I hold up my hands, one aimed at the creature before me and the other at the one behind me.
“No!” Acari’s voice pierces the air like an arrow. “Don’t kill them!”
I realize dumbly that he means the wolves. His caution and stupidity nearly makes me lose my focus, almost missing the moment when the wolves pounce. Fortunately, I recover enough to aim my hands in a way that will avoid me being wounded in the process. I aim high and push on one of the wolves’ noses. On the other, I lean back and touch its throat as it whirls by me.
Agonized screams tear into the silent night, drowning out Veltuur’s roar.
I whip around to find the fourth wolf sinking its teeth into Acari’s chest, around his shoulder. The creature shakes him like a ragdoll and Acari’s screams sink deeper, wrenching from his belly. As I race toward them, Acari tries shoving the wolf’s face away from him, but all he manages to accomplish is making the creature lock his jaw tighter.
I am no hunter, and I have limited experience with wolves or most creatures of the living realm, but I am familiar enough with death to recognize when it’s close. One more snap of the wolf’s teeth, perhaps a transfer from Acari’s shoulder to his throat, and the young prince will die.
I recognize the panic thrashing inside me only because I felt this same sense of desperation the day I killed that man. It’s the kind of rushing and heightening of senses that somehow manages to make everything seem like it’s moving too fast and too slow at the same time.
If I can just get close enough, I can kill the wolf with one touch. But I’m too far away. It has the time it needs to snap his neck before I’d even get close.
Need courses through me, dark and unbounding, begging for the wolf to die. I can feel my power answer it, agreeing to claim a life that wasn’t meant to be mine. Darkness spills inside me, coursing down my legs and arms and up my neck, black and inky, until I am a kettle of boiling water, ready to overflow.
Before the wolf can make its next move, I scream, pushing against my own skin. Smoke, black as night, fires out of my hands with such force that I am knocked backward, but not before I watch the blast hit the wolf in the head, engulfing both its ears and eyes in the opaque beam of concentrated death. The power of it blasts the wolf backward too, its limp body crashing into the trees behind it.
I gape down at my hands like they are foreign. Never before have I seen this kind of power. My magic has always only ever come on contact, never by my own command and never like some projectile at my disposal.
Acari crashes to the ground in a heap of limp limbs.
“Acari!”
There is no restraint when I run to his side, skidding to a stop at my knees. I almost pick up his head to cradle it in my lap, but fortunately I remember myself before inadvertently killing him.
When his eyes flutter, feathers dance inside my chest. They are quickly turned to ice with shame though. What am I doing? Why am I so relieved to see him alive?
Right, my mission. I can’t find the Guardians without him. That is his purpose in my life and that is why I need him to stay alive. That’s the only reason. Or at least, the only one I am admitting to.
My gaze flickers to his oozing chest. Blood is pulsing freely from his wounds, having drenched his entire shirt already. I lean forward to put pressure on the puncture marks only to lean back again remembering I can’t. I can’t touch him and not make everything worse.
Since becoming a Reaper, I have never felt so helpless.
Finally, his eyes manage to open. To my surprise, he’s not writhing in pain. Instead, his gaze is hollow, directed up at the sky and I don’t dare cross its view. Only a second passes before he grimaces, as if the wound is just now causing him pain. His vision settles on me and I smile.
I actually smile. At a mortal. Though I don’t want to admit it, I am relieved he is alive. Dare I say that maybe this forced, contractual friendship is becoming real for me. I am amused by his bumbling nature, intrigued by his love for his sister.
But my relief fades when I realize he is not looking at me fondly. There is hate behind his eyes.
Letting his head fall to his side, he gazes upon the dead wolf lying so close to him that their bodies are pressed together. With his uninjured arm, he reaches around to the wolf’s body, petting it desperately, with a shaky hand.
Though death is so natural for me, I forget that for mortals, who live in a realm where killing something—anything—is entirely forbidden, I forget how much value they can place on life.
“If I hadn’t killed them, you’d be dead,” I say softly, putting some distance between our bodies, even as I remain kneeling beside him.
“I… I know that,” he says between hitching breathes. There is a pause, meant to give him time to recover verbal strength, but it only weakens him. He’s sobbing by the time he speaks again, his hand tightening in the wolf’s mane. “Death just isn’t an everyday occurrence for some people, Sinisa.”
The words burrow into me like worms writhing in my thoughts. The only people I’d ever mourned had been my parents, but even that I’m only halfway aware of, and only for a few hours now thanks to the memory tea. Before tonight, for the past three years, death had just seemed normal. Necessary. It was either us
