Page 57 of The Ruthless Fae King
“She’s gone.” My voice was hollow, dead inside. My heart took its last beat and then began to stack an ice wall around it that I vowed to never thaw again.
I would never love another living soul, it only ended in disappointment. And they would never be her. Madelynn Windstrong could not be replaced.
Raife held his hand over Madelynn’s face and his mouth popped open. “She’s not gone yet. Her heartbeat is very weak but she lives,” Raife told me, and grasped my fingers to squeeze them. He winced: “Brother, your fingers are too cold to feel her pulse. Calm this storm so I can get her inside!” he snapped at me.
Alive?I looked down at her: lips purple, chest not moving. Was he sure?
I couldn’t see where we’d landed, the storm was raging too hard, a sea of white. I’d last left Raife at the Winter castle, so we must be somewhere near there.
Raife suddenly reached down and tried to wrestle Madelynn from my arms, and that got me moving.
“She’s too cold. Calm the storm, brother. I need to get her by a fire.” Raife shook my shoulders a little as if he were trying to shake sense into me.
“I had to freeze her to stop the blood,” I told him mindlessly. I didn’t want to allow myself to hope that she might still be alive. I felt like I was in a stupor. I’d gone into shock, I suspected, and I didn’t know how to get out of it.
“Lucien, you’re freezing her!” Raife yelled, and purple light exploded before me. His magic smacked whatever shock had its hold over me and it dissipated. It was like the storm clouds in my mind cleared instantly. “She’s alive,” he said again.
This time it hit me like an avalanche.
I dropped my power over the weather instantly. Standing, I clutched Madelynn to my chest and leapt out of the basket. My feet sank into snow that went up to my knees but I didn’t have time to feel bad about hitting my town with the storm.
She’s alive. She’s alive. She’s alive.
The last bits of snow fluttered to the ground.
Raife ran alongside me, his glowing purple hands hovering over Madelynn’s wound as I ran inside the open entryway of my palace. My snow-covered boots slid on the cool stone floors as I fumbled to get her in front of the fire in the drawing room.
She was limp, her hair in half frozen chunks about her head and her lips purple. I feared that in my effort to keep the wound cold so she wouldn’t bleed out… I’d frozen her to death.
Raife’s strong hand clasped my shoulder and squeezed. “You did good. She wouldn’t have made it otherwise,” he told me.
I backed away half a step as he knelt before the woman I hoped to one day very soon marry. Raife and Drae were once some of my closest friends but we’d grown apart. More than grew apart, Raife and I had a falling out due to his sleeping with the woman I loved at the time. I heard later that she’d slept with half my Royal Guard too, so he probably saved me from heartache, but that wasn’t the point. The wound he’d inflicted so soon after my mother’s death left a scar. I didn’t think I could ever care for him again, or trust him.
Then Madelynn’s lady-in-waiting arrived on bare horseback and told me what Marcelle had done. When she’d told me that he’d taken my betrothed against her will to have for himself, I nearly froze the entire realm just to spite him. And that’s when Drae and Raife showed up. The second they heard the news about my future wife, they helped me fight my way to her at the border, and when that failed, Drae risked his life and flew me into Summer. I knew now that even though we’d had time and circumstances that drew us apart, I could always count on these men as brothers.
“How is she?” Drae’s voice came from behind me and shook me a little.
Raife was hunched over Madelynn, throwing purple arcs of healing light over her and grunting. He’d pulled the arrow out and it lay in two pieces beside her.
“Drae, I need you to fetch my wife. Fly as fast as you can. She’s at the border with our armies making a show of togetherness for Zaphira. Tell her to bring her human medicine kit,” he told Drae, and my stomach dropped.
I’d heard rumors that his new wife had an ability to bring the dead back to life. Was Raife afraid Madelynn would die? But her ability was not without great cost to herself, and I couldn’t imagine him risking his own wife’s life just to save Madelynn, no matter how good of friends we were. And a human medicine kit, how the Hades would that help us now? Raife was the greatest healer alive; no human concoction could touch his ability.
Drae bolted from the room, already shifting to his dragon form before he was even at the door.
“Talk to me.” I didn’t recognize my own voice. It was hollow and devoid of emotion, yet on the verge of panic at the same time.
When Raife glanced up at me, I didn’t like the look in his eye. “I can heal any wound, shrink any growth, rid the body of nearly any poison…”
I didn’t breathe, I didn’t want to miss a word of what he was about to tell me. I wanted to be hit with the truth so that I could absorb it.
“…but I cannot make blood once it has left the body. I’ve closed her wound, but her heart… it’s failing.” He paused and a guttural wail ripped from my throat as the temperature inside the house plunged.
No. No. No.I couldn’t lose her. Not like this.
Raife chewed his lip. “If Madelynn doesn’t get blood soon, she’ll die. My wife knows how to take blood from one person and give it to another to save them. I’ve seen her do it at our infirmary.”
That sounded like Necromere sorcery. Something I wanted nothing to do with. “Put blood into her? Are you mad?”
