Page 92 of Dragon Cursed
She tried to sayI love you.
She tried to tell him she wasn't afraid.
None of the words made it to her mouth.She managed his name.She managed only his name — very small, the way a child says a name when they are falling asleep — and her hand on his chest had gone still, and the chamber around them was bright with the dance of the green and the dark in slow steady balance, and Niamh's voice came thin and far away from beyond the curtain of the falls, still singing, still singing the old song to the wood.
"Alsander," Poppy whispered.
"What have you done, my love."His voice was breaking."What have you done."
She closed her eyes against the warm column of his throat.She felt his pulse under her cheek.The dance kept turning.
His arms tightened around her until she couldn’t have escaped them if she had tried.
"Poppy."
"Mm."
"Poppy,no."
"It's all right —"
"No.No, you do not — Poppy,open your eyes— "
She tried.
She got them open partway.She saw his face.Wet.Wrecked.His green eyes burning the way they had burned in the lair the first night, the way they had burned in his Dublin bedroom, the way they had burned when he had saidI will love you past the world ending.
"I love you," she breathed."Mo chroí."
It was the first time she had ever said the old word back to him.
It was the last thing she said.
Her head fell against his throat.Her hand on his chest slipped down to her side.The dance at the center of the chamber turned full and rich and even, the green steady now, the dark steady now, the cycle restored — and at its edge, on the cold stone floor of his sister's shrine, Alsander knelt holding the body of his mate.
He made a sound.It was full of pain.
It tore up out of his chest from the same place the dragon lived.It wasn’t a roar.It wasn’t a word.It was the sound a creature makes when the thing it has built its whole long life istaken from it, and the dragon and the man made the sound together, and the chamber rang with it, and the dance kept turning because the dance didn’t care, and somewhere beyond the falls Niamh's singing stopped.
He pressed his forehead to Poppy's.
Her skin was already cooling.
"Mo chroí." His voice was ruined."*Mo chroí, mo chuisle, mo bheatha — Poppy, no, no, you cannot, you cannot — *"
The dragon inside him wasscreaming.
Screaming and clawing at the inside of his ribs and demanding to take her back, demanding to give her his fire, demanding to pour every last shred of three centuries of dragon magic into the small still body in his arms.And Alsander — wrecked, broken open, naked on the cold stone of the shrine where his sister had died three hundred years ago — heard the dragon and didn’t fight it.
He drew breath to do the only thing he had left to do.
20
The silence in the chamber was the most terrifying sound Alsander had ever known.
A profound, absolute silence.A void where the beat of her heart should have been.
He held her — his Poppy, his light, his entire world — cradled in his arms.Her body was limp and cold.Her skin was already taking on the waxy pallor of death.The curse had taken her.It had taken her and left him with nothing but a crushing, soul-destroying emptiness.
