For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten (freda ebook reader .txt) 📕

wait and they spin, they spin nightmares new and old, remake the shadow and let the shadow remake them . . .”

Eammon glanced down at her, a question in his eyes, the expression easy to read. If she’d changed her mind, he’d take her out of here the moment she said so.

Red bit her lip, that sour guilt in her throat again. You begin and begin and never see it finished.

One nod, sharp.

With another burning look, Eammon started forward, moving almost soundlessly over the stone floor.

Bormain’s singing dropped to a tuneless hum, his eyes closed and his head swinging gently back and forth like he’d lost interest. Red took a deep breath of the stinking air and tugged at the power curled in her middle. It spiked upward, blooming toward her fingers and Eammon holding them, veins greening and the taste of earth faint on her tongue. They stepped forward carefully, soundless as possible, Eammon’s body drawn up like a spring set to snap.

Eyes still closed, Bormain stopped humming. “Your knotted string of death is fraying, Wolf-pup,” he said, his voice ringing clear and precise. “They have help now. They’re coming home, Solmir and all the rest.”

The name stopped both of them cold, Eammon with his hand half outstretched. Bormain’s laugh was broken and ugly. “So many endings, Wolf-pup, and you’ve seen them all—”

He was silenced by Eammon’s hand slamming over one of the only places on his body left untouched by shadow— his mouth.

Tendons stood out on Eammon’s neck as Bormain thrashed beneath his palm. “Do it,” he gritted through his teeth. “Red, if you’re going to do it, do it now.”

Her teeth drove together, and Red let forest magic cycle out of her, flowing instead into Eammon.

Like before, when they worked together to heal the sentinel, her mind’s eye beheld what her physical sight couldn’t. Her own power was dim in comparison with Eammon’s, only a thread running through her body, snaking in and out of her bones and organs. But Eammon— a riot of gold, light shaped like roots twisting through him, blooming, growing.

It almost made her stop, seeing how ingrained in him it was. Almost made her cut off the thin thread of her power when she remembered how it changed him, how it took him in pieces. Fear rioted, fear that somehow he’d be taken from her, and it would be her fault for making him do this and feeding power into the roots that grew beneath his skin. She opened her eyes with a gasp to see him looking at her, the shadow-sickened form of Bormain twisting on the bed beneath his green-veined hand.

“Don’t.” Clipped, focused, but with something in it that spoke of surprise, and a kind of longing. The whites of his eyes were wholly emerald. “Red, I’ll be fine, don’t stop.”

A deep breath, his scent of falling leaves and coffee and paper drowning out the sickroom stench. Then she closed her eyes, and gripped his hand like a lifeline, and let the power blooming out of her keep feeding into him.

Behind her eyelids, Bormain looked like a void. A complete absence of anything, a vaguely man-shaped hole in all that golden glow. At first, the magic flowing from Eammon seemed almost eaten by it, swallowed. Each golden thread was deft and deliberate, like Eammon was sewing something up, mending a sock rather than a man. Eventually, the golden glow began to overtake the shadow, consuming it and canceling it out. She felt Eammon sway, heard Bormain’s pained gasp as, slowly, light eclipsed the dark.

When Eammon finally let go of her hand, Red opened her eyes.

The man on the bed looked waxen as a corpse, but his skin was no longer threaded through with darkness. The nails on his hands were short and pale, not clawed, and the bones of his skull were the right proportions again. His chest rose and fell, shallow but steady.

Eammon hunched over the bedframe. Bark on his forearms, evident from where his sleeve had rucked up, height made greater by the magic he’d called. His veins were green, in his wrists and his neck and the bruised skin below his eyes, but darkness shot through them like heartbeats, flickering shadows.

“Eammon?” Alarm made her voice sharp.

He shook his head, once. Ground his teeth in his jaw. Slowly, slowly, the darkness stopped beating in his veins. They turned to green, then faded to blue, changes and shadow leaching out of him like blood from a wound. He shuddered, a grimace drawing his lips back from his teeth.

Pain has to be transferred. Eammon had taken the shadow-rot, let it cycle into him, and drowned it out in Wilderwood magic.

Her knees suddenly turned to water, exhaustion and relief coming like a fist to the temple. Red sagged sideways, and Eammon wrapped his arm around her, his veins now the color a man’s should be, though the whites of his eyes still held a tracery of green. “I’m fine,” he whispered into her hair. “I’m fine.”

“You did it.” Tears streamed down Valdrek’s cheeks, and reverence lit his face. “By the Kings and all the shadows, you did it.”

But Red didn’t hear him, because she’d fainted dead away.

Chapter Twenty-One

S he woke to the smell of a library, the rough weave of fabric pressed against her cheek. Red started, jerking in Eammon’s arms, and the top of her head collided with his chin.

“Kings,” the Wolf muttered. He put her down with one arm and raised the other, rubbing at his jaw. Most vestiges of magic were gone, other than that extra inch of height he’d gained the night the Wilderwood took the corridor. But the veins around his amber irises were still faintly green.

“Sorry.” Red’s cheeks blazed as she steadied herself, squinting against sunlight and the remaining haze in her head. They stood in the center of the Edge’s main thoroughfare, the sky slanting dark overhead. “Where’s Valdrek?”

“Still at Asheyla’s with Bormain. They thought it best not to try