Falcon’s kind face dropped the worry and fear for a warm smile. He kissed my head and smoothed his own tears from his cheeks. “You scared me,” he said.

  “Where am I?” I asked, but as the darkness gave way to the light, I saw a pale pink circle staring back up at me from a very naked chest. “Oh my God!” I covered my breasts. “What happened?”

  “Hang on,” he said, tucking his phone against his ear. “Jason? Yeah. I got her.”

  “Falcon?” I urged with pleading eyes. “What happened?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” he said, then went back to his phone conversation, quickly telling Jason where to find us and adding that we’d need blood. Well, that I’d need blood.

  I looked down my stained white flesh as the baby’s movements rippled a red handprint, and my body surfed the length of my mind then as I took in my surroundings, slowly piecing the events of last night together—drawing reality from the darkened dream world it had slipped into. David’s perfect lips had been on mine. His hands had touched my skin in ways I’d only prayed for for so long now. And, at the end of it all, he’d successfully taken my life, leaving me lost and wandering in a place I knew to be the Valley of Death. How I knew that, I don’t know.

  The birds prattled on overhead, chirpy and delightful, and the cool dawn air moved down over my toes and drew tiny bumps up under the hairs on my arms. Had I not been immortal, my death would have been final. My death would have come at his hands—the man I loved. The man I married.

  Falcon cradled me closer, hanging up the phone. “You’re freezing.”

  I could feel the cold, but couldn't really feel it affect my body—didn't notice the shivering until Falcon let go of me to take off his white button-down shirt. He laid it across my legs and chest and wrapped his arms around me again, settling back on his knees on the earthy path in the middle of the clearing.

  “Ara, what happened?”

  “I…” My soul sunk then, the entire event trickling from my nightmare and filling me with shock. My trembling hand rose to cover a sharp, embarrassing sob, and the tears slipped between my fingertips, blending with the dried blood on my lip. “David killed me.”

  “David?” Falcon looked around then as if the perpetrator might still be here. “What else did he do to you?”

  “I don’t know.” I focused on all the parts of my body that hurt as Falcon helped me sit up on the ground, the dirt and twigs pressing against the softest part between my legs. I wasn't sore there, or mucky, so I was pretty sure David's uncontrolled vampire self didn't have its way with me while I was unconscious, but I couldn’t remember anything after his teeth went into my neck.

  “Ara.” Falcon cupped both my cheeks and forced my eyes up to meet his. “Why are you naked? Did he…?”

  “He might be an asshole,” Jason said, appearing in a blast of wind and raining leaves then, and stood for only a second to take in the scene before bending and slitting his wrist open with his own teeth. “But he is not a rapist. Drink.”

  My mouth watered and the burn in my throat seared, but as I leaned forward and pressed my lips to his skin, the sun blinded me with a brightness so sharp I drew back. “No.”

  “Ara—”

  “No. I can’t wait for another dawn to find out how to fix him.” I got onto my hands and knees, wobbly and weak, and Falcon grabbed my necklace as he helped me to my feet. “I need to get to the Stone. I need to ask for its wisdom.”

  “Ara, what are you talking about?” Jason tried to cover me with Falcon’s shirt again, but I shrugged it away and stood baring all in front of them both.

  “David’s been cursed. He needs help.”

  Two half shocked, half confused faces stood staring back at me, Jason’s eyes carefully avoiding my naked form, while Fal seemed unfazed by it.

  “What makes you think he’s cursed?” Falcon asked absently, studying the broken link of my chain. “And what does that have to do with you going missing from your bed in the middle of the night?”

  “I’ll explain later.”

  “Ara?” they both called as I charged forward.

  ***

  Falcon’s shirt draped my shoulders as I fell back on my knees, panting. But the gash on my hand, as I drew the blood offering away from the Stone, did not heal as usual. I fingered the gaping red wound, wincing from the prickly sting.

  “Ara, what did you see?” Falcon asked, squatting down beside me, his shadow blending with mine against the Stone.

