one she couldn’t repair. One that no one could fix. Mentally she reviewed the supplies she kept in her car—none of them would help, and his car’s emergency kit apparently lacked the right herbs, because he’d had to raid her workroom when he made the siphoning paste.
Soleil ground her teeth so hard her jaw hurt. She would try anything, do everything possible, until there was no hope left.
911, then CPR.
Get up, Soleil. Get your phone and call for help.
First, she allowed herself one single sob. It hitched in her chest, bubbling out of her throat, a broken whimper of pain.
A low male voice. “I was going to tell you I’m fine, but it’s just so damn comfortable here—”
