Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,62
body through the trees, slithering loud, cracking young trees and old branches, and disappears as quickly as it appeared.
“Good riddance.” Malachite waves it off.
“It saved you, you know,” I blurt.
“And it’d sooner turn around and kill me, too,” he drawls. “Daft thing.”
I watch the last of Evlorasin go with a sadness welling up in the cracks of me—a sadness I know isn’t my own. Or, it is. But it’s more than that. The sadness is both of ours, Evlorasin’s and mine. Connected to each other through the blood promise it gave me.
A sudden thought flashes through my brain, in Yorl’s voice of all voices. Yorl, the celeon polymath genius Varia put in charge of finding the Bone Tree. He knows the most about valkerax of anyone in the world, thanks to his grandfather’s research. He was there with me every step of the way, and he’s here with me now, in cold, clear logic. He could help us.
“It’s called a blood promise, Zera, not a blood moment.”
He’s right. Mine and Evlorasin’s connection has endured.
“You know where the Bone Tree is. You will always know. Now and forever. Until the very moment your human body dies for the last time.”
The dreams.
“Mal.” I pivot, only to see Lucien staggering to his feet and toward Fione.
“Is she breathing?” he demands.
Malachite puts his fingers to her bloody throat and shakes his head. “Nothing.”
My unheart squeezes painfully. So wrapped up in Ev’s mystic Tree shit, I forgot who needed help. “Is she—”
Malachite looks up to Lucien. “You could…you have another glass shard, right?”
“No!” I blurt. “Mal—no. She has to choose it. We can’t force her into it.”
“Nightsinger forced you,” he points out. “It’s to save her life, Six-Eyes.”
“No. Zera’s right,” Lucien manages, limping over to Fione. “It has to be chosen. We try to heal her.”
“There’s no pulse to heal, Luc—”
I race over and drop to my knees. “What do we need?”
“Water,” Lucien croaks, rolling up his sleeves. His own neck is bloodied so badly, it looks like a butcher shop, but he ignores it. “So I can heat it. And a rabbit, if you can find it. She’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Uh, why a rabbit?” Malachite asks.
“Less talking.” Lucien pulls off his covering and drapes it over Fione’s blue-lipped body. “More doing.”
Malachite and I share a look.
“Dibs on the rabbit,” I say.
“Always giving me the boring jobs.” He sighs, both of us splitting off in a blink. It doesn’t take long for me to find a burrow, and it takes even less time to dig into the earth with all my claws.
“Sorry,” I murmur.
When I get back, Malachite’s already there with the water, his drinking skin bulging as he offers it to Lucien. The prince’s fingers turn dark as he holds it, and a small trail of steam suddenly wafts from the skin’s spout. He tears his shirt and offers me the cloth.
“Wet it with the water and clean her wounds, if you would. Gingerly.”
I nod. My fingers work as fast as “gingerly” will let me, and my eyes roam over Fione’s face. Her skin is sallow, her breathing so thin, I barely hear it. She’s not awake, thank the gods, because Lucien cuts her wrist with his blade out of nowhere.
“Shit!” Malachite snarls. “She’s already lost enough blood! What are you—”
“Rabbit,” Lucien demands from me, and I hand it over. He slits the thing’s broken neck, his fingers deep midnight up to the knuckles as he holds the wounds together—rabbit to girl, skin to skin.
It happens slowly at first and then quickly, like all magic. The blood from the rabbit oozes out like a hedging worm, like a thing burrowing out of winter to peek at spring. A pure liquid-red worm, thick and long, moving without spilling a drop. It almost seeks Fione’s wound—drawn by the blood—and when it finds it, it burrows. With a sickening squelch and a slow pump, the rabbit’s blood empties into Fione’s cut, but not without cost. Lucien makes a snarling noise, his brow dripping sweat onto the ground.
“Can’t—can’t you just heal her?” Malachite asks.
“Sh-She needs blood first,” Lucien says. “Or her body will reject the spell.”
“Use a human’s, maybe?” I offer. “I have plenty—”
“Do you see any humans around here?” he snaps.
“You—”
“I’m not human anymore. I’m witch. You’re a Heartless, Mal is a beneather. All incompatible.”
“Are you—” I gulp, watching the rabbit blood move into her arm, writhing like a live thing just below her skin. “Are you turning the rabbit’s blood…into human blood?”