  The vision resurfaced with sudden clarity. “David.”

  “What about him?”

  I coughed out a hard breath, drawing a few heavy ones in to replace it, as flashes of horror repeated over and over again in my mind: a vampire stumbling through the dark, searching for something he couldn't find. Might never find. But I didn’t know what. And as time passed, neither did he.

  When he reached the border of the forest, a piercing blade of agony ripped through his stomach, emanating from the inky text on his back. He let out a mighty, roaring scream and reached back, tearing his shirt apart with curved fingertips, scratching at his flesh to stop the pain.

  I covered my eyes, hearing his cries for help ring out in my mind like a reminder of an unchangeable disaster. “He fell to his knees,” I said, watching the nightmare replay: dying hope withered his heart as he looked back at the border of the forest, knowing he should return but desperate to leave—to get somewhere. “He needed to do something.”

  “What?” Falcon asked.

  “He needed help!” I yelled, but it was his deep, desperate voice that echoed, taking my mind through David’s eyes to the grassy field beside the forest. He searched frantically, but no one came for him. No one heard him cry. No one except the lone oak tree in the middle of what once was an orchard.

  He tried to stand but stumbled forward, landing harder than before, heaving and choking on the blast of red vomit projecting from his lips with a force as wild as nature. His hands turned upward as if to cradle the liquid in a desperate last attempt to hold on to all that represented hope for him just minutes ago. And weakened, beyond the level of suffering any man could stand to return from, he fell to the floor, writhing and squirming as it consumed him.

  I got to my feet. “He’s at the border on the other side.”

  “Who?” Falcon stood up beside Jason.

  “David.” I looked right at Jason and showed him everything the Stone just showed me. “He needs help.”

  Jason moved before I finished my last word, and Falcon took step just as quickly. We charged through the sacred land, brushing branches aside as they reached across the path, like they meant to hold us there or maybe to slow us down.

  “Let us pass!” I demanded, and the branches hesitantly receded. But the small hope I had that David recovered and stumbled back into the safety of the forest border to find me died as we broke through the tree line and into the clearing.

  Ahead of us, Jason fell to his knees and covered his head with his hands. I didn’t see the dark blue of David’s jeans and his bare, blood-covered feet until my mind completely took in Jason’s posture, registering the imminent horror before I even came to a stop.

  Dirt spat up at my feet in a rubbly rainbow, covering David’s bloodied skin in brown, and my heart almost completely stopped with my legs. A Hollywood makeup artist couldn’t have fashioned a scene more gruesome.

  I sunk to my knees too, my body not knowing what else to possibly do, while my hands hovered near David’s bare hip, bony and jutting out just above his blood-soaked jeans. He lay twisted and slightly mangled in a patch of ground that wasn't quite dirt or grass, not quite forest, not quite field, his legs tucked sideways, pulled up to his waist, his arms out wide like the wings of an eagle. His white shirt hung in shredded scraps and surrounded his form, soiled so red that, at first, they appeared to be strips of flesh. His jaw looked broken, hanging open just a little too far, while his hair, matted with dried blood, stuck to his lashes. But his hands… His hands were the breaking point for my heart. Those loving, tender and long fingers that could soothe my wildest nightmares and bring me back to the light no matter how great the terror, laid curled over, tight like a frozen corpse that suffered an horrific end, his nails slightly raised from the beds with fat remnants of both shirt and flesh.

  I took a sharp, jagged breath and cried into my hand.

  “How did this happen?” Jason asked numbly, a tear slipping into the corner of his lip.

  “Morgana,” was all I could say, offering him the prologue to this ending.

  “What did she do to him, Ara?” Falcon knelt beside me, looking at my face rather than the mess my eyes were locked to.

  “See this Mark?” Jason pointed to David’s shredded back: the skin surrounding the otherwise untouched block of black text was gouged deeply, bone and sinew showing through like fat legs in fishnet stockings. “It’s not the Mark of the Goddess, Falcon. It’s witchcraft. Linked, I think—” He reached over and lifted Falcon’s shirt off my back, making me jump a little. “To Ara.”

