Page 71 of The Deathless One
“I’m fine,” she muttered, wincing as the wound on her side throbbed with her heartbeat. “Or mostly fine.”
“This is much more difficult the second time. I hope you realize that,” he growled as he ran his hands down her sides again. “It shouldn’t have been so difficult to find you. I lost you, nightmare.”
“Apparently I just show up wherever I want.” Her joke fell on deaf ears.
Elric frowned down at the blood still coating her torso. More of it poured out of her, no matter how hard she pressed on it. “You shouldn’t be able to bleed in the shadow realm.”
“Well, I definitely am.”
“It’s impossible.”
“It’s not like I’m trying to—”
He interrupted her with another grumbling growl before reaching into the shadows of his chest, pulling until a thread of darkness ripped off him, a bit of his magic for her to use, just like all the other creatures in his life. She’d thought perhaps it would look like a leech. But no, instead, it was just a thread.
He had pulled on the loom of fate and held out a way to tie them together even more than they already were.
Jessamine was the fool who grabbed on.
She let the magic coil around her finger as she pulled it toward her wound. Together, they watched as she gently laid the black thread over the angry gash on her side. The magic wriggled underneath her skin, eerily seeming like an invisible hand stitching her back together, and immediately she felt the pain ease.
“Oh,” she moaned, her eyes rolling back in her head at the sudden relief. “That is so much better.”
Silence rang louder than thunder. When she focused on him again, she watched a hungry gaze that roved over her entire form.
“Again,” Elric growled.
This time, she didn’t hesitate when he reached out a thread for her to take. She placed it on her jaw, feeling the ache disappear and seeing the healing in the reflection of his eyes. She had no more hurts to heal, but he still held out another. Then another. Threads that should have felt like chains wrapping around her wrists, but she couldn’t view them as that.
They were a woven armor that she fastened on, strand by strand. An armor he created to protect her.
Even if he couldn’t keep her safe in the realm of the living, at least until she broke down and summoned him, she knew he would do so here.
In his arms. Newly alive and burning under his heated gaze as he stared at her like she was his reason for being.
“Elric?” she whispered. “It was worse the second time.”
“What was?”
“Dying.”
Those dark eyes met hers, a little too serious and a little too heartbreaking. He had known. At the very last moment she’d seen the absolute anguish in his expression.
And yet, he had still disappeared. Leaving her to die alone in an alleyway for the second time.
“Why?” she asked, her voice cracking around the word.
She didn’t know what she was asking. Why had he left? She knew the answer to that. He’d already explained it. If he hadn’t come back here,then she would have died for real. Why had it hurt? Well, it was death. Of course it hurt.
But he blew out a long breath, and his fingers spasmed against her back. “Everyone has to die alone, nightmare. No god can stand with you at the end, no matter how devout a worshipper you are. It’s just you, and the end. None of us, no god or goddess, can ever understand what that feels like. We will never die and go wherever it is you go. And you always will.”
The words punched her in the gut.
Don’t get too close, because he was always going to live, and she was always going to die.
“But I didn’t die,” she whispered. “Twice now.”
He blew out a long sigh, then touched their foreheads together. “A dead woman walking is not the same as a living one, Jessamine.”
