I’d seen his soul. I knew why he stalked me and what he wanted from me.
Having seen him in his dream time in the garden of the seethe, I understood exactly what I’d done in Elizaveta’s backyard. For a very brief time, I’d given Wulfe back himself, the person he’d been before Bonarata had tortured him all those centuries ago. Once again, he’d been the traveling scholar, Marsilia’s poetic friend, the man who had played a vielle while sitting in a tree in the moonlight.
Wulfe hoped that I could make him whole once more, permanently this time. That I could save him. I was pretty sure—having seen the scars of his past and the person he was—that I could not. Though I might give him brief respite, fixing what had been done to him was beyond any magic I could lay claim to.
I could not undo the damage done to him, but I thought I might, just might, be able to shake the Soul Taker’s hold on him. After all, the Soul Taker itself had told me that it did not think it could have held Wulfe had Bonarata not blinded him first.
I pulled on whatever magic lingered in the room, no matter that it was the Soul Taker’s magic. Although my mating bond and my pack bonds were intact, the Soul Taker—or possibly some magical protections that Marsilia had on her seethe—was blocking me from pulling on that power. Instead, I called upon the ghosts tied to the seethe with unbreakable bonds of trauma, and they came, despite their fear of the vampire in the room with me. And, when the walking stick fed it to me, I took power from the dance of blade and staff that the Harvester and I engaged in.
When I could hold no more magic, I dropped the walking stick, slipped my head under Wulfe’s arm, shoved my neck into his armpit, and reached up with my hand so I could touch his face, the only place his skin was exposed.
His flesh was chill under my battle-and-magic-heated fingers as I whispered, with all the Coyote-born magic within me, “Be at peace.”
He stiffened, smooth movement suddenly clumsy. But he didn’t stop.
Wulfe twisted and got a hold on my shoulder. He was a lot taller than me, stronger, and I was pouring everything I had into the magic. I had no defense. He threw me across the room. He caught me with some magic, too, but its effect and the shock of hitting the wall with the back of my head mixed together into a miserable, pain-filled instant.
Get up, get up, Aubrey whispered in my ear. I felt icy cold hands on my face.
My vision came swimming back. Aubrey, if it had really been him, was nowhere in sight. But the Harvester was.
He walked toward me, casually swinging the sickle like a tennis player warming up. There was no need for hurry on his part. I was still stunned by the impact, either of the wall or his magic. My eyes worked, so I could stare into the crusted wounds where Wulfe’s blue eyes should have been. He stood in front of me for a second. I managed to move my shoulder. If I’d had a couple of minutes, I thought I could shake it off.
The sickle came at me, cutting the air so fast that it made a noise.
The blade missed, sweeping by me and up in a strike I would never have been able to get much force behind. But Wulfe was a lot stronger than me. The pitted old blade dug into Wulfe’s own belly, spilling entrails and splashing me with blood. It was so unreal that it felt almost like I was watching a scene in a Quentin Tarantino martial arts movie.
The Soul Taker’s enraged howl rang in my aching head without making an audible sound as Wulfe laughed. My magic, it seemed, had worked after all. Though I hadn’t dreamed that this was what Wulfe would do with the moment of freedom—vampires were not built for self-sacrifice or suicide. They were vampires, in fact, because they refused to die.
Blood pooling at his feet, Wulfe tried to open his hand, fingers relaxing. But before the sickle fell to the ground, his hand moved like a striking hawk, closing around the leather-wrapped handle. He stood still, armed with the sickle, as blood continued to drip.
I tried to gather myself and managed a sort of full-body twitch. The Harvester staggered away from me, toward Warren, his footfalls heavy. Warren, who was unconscious. I was helpless to do anything to interfere as the vampire dropped to the ground and bent over the werewolf. From where I was, I couldn’t see exactly what he did, but I could hear it when he started to feed.
Feeding was how vampires were able to heal their wounds because—although I now knew, somewhat to my surprise, that vampires had souls—they were not truly alive. They did not reproduce sexually, and they could not heal using their own biological abilities. They needed to borrow healing from the living blood they fed upon.
The Soul Taker had decided to fix Wulfe’s body before sacrificing me. I looked at the blood on the floor in front of me. There was a lot of it. I wondered why it chose to feed on Warren instead of me.