  Falcon leaned around and looked at my back, running his thumb down the small symbol that’d been left behind after my Mark of Betrayal faded. “They’re the same.” His voice questioned his eyes.

  “What are?” I tried to look at my back, but my head wouldn't turn that far.

  “This symbol and the one on David’s back. Look—” Falcon pointed to the top and bottom symbols on David’s Mark. “They match yours.”

  “Whatever the spell Morgana placed on David, Ara,” Jason said. “It’s either linked to you or has been placed on you too.”

  “What do we do?” I asked, panicked. “The Stone didn’t show me how to fix him.”

  “Nothing.” Falcon stood. “It’s her spell. She needs to undo it.”

  “Come on.” Jason stood up heavily, like a human, and offered me his hand. “I’ll take you to get cleaned up. Falcon can see to David.”

  “No.” I smacked his hand away and laid on the ground, curling around the top of David’s head so we looked like two commas laying head-to-head. “I’m staying with him. You go get help.”

  Jason looked at Falcon.

  “Just go,” Falcon said. “I’ll stay here.”

  Jason nodded and walked away stiffly, his fists gathered in tight balls by his sides.

  “Give him blood, Ara.” Falcon took to one knee beside me.

  “I can’t,” I cried, wiping David’s cheek and sweeping his hair away from his eyes. “He rejects it if he’s outside the forest.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “See all this blood?” I motioned to the splatter of red all around David. “It’s mine. He threw it up. The forest protected him from the magic that’s making him reject it.”

  Falcon sat down heavily in the grass, his head in his hands, elbows on his knees.

  “He’s been suffering like this for weeks now, Falcon.” I paused a moment, smoothing my thumb across David’s fluttering eyelid. “That’s why he’s so thin—why he’s been so damn moody with everyone.”

  “Well, why don’t we just drag him a few feet into the forest and heal him up?”

  I moved my head slowly. “No point. Morgana needs to lift the spell. She can’t do that in there—her magic won’t work. So he will, eventually, have to come out here. And then he’ll hate me and he won’t want help. While he’s unconscious he has no say.”

  The hard breath from Falcon’s lips passed my bare legs and moved David’s hair a little. “Then we’re gonna need Jason to keep him unconscious while we clean him up.”

  I nodded slowly, weakly. “How could she, Falcon?” I held my breath for a second, hot tears blurring the horror until they slipped past my lashes. “Look what she’s done to him.”

  He reached across and drew his shirt down over my bottom, leaving his hand there on my hip for a second. “We’ll make her pay, Ara. I promise.”

  I nodded, curling a little more around David, cocooning him in every inch of me that wished he’d just be okay.

  ***

  Somewhere in the weight of time passing I drifted to sleep, breathing the copper-scent of blood that passed through David’s lips. It warmed my heart to think that his body resorted by default to such human actions as breathing, especially since he refused to acknowledge any past or present connections to this lesser form. At the end of it all, despite his dark side and despite the fact that his body would live forever, he was ultimately and undeniably human.

  My eyes opened slowly as I felt a familiar sense of comfort before I even smelled my dad approaching. His light footsteps carried him down the small hill from the manor while the warm air of reassurance draped my shoulders like a blanket. Arthur and Jason stood on either side of him, both stopping a few feet away while my dad continued on.

  “This explains a lot,” he said, rubbing the bone above his eye.

  “I had hoped this wouldn't happen again,” Arthur mumbled, snapping out of his trance long enough to move forward and kneel beside his nephew.

  My head snapped up and I crawled up onto my knees. “What do you mean again?”

  He touched David’s forehead with a firm hand. “This happened while you were staying at Vicki’s—after the funeral.”

  “It did?”

  “Yes, but his intolerance for human blood hadn’t completely taken hold yet, so I managed to heal him up and get him back to you before you woke.”

