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I went, climbing over bodies, hacking, slashing, cutting, fixated on Julie. To the left, a clump of Fomorians broke from a vampire whose limbs they had torn and charged me.
“Kill the child!” The Shepherd’s hiss pierced the clamor of the battle. The Fomorians reversed their course.
Twenty yards separated me from her. I wouldn’t make it in time.
Bran materialized by Julie in a puff of mist. He was back in his human form. He hugged the cross and her with it. Mist puffed and all of it was gone. The Fomorians howled in fury.
Bran popped in front of me, his hands empty, grinned…
A swirl of green tentacles burst through his chest. His blood splashed me. His eyes opened wide. His mouth gaped.
“Bran!”
He stumbled forward and fell on me, blood gushing from his mouth. Behind him the Shepherd hissed in triumph. I leaped over Bran, and slashed at the bastard’s face. Fish eyes glared at me with hate and then the top of his head slid aside and rolled into the dirt. His body stumbled. I cut it again, and again, and the sea-demon fell in pieces to never get up again.
An unearthly cry rang through the field. Curran rose through the carnage, Morfran’s huge crow head in his hand. Covered in blood, he thrust the head to the sky and screamed, “Kill them! Kill them all! They are mortal!”
The shapeshifters fell onto the Fomorians. I spun around and dropped to my knees by Bran.
No. No, no, no.
I flipped him over. He looked at me with his black eyes. “I saved the baby. I saved her. For you.”
“Mist! Mist damn you.”
“Too late,” he whispered with bloody lips. “Can’t heal the heart. Good-bye, dove.”
“Don’t die!”
He just looked at me and smiled. I felt a thin line of pain stretch inside me, strained to the breaking point.
It hurt. It hurt so much I couldn’t take another breath.
Bran gasped. His body went rigid in my hands and I felt the last of him fluttering away.
No!
I clasped onto that last shiver of life. With all of my magic, with all of my power, with everything I was I held on to that tiny fragment of Bran and I would not let it go.
Magic churned around me. I sucked the power to me, driving it deeper into his body, holding on. It streamed through me in a flood of pain and melted into Bran’s flesh.