Bring Me Their Hearts(110)
I freeze in my tracks. His eyes flit between me to the mound of corpses at my feet. I want to be sick, but I can’t move for fear of him striking out at me. What do I say? What can I say? I’m disgusted, and terrified, and so confused. But so is he. Never again—I could never again feel this way, if I only had the heart in his chest.
TAKE IT, the hunger begins again, coming over the horizon of my mind. I look up at Lucien.
“Run,” I beg him. “Leave me—run while you still can.”
The Crown Prince of Cavanos struggles for only a moment with his thoughts. His pause is the sort born of regret, no doubt. One second is all he gives me—one last second to take in his face, to memorize the lines and planes and beauty of it before it’s gone forever. One last second to relish the memories I have with him, before they shatter into a thousand irreparable pieces.
I should’ve known—woods like these are where I belong. It’s where a thing like me is meant to stay. The witches made a mistake, sending one of their beastly puppets out to play. And now a dozen lawguards and an archduke have paid with their lives for it. Now Lucien pays with his heart for it.
OUR LAST CHANCE, the hunger slavers mindlessly. GET HIM!
Lucien won’t run. I don’t understand why not—he knows what I’m capable of now. He knows I’m not the girl he fell in love with. Why? Why does he insist on standing there, risking his life? I clutch my head, the hunger’s voice dark and crescendoing again. It’s so unstable, my body so weak from my wounds. I refuse to let the hunger turn me into that…thing again, but here it is, singing to me of long claws and teeth, of nothing but the urge to consume. I try to summon up the silence, Reginall’s teachings of the weeping I’d managed in that one desperate instant, but the hunger is so much stronger.
“Lucien, please! I can’t control it for long—you have to run, now!”
“You heard her,” a girl’s voice flits between us. “You really should run. Then again, you were never very good at that. Always had to stay and see things through to the end, like an idiot.”
Lucien and I look to the bloodstained yew tree, where a girl no older than me stands on its roots. Her face is round, expression as calm as a lake on a winter’s morn, a shapeless robe billowing about her body. Her skin is golden oakwood, eyes like onyx, long hair so incredibly dark—the color of a raven’s wing. Unmistakable. Unforgettable. This can’t be happening—this can’t be real. I’m seeing double, or a hallucination. Lucien is the first to find strength enough for words, his voice cracking in on itself.
“Varia.”
The girl’s smile shines despite the blood she stands in. “Hello, brother.”