Mercurial by Naomi Hughes (ebook reader with built in dictionary .txt) 📕

bones picked clean. Huge as it was, it had managed to steal up behind Tal without making a sound, and was now near enough that if it exhaled, its breath would ruffle his hair.

Elodie scrambled to her feet, a movement made slow and ungainly by horror. She flung out her hands as if she could stop the massive predator through nothing but the force of her will alone. She screamed, “Tal!”

Tal reacted at once. His eyes snapped to hers, registering the direction of her gaze. He reached for the small of his back, tucked one shoulder down into a roll, and came up kneeling several feet from where he had been with a short sword in each hand.

He lifted his head and looked at the mooncat. The cat gazed back, assessing. All was silent, Elodie’s scream hanging shattered in the air, serene peaks looming above, icy lake stretching below. She saw the thoughts of Tal and the thoughts of the mooncat.

Tal was injured. Couldn’t stand, couldn’t walk. He would go down fighting—but he would go down.

The mooncat lunged.

Rather than rolling away again, Tal dove forward. He twisted agilely in midair and drove a sword upward. The blade came away wet. Blood steamed on the snow and glowed in the cat’s fur, garnets on ivory. The creature roared. The mountains seemed to shake with it.

Elodie was racing across the ice, heedless of the way it crackled and snapped under her sharp footfalls. A desperate hope thrilled in her chest. Tal had injured the cat. He was a skilled fighter. He stood a chance.

But he’d overextended himself with his lunge and was now panting, struggling to shove himself up on his elbows, one sword trapped beneath him. The cat leapt—powerful back legs taut as springs, front claws extended, teeth bared. Tal stopped struggling and looked up. He regarded his coming death, head thrown back, neck bared, eyes bright. Elodie saw the moment a dark sort of peace settled over him.

He would die. He could not escape it. He would no longer try.

The cat landed with its paws in the snow on either side of Tal’s chest. It leaned down. Its teeth shone cruelly in the sunlight as its jaws snapped shut around Tal’s legs.

Tal’s hands spasmed. He dropped both swords. His back arched and his palms drove downward into the snow as if to brace himself, and then he screamed.

The sound pried hot fingers into Elodie’s chest. It cracked her open. And what spilled out was a memory.

She had heard this scream before. No—she had imagined this scream before. She had imagined what it would do to her. What it was doing to her now. It was why she had never put Tal to the question. It was why she had never willfully hurt him, except in the way it always hurt him to be with her.

The thought snapped into place like a broken bone being set. She cried out with it, tripped and fell hard on her knees. Her palms scraped over a sharp ridge of cracked ice. She lifted trembling hands and looked at them. Blood, red and slow, dripped from her fingers.

Wrong, repeated an instinct in her, and this time she could almost remember why.

Tal screamed again, his voice raw and breaking, as if the sound had been hooked on a line and dragged out of him. Elodie’s head jerked up. The mooncat was stalking away across the snow, dragging Tal with it. Tal’s eyes were shut, his brittle peace shattered, his face twisted in a rictus of pain.

Elodie launched herself after them. Tal’s fallen swords lay akimbo on the bloody snow ahead of her. She swept one up. She pushed herself into a sprint, every ounce of her strength focused on thrusting her sword into the mooncat’s skull. She wanted to see more of its blood on the snow, all of it, a new lake to baptize the wilderness.

The mooncat spotted her and growled a low warning, and she screamed back at it, not realizing that her cry contained words until she heard them echoing in her own ears:

“He is not yours! He is mine!”

If you truly think you can protect yourself so well, whispered another memory as it locked painfully into place, then will you finally get rid of that one?

No, she’d answered, a prickly, possessive fear flitting over her, though she hadn’t allowed it to show in her expression then. He’s mine.

She leapt. She was a weapon aimed true; the mooncat was reluctant to let go of Tal to defend itself against such a small attacker, and her blade sliced a gash through its brow and into its left eye. It shrieked in pain and anger, dropping Tal and jumping backwards to paw at its face. The force of the blow drove the hilt into the heel of Elodie’s hand and she reflexively pulled her fingers away, dropping the short sword.

Tal was laid out in the snow at her feet. She knelt at his side, sweeping her arms under him, about to…try to carry him somewhere, maybe the sled, she wasn’t sure yet—and then he opened his eyes and saw her. And it wasn’t relief that came into his eyes. It was something broken and bitter, something grown too far from the sun.

Voice rough with pain, he said, “You will never let me go, will you?”

She didn’t understand the words, but she was afraid that she would soon if her memories kept surfacing, and she discovered that she didn’t want to. “Shut up and let me save you,” she snapped, trying to heave him up without jostling him too much. He closed his eyes and turned his face away, his breath coming in shallow gasps, his skin pale and stained silver with blood.

She froze.

Tal didn’t have silver blood. He couldn’t. So why was the color seeping over him, smearing across the snow, dripping in rivulets down her arms where she held him?

She pulled one of her hands out from underneath him. He sagged back to the