If She Had Known

The Forest

The forest had become a labyrinth of snow and ice. The warmth of my mate faded into nothing with every passing breath.

A hole ripped in my chest as I felt our bond slacken and then disappear. I called out with my mind, but my mental talons did not respond to my commands.

"Rhys?" I called when my magic failed. "Rhys!" I tried again.

Nothing.

Panic rose in me. Panic I hadn't felt in years. I grasped within myself for the mating bond. For the golden chain that bonded us. I searched my soul for the bond but found only wisps. It was then that it finally sunk in what had happened. Where I was.

I had nightmares about these woods. The woods I had stumbled into when I was but a child in a desperate attempt to feed my family. Rhys had woken me from many of these nightmares on winter nights. I had gotten out of our bed, still asleep- having dismissed the body next to me as one of my sisters- and started pulling on boots and slinging my bow and arrows around my back. The gentle caress of my mate's hands on my arms would bring me out of this confused haze.

But this was real. The lack of magic within me, the loss of the delicate, pointed ears told me enough. The deep, all consuming hunger told me more. I had forgotten what monster Hunger could become. It ate you alive.

I was perched in a tree, my bow already strung and an arrow knocked. I was still running through every possibility of what could have happened. Calculated where Rhys could be, if he woke to find me missing from our bed. Missing from the world. Or had he fallen through time as well, if that is indeed what I had done? I was still contemplating all of these things when I spotted them. The deer that would provide a week's worth of food if we were smart about it.

And the wolf.

With a sinking of my heart, I knew what this was. When I was. Because that was Andras before me, waiting to die. One of the sentries Tamlin had sent, had been sending out into the human world for years, in a desperate attempt to rid himself of Amarantha. Waiting patiently for me to kill him.

Almost as if I wasn't in complete control of my own body, I raised my bow. I switched the arrows, the skinny and cheap arrow I had held on to for so long for the heavy arrow made of ash wood. I knocked the new arrow and fired. As clean a blow as I had ever managed - better.

When I had been human, I had only held contempt in my heart for Fae. I had been raised on horror stories and histories of war. But I had experienced so much since those days I found myself returning to. The ash arrow should have repulsed me. I should have cringed away from it, feeling my magic quiver in it's closeness. But I still remembered the sense of security it had brought me all those years ago. The feeling that compelled me to hold onto the single arrow for months after I had bought it.

I took the doe down in another blow. But when I approached the two carcasses, I knew what was happening. Andras had just sacrificed his life for his land, for his court. And I had skinned him alive for the coin his pelt would bring.

The golden eye met mine with eerie calm. I swiftly moved past the doe I had felled, already dead. I knelt by the large wolf's side. I caressed the side of his head and neck with a kindness he deserved the first time around. I had never gotten the chance to apologize for what I had done. What I had been led to do by centuries of hate and habit.

"Mother hold you," I whispered, and watched as his eye closed as if in sleep. Andras lowered his head to the snow, almost relieved. At peace. "May you pass through the gates; may you smell that land of immortal milk and honey."

I did not hesitate when I drew a quick red line across his wide throat. I knew now, that it was a quicker, less painful way to go that the alternative.