Beloved Beast

Chapter Forty-Six

            "She has a pulse," Rossetti's voice was low and impossibly soft, a breathless quality stealing the edge from his deep timbre as he remained preternaturally still, his steel-colored eyes flicking expectantly from her to Elle. "She's alive?"

There was so much raw emotion packed tight in that wavering inflection, so much underlining hostility, and hopefulness hinging on her response that Lucy feared, if she had erred, if there was any misstep on her part, would it be the final straw that shattered his brittle composure?

In the hours that crawled by, she had watched him carefully from beneath her lashes, as one would a volatile beast, heedful of every sudden gesture that betrayed his restless, vengeful energy.

With the crisscrossing scars that flawed one side of his face, his mercurial expressions were restricted by half, the undamaged side fluctuating in expressive detail, morphing incessantly from brooding to regretful to an unfathomable, fixated rage. She could feel his deep-seated despair but felt his profound fury all the more, the burning need to exact revenge on anyone he saw fit to victimize.

Although Lucy felt no real danger to herself, every anxious movement infused with volatility, roused old and new fears. If Rossetti lost all sense of self-control, would he become an immediate threat to others? Just how far would he go to avenge Elle? To unburden his vengeful soul? Who would suffer his unbridled wrath? He appeared ready and willing to hold true to his beastly moniker, to set the world aflame for his internalized pain, and she worried that the smallest oversight or mishap could incite a violent reaction and send him careening into madness.

The only person who could reach his humanity, who could tame the unstable Rossetti Beast, laid lifeless in his bed ... that was until Lucy had felt a gradual shift in the air, an infinitesimal flicker of energy so faint, she nearly missed it, compelling her from her seat and scrambling to feel for a pulse.

There was no mistaking that glimmer of vitality clinging to the open room. It was the same energy she had felt – sensed, the moment the Elemental Host was revealed to her.

For a staggering moment, Lucy thought she had misjudged that imperceptible change, that she had imagined a heartbeat, but when it climbed a second time to her waiting fingers – a weak, lagging rhythm, but a rhythm nonetheless, all of the air expelled from her lungs in a dizzying, exuberant rush.

She couldn't believe it. She had done it. She, an inexperienced healer, had brought Elle back from the dead.

Despite her feigned confidence and reassurances, she mentally floundered at the difficult task ahead of her, equally fraught with doubts and insecurities. Restoring a life was a monstrous endeavor that went far beyond her passable skills. Her mending hands could render care, and even recover sickly plants and animals, but could they single-handedly rescind something as final as death?

But if her mother's voluminous writings had any truth to them, that the Elemental Host could bind and sustain energies – those energies reinforced by the primitive power nested deeply within Elle's body – then surely the same could be done for healing properties if bolstered by some force? Even if death had completely eradicated that existing power, what if the natural energy comprising all living things could be enough to nurture the active components of the medicinal herbs once ingested ... and implement healing?

It was a wildly ambitious theory, one Lucy knew would not be possible for an ordinary human, but because of what Elle was, that changed everything, presenting a hopeful prospect. Having administered only a handful of herbs sporadically at a time, she worried they wouldn't be enough. What if they had already passed through Elle's system? What if she had blended them wrong? What if they weren't strong enough to effectively initiate healing? Not to mention, something of this nature had never been attempted before – it wasn't known or documented, and she knew not what to expect ... but she knew she had to try.