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me this was happening?” I looked Arthur right in the eye, meaning you. “How could you let him suffer like this? He—”

  “Amara, he was Marked because he’s been forbidden to have you—by the goddess herself,” Arthur stated firmly. “There was nothing to report.”

  “That’s what you believe?” I asked. “You’re wrong. He—”

  “He was punished—this is his penance for overstepping the boundaries in either his actions or his thoughts.”

  “What boundaries?” I yelled, closing Falcon’s shirt over my chest.

  His shoulders dropped as if a heavy burden just lifted. “Amara, in truth, David has found it … difficult to leave you alone—to let you get on with your new life,” he started. “And, more often than not, he’s been unable to distract himself with other things. In those times, when his heart most yearns for you, he is made to suffer more than any one man could possibly bear. We’ve come to call these lapses in strength ‘boundaries.’”

  I looked down at the gaping scrapes across David’s collarbones. “You should have told me, Arthur. Don’t you see? This isn’t the work of Nature. It’s witchcraft. He’s been suffering this entire time for no reason!”

  “Witchcraft?” His eyes shot to my dad. “Could this be true?”

  “From the looks of this mess, I’d say it is entirely true,” Dad said flatly, exhaling after. “A very clever and quite powerful little spell, too.”

  “How could we not have known it was witchcraft?” I looked up at my dad as if, maybe, somewhere in that youthful face that didn't match his smell or his voice, he could make some sense of all of this. But he shook his head, so I turned on Arthur. “Arthur, how can you not have known?”

  “Don't blame Arthur,” Dad said. “The Markings Morgana has used are very similar to the ones we see in Nature’s Scripture. No one could have made the connection.”

  “Someone should have.”

  “Well, they didn’t. Not even I.” Dad stepped away, rubbing his face like the action might refresh the situation; clear his head. “Look, Arthur and I will talk to Morgana. You two get the king cleaned up.” He snapped his fingers at the mess, then at Falcon and Jason. “Meet us back in the royal chambers in an hour.”

  “Yes, My Lord.” Falcon bowed.

  Dad and Arthur turned and walked side-by-side back up the hill.

  ***

  Darkness spilled into the corridor from my room, mingling with the sun coming through the west-facing windows. I stood up and went to walk in, but Falcon stopped me, blocking my path as he closed my bedroom door behind him.

  “How is he?”

  “He’s stable,” he said. “But he’s in pretty bad condition. We need to get Morgana to undo that spell quickly so we can give him blood.”

  “Dad’s still interrogating her.” I pointed down the hall. “They’ve taken her to Arthur’s clinic but, from what Blade said, she’s denying everything.”

  Falcon’s jaw tightened. “Give me five minutes with her. She’ll talk.”

  I managed a little smile then, and Fal smiled too, his eyes moving down my body after to my light denim jeans and the soft pink top that gathered just under my breasts, falling softly over my little potbelly.

  “You certainly look better.”

  I gathered my damp hair and piled it on top of my head, letting it all fall down a second later into a mass of curls. “I showered in Em’s room.”

  “I thought you were going to Arthur’s room.”

  “I…” I buried my lip between my teeth, trying to think of a good explanation as to why I couldn't bear to shower in a place where the man who … where Arthur had also been naked. The thought made my skin hot with shame and the bile rise in my throat, taking me back to the Training Hall and flooding me with the sickening sensation of his finger slipping up inside me. “I just needed someone to talk to. Em’s always good for that.”

  “Fair enough. So, where’s Ryder?” He looked down the corridor. “I thought he was meeting us up here.”

  “He’s waiting outside the infirmary in case Blade and Dad need any help.”

  “Lord Eden, Ara,” he reminded me in a stern but loving tone.

  I cringed at my own carelessness. “Sorry. I keep forgetting.”

  “Today, my little queen—” he laid his hands firmly on my shoulders, “—that is perfectly acceptable.”

  “Thanks.” I cupped his hand. “Now, let me in to see my husband, or I’ll rip this hand off.”

  Falcon laughed, his easy smile revealing a set of straight white teeth. “I guess you better come in then.”

 

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