Chapter 60 Death In His Arms

Chapter 60 Death In His Arms
Beatris

The woman in the mirror looked nothing like me. The gown was older than anything I had ever worn, a deep, elegant blue that hugged my waist before falling in soft folds to the floor. My hair, no longer brown, spilled in waves of rich copper-red over my shoulders, pinned back at the sides in a style I had seen only in portraits and forgotten paintings.

Eudora.

The name moved through me like a draft beneath a locked door. I lifted a hand toward my reflection.

The glass did not feel like glass anymore. It felt thinner than it should have, as though one more step might carry me through it.

Then the room vanished. Warm sunlight touched my skin. I stood in the gardens. Not Crimson Hill as I knew it now, but something older. Softer. Brighter. The roses had grown wilder here, climbing over pale stone and spilling across the paths as though the estate had not yet learned how to discipline its beauty. Laughter drifted from somewhere behind me, low and familiar enough to make my chest ache before I even turned.

Alexander.

He was walking toward me through the roses, his dark coat thrown open, his expression easy in a way I had never seen outside the visions. No shadows in his face. No distance in his eyes. He looked younger somehow, though I knew that made no sense. Not younger in years. Lighter.

"There you are," he said, smiling.

That smile hit me like grief. I knew it before I should have. Knew the shape of it. Knew the warmth of it. Knew the way it made something inside me soften before I had time to think.

"You say that as if I was hiding," I heard myself say.

My voice was not mine. Or perhaps it was, only wrapped in another life.

"You were," he said. "I've been looking for you."

I wanted to answer. Wanted to smile. Wanted to stay in that strange, impossible sunlight where he looked at me as though nothing in the world had ever been loved more.

Then something moved in the hedges. A sharp rustle. I turned at once. The air changed.
Alexander's smile vanished.

"Eudora…" he started. Someone burst from the bushes.

A man.

I never saw his face clearly. Only the dark shape of him, the raised crossbow in his hands, the speed with which he came at us. My body locked for one terrible second. Then Alexander shoved me aside.

"Run!" he shouted.

The first bolt flew. I heard it before I understood it, a violent hiss through the air, and then Alexander jerked in front of me as it buried itself into his back.

My scream tore out of me. He staggered, one hand catching the stone edge of the path.

"Go!" he shouted again, twisting toward me. "We're under attack…run!"

Voices rose from every side. Footsteps crashed through the gardens. More figures emerged between the hedges, armed, shouting, closing in around us.

I ran.

My skirts snagged against thorns and stone. My lungs burned. Branches tore at my sleeves. Behind me I could hear Alexander moving, hear the violence breaking open around us, the impact of bodies, the sick sound of something striking flesh.

Then another bolt flew. This one drove straight into his back. He choked. I turned in time to see blood spill from his mouth. He fell to one knee.

"No!"

I ran back to him before I could think. My hands caught his shoulders as he sagged forward, and suddenly there was blood everywhere, hot and dark across my palms, my dress, the grass beneath us.

"Alexander-"

"Keep running," he rasped.

Tears blurred my vision. "No…"

"Eudora." He coughed again, blood staining his lips. "Go."

I shook my head wildly. "Please"

The men reached us before either of us could move. Hands seized my arms.
I screamed and fought, twisting hard enough to nearly tear free, but they dragged me backward across the grass. My heels gouged into the earth. Alexander tried to rise.

"Leave her!" he shouted.

One of them struck him hard enough to drive him back to the ground.

"Stop!" I cried. "Please stop!"

They hauled him upright. Forced him to sit there in the grass, bleeding, barely able to hold himself up, and made him watch. The knife flashed only once.
Cold. Quick. Terribly clean.

Then fire tore across my throat.

The pain was so sudden I could not understand it at first. My hands flew to my neck. Warmth poured through my fingers.

Blood. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't…

Alexander screamed. It was not a human sound.
It ripped through the gardens like something dragged out of Hell itself, a sound so full of rage and grief that even the men around me recoiled.

My knees hit the ground. The world tilted. I could hear them shouting. Could hear my own choking breaths. Could hear Alexander still trying to reach me, even now.

Then something changed. The air thickened. The men nearest him began to scream. I lifted my head just enough to see through the blur. His eyes had turned black. Not dark. Black.

He moved with a violence I could not follow. One man was there, and then he was not, only blood, torn flesh, a body crumpling into the roses. Alexander caught another by the throat and ripped into him with a savagery that made my stomach turn even as death closed around me.

One by one, they fell. I barely understood what I was seeing. Only that he was killing them. Only that he was coming back to me.

By the time he dropped to his knees beside me, the world had already begun fading at the edges. His hands shook as they cradled my face.

"Eudora."

Blood streaked his mouth. His coat. His hands.
He looked destroyed. Not angry now. Broken.
Tears burned down his face as he lifted me into his arms.

"No, no, no..." he whispered. "Stay with me."

I tried to speak. Only blood came. His grief twisted into something desperate. Wild. Then he bent over me and bit into my neck. Pain flared again. I gasped or tried to. Then he bit me again. My shoulder. My throat. My collarbone. Over and over again, he wasn’t feeding.

Forcing something into me. Giving, not taking. Frenzied. Furious. As though he could not bear to let death have me and would rather tear me apart himself than surrender me.

The last thing I saw was his face above mine, bloodied and weeping and monstrous all at once. Then darkness swallowed everything.

I jolted upright with a strangled cry, my hands clawing at my throat.
Air rushed into my lungs in ragged bursts. My whole body shook. Sweat clung to the back of my neck, my chest, my palms. For a moment I did not know where I was. Crimson Hill. My room. My bed.

But the blood still felt warm on my skin. My fingers pressed harder against my neck. No wound. No blood. Only skin, breath, and terror.

I bent forward, trying to steady myself, but the image would not leave me. The knife. Alexander's scream.
His teeth sinking into her body again and again.

Into my body. I had not watched Eudora die. I had died. And somehow, impossibly, I knew that what I had seen had not been the end of her in his arms.
It had been the beginning of something far worse.