Page 124 of Realm of Dreams & Shadows

Only once I’m touching him do I focus on the healer, a petite gray-haired woman with a soothing manner and a no-nonsense attitude as she applies tonics and salves and other medicinal potions that I can only assume are the right things to use to treat the wound.

“He’ll be okay?” I finally ask after she’s stitched him up.

“I have made comfortable,” she says in broken English and an accent I can’t place.

“Comfortable,” I repeat, feeling sick. “You mean…” I trail off, unable to even voice the question.

“I treat pain. Infection. I help him sleep. The venom? This I cannot stop.”

“Then how do we cure him?”

“Oh, child,” she says, her eyes both firm and sad. “We do not cure. We only make last hours comfortable.”

The room seems to tilt, and I sink to my knees, one hand clutching the bedsheets, the other Chase’s limp hand. He’s asleep now. Maybe passed out, and all I can do is hold his hand and hope.

“How long?” My voice doesn’t crack. I count that as a miracle.

“That depends on man,” she says. “On strength of heart and what he refuses to surrender. It will feel first like fever. Then cold. Then nothing.” She sets up a small pharmacy on the bedside table—glass vials, a folded cloth, a tin with a greasy salve that smells like bitter mint. She holds up a finger, then shows me what to do. “Change bandage when it weeps. Wash with this. Use salve here and here.”

“There’s nothing else? Nothing else I can do?”

“Is all,” she says. “Is deadly. But you keep him warm. When he wakes, you tell him goodbye. Could be last chance.”

No, I think as she quietly leaves. There is no way in hell I’m saying goodbye. Chase is a fighter. He’s been a fighter since the beginning of time. I’ve seen him fight. Hell, I’ve seen him fight for me.

Now, he can damn well fight for himself.

And somehow—some way—he is going to win.

Chapter

Thirty-Two

Idon’t know how long I sit on the edge of the bed, my palm stroking his cheek as I watch the rise and fall of his chest. Each breath he takes feels like a miracle and a countdown all at once. The healer’s words echo in my head—We do not cure him—and I want to scream at the wrongness of it.

He’s immortal. He’s been alive since before humans learned to speak. He’s fought gods and monsters and the fabric of reality itself. Surely that has to count for something. Surely he’s strong enough to fight this off. To pull himself back from whatever edge the venom is dragging him toward.

I press my hand to his chest, feeling the steady thump of his heart beneath my palm, and I pray. Not to any god I know the name of, but to whatever force in this universe decided he was worth creating in the first place.

Don’t take him. Please. Not like this.

The skin around his wound has turned a sickly orange-brown, like dying leaves, and even with the salve dulling the pain, I can see the tension in his jaw, the tightness around his eyes. He’s fighting even in sleep.

As if he can feel me looking at him, his eyes open slowly, and I watch as awareness returns—the pain first, sharp and immediate, then confusion about where he is, and finally recognition when his gaze finds mine.

“Hey,” I whisper, my voice cracking.

“Hey.” He tries to smile and can’t quite manage it. He fumbles for my hand, then grips it with a ferocity that suggests I’m the only thing anchoring him here. “How long?”

“Couple of hours.” I blink rapidly, battling back tears. “How do you feel?”

He’s quiet for a moment, and I watch him take inventory of his body, of the poison working through his system.

“I’m losing,” he finally says, the brutal honesty like a kick to the gut.

“No. No. You’re immortal, dammit. You don’t get to lose to a fucking wolf bite.”

“Cora—”