Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(92)

“Keep bleeding,” snapped Siwan, cupping her hands under mine. She began chanting in quick, fluid syllables. The smell of yarrow and sweet cinquefoil rose between us, sketched over the blood.

“Toby.”

My name was barely a whisper. I glanced down. Tybalt’s eyes were fixed on me, his jaw trembling with the effort of speech. He smiled when he saw me looking at him. In some ways, that was the worst thing that had happened since all this had started. He smiled, like there was no way this could be my fault; like I shouldn’t have figured it all out sooner, like I wasn’t supposed to save him.

“I . . . very much . . . wanted to marry you,” he whispered, and closed his eyes.

My own eyes widened until it felt like the skin around them would tear, put under too much strain by the effort of keeping myself from breaking apart. “No,” I said, and gathered him closer with my free arm, still bleeding for Siwan, the knife jutting from my hand. “No, Tybalt, no, you don’t get to do this. Just because you’re a cat, that doesn’t mean you get to do this. You need to stay. You need to stay with me.”

Siwan continued chanting. Arden had returned, and she and Karen were throwing things into the flame the Luidaeg held, following the instructions Siwan muttered between phrases. Jin was nowhere to be seen. All I could do was bleed. That’s something I’ve always excelled at. It didn’t feel like it was enough, and so I bent and kissed him, hoping that something in the fairy tales Amandine had read me when I was a child would finally turn out to be true: hoping a kiss might convince him to stay.

His lips tasted like blood. A red veil slipped over the world, and I saw myself looking down at him, terror and compassion in my eyes. I was so beautiful when he was looking at me. I had never felt like I was that beautiful before.

This is always how I see you, little fish. The thought was in the blood, amused and pained and quietly furious. He thought he was seeing me for the last time. He was taking as much of me with him as he could, as he left me for the night-haunts.

I had never been so angry in my life. I raised my head, glancing toward Siwan. The blood in her hands had hardened into balls of what looked like red-frosted glass, all different sizes, none bigger than a cherry. She stopped chanting and looked at me.

“Get it out of him, now,” she said, and dumped the glass into the flame.

“Not the way we got it out of you,” said the Luidaeg, before I could move. “Shoving it through will kill him.”

When did everyone around me get so fragile? I turned my attention to the spike in Tybalt’s chest, moving to wrap my hands around it. The knife jutting from my palm made the motion impossible to finish. With a snarl, I ripped it loose and tossed it aside, not even waiting for the wound to close before I grabbed the rosewood stake and began to haul. Splinters bit into my palms, drawing more blood. I let them. Anything that could help me now was welcome; anything that could make this a little bit easier, a little more possible, was something to be absolutely desired.

The hooks on the harpoon caught and tore at his flesh as I pulled. I would have done anything to take that pain away from him. Anything.

Tybalt still wasn’t moving. I couldn’t be sure, as I wrested the stake loose and dropped it to the floor beside me, that he was breathing. I also couldn’t allow myself to dwell on that thought. If I decided he was lost—if I let myself lose hope—then I was going to be finished, and this time, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find the strength to start over. My heart had been broken too many times. It no longer had the capacity to heal the way it once had. The rest of me might be immortal at this point, but my heart? No. That was wearing out.

The stake left a hole in Tybalt’s chest that seemed deep as a well, at least for the split-second that it was empty. Then blood rushed in to fill the space I’d created, flooding everything in red.

And Tybalt stopped breathing.

I didn’t think. I didn’t pause. I just moved, taking a deep breath and clamping my mouth down over his. The taste of blood filled the world, almost choking me. I pulled back and pushed down on the side of his chest that didn’t have a hole in it, trying to keep his heart beating as I forced air into his lungs and then pushed down on his chest again and again, doing everything I could to make him stay. Sweet Titania, let him stay.

Every time our lips touched, the memories were there, rushing over me, overwhelming me. Not all of them held my face—that would have been too much to bear—but there were so many of them. I saw Raj as a little boy, kitten-gangly and unsure, and was stunned by the depth of the love Tybalt had felt for that child, even when he’d known that Raj’s father, Samson, hungered for his throne. I saw a red-haired woman with golden Torquill eyes, heard Tybalt’s voice whispering September like a prayer, and knew her for his first love; I saw a dark-haired woman with nothing fae about her, and knew her for his first wife. His entire life was there, written in the blood drying on his lips, and I kept on breathing for him, for both of us, because I couldn’t let him go. I couldn’t. I couldn’t.

Siwan was chanting again. Breathe in, breathe out. The taste of blood, and the laughter of a girl with calico hair.

The smell of my own magic rose around us, cut-grass and copper and an overlay of iced yarrow, like a frozen field. Breathe in, breathe out. The taste of blood, and a flash of my face, weary and bruised with iron poisoning, accompanied by a sudden, crushing terror that added even more weight to the terror I was already feeling.