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I’m not letting go. He will live. I won’t lose him.
“Foolish girl!”A voice filled my mind.“You can’t fight death.”
Watch me.
The spark of Bran’s life slipped deeper. More magic. More…Wind howled, or maybe it was my own blood filling my ears. I no longer felt anything except pain and Bran.
I pulled harder. The spark stopped. Bran’s eyelids trembled. His mouth opened. His eyes fixed on me. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. His heart had stopped and it took all of me to keep him.
He looked at me with ghostly eyes. His whisper floated to my ears, each word weak but distinct. “Let me go.”
“This is how undeath is made,”the voice said.
And I felt deep within me that she was right.
I would not become what I loathed. I would not become the man who sired me.
“Let me go, dove,” Bran whispered.
I severed the magic. The line of pain within me snapped like a broken string. It whipped back into me. I felt the spark of Bran’s life melt into nothing. Magic flailed in me like a living beast, trapped and tearing me apart to break free.
In my arms Bran lay dead.
Tears burst from my eyes, and streamed down my cheeks to fall on the ground, carrying the magic with them. The soil soaked in my tears and something stirred beneath it, something full of life and magic, but it didn’t matter. Bran was gone.
A Fomorian crept behind me, her blade ready to bite into my back.
I rose, moving on liquid joints, turned, and thrust in a single move. The tip of Slayer’s blade punctured the Fomorian’s chest. It cut her green skin and sliced smoothly through the tight sheet of muscle and membrane, scraping the cartilage of her breastbone, sinking deeper, driven by my hand until it found her heart. The hard, muscled organ resisted for a fraction of a moment, like a clenched fist, and then the blade pierced its wall and bathed in blood within. I jerked the sword up and to the side, ripping her heart to pieces.
Blood drenched my skin. I smelled it. I felt its sticky warmth on my hand. The Fomorian’s eyes widened. Fear screeched at me from the depths of her cobalt eyes. This time there would be no rebirth. I had killed her. She was dead, and the realization of her own fate made her terribly, painfully afraid.
It was a moment that lasted an eternity. I knew I would remember it forever.
I would remember it forever because in that instant I knew that no matter how many I had killed and no matter how many I would kill before the day was over, none of it would bring Bran back. Not even for a