Page 94 of Bound to the Wolf
With Reece standing outside of his body, he could see magic as he had never seen it before. There was nothing mystical tying him and Delainey together. She was free of him.
And that meant he really was dead.
But he was still a little alive if he was sitting right here, staring at his body. He knew that as soon as the scene dissolved he would truly be gone, with no chance to see her again, to keep her.
If she kept digging those vines into him, she would be bound forever to his soul, but also to his corpse, because this waswrong.
He sat down beside his wolf and reached for the vines. He didn’t know if this would kill him, but even if it did, it would free her. He wouldn’t save himself at her expense. Not now.
A thorn pricked his finger, but he didn’t bleed. He wasn’t a body right now. He was more spirit and force of will. Where the thorn had punctured his skin, there was only a pinprick of light, a brief white flash that sealed over instantly as if his form couldn’t hold even that small wound.
He plucked one thorn out of the wolf, then another, and another, until there was nothing holding him. Each thorn came free with a faint resistance, and the wolf flinched with every extraction, its massive gray body twitching as the vines loosened and slithered away from its black-furred paw. He placed his hand on the wolf’s head and felt the fur on his skin.
“You don’t belong out here, my friend,” he told it, and could feel a buzzing under his hand as his soul absorbed the beast that lived within him.
The first of the vines wrapped around his wrist, and Reece let them dig in. He needed them right now, needed a path back to his body.
But he couldn’t let them wrap so tightly.
He climbed back from the strange spiritual space and started picking thorns out of that shadowy masculine figure that had to be him, the one that looked like nothing more than an empty vessel.
Delainey was clutching him close, her form still illuminated by that halo of inescapable magic. In that moment, she was his angel, keeping him here, keeping him alive, showing her love in a way she might never be able to say.
He didn’t need her words, not when he saw this.
He plucked out more thorns, but as soon as he removed some, more were added.
He was going about this wrong.
Reece left his body as it was and knelt in front of Delainey, concentrating hard as he trailed his hands along her face. At first she was nothing more than air, but he could feel a tingle in the ether when he tried again and got close. He didn’t know if she could feel it, didn’t know if she had any idea he was there. He rested his hand and held still.
“You have to let this go,” he said. “Trust me to come back to you.”
Delainey’s eyes opened, her brown depths fathomless. “Reece?” she asked in a quiet voice.
He didn’t know if this would work. The thorns were mostly gone now as her concentration split. Around him the battlefield was becoming more faint.
He was fading, and he wasn’t back in his body yet.
He plucked one of the thorns and looked at it. He could feel the magic radiating out of it, and it grew bigger until it was several inches deep. It was a binding, not like the tether, but something deeper, something that would hold their souls together. Not, he hoped, make it so that they couldn’t be physically parted.
He was letting instinct guide him.
This move would be irrevocable. If he did it, the only way to escape would be death.
But he was dying anyway. From the look in Delainey’s eyes, that was the last thing she wanted.
He looked at the magical thorn once more and furrowed his brow. “This is going to fucking hurt,” he said, and he drove it into his chest right over his heart.
The world around him went black.
Chapter
Forty-Four
The fighting was coming to a stop around them, but Delainey was barely paying attention. She had her body thrown over Reece’s to protect him from any stray magic that might come their way, for all the good it would do her.
Her fingers were jammed under his pulse point, trying desperately to feel that thump, thump, thump that would tell her his heart was beating, that he was alive. His neck was cold under her fingertips, and his head had lolled to one side so that his hair was matted with dirt and pressed flat against the ground, his jaw slack and his lips colorless.
