“You can...”
“I can bring him back to life,” she said calmly, as if she was not offering the impossible.
“You’re sure?”
“I caught him as he died,” Scarlet explained. “And I have only been able to hold him here this long because of his bond with Gizelle. We have to hurry, or I will lose him entirely.”
“I can heal him,” Mal said, testing his wells of power cautiously. They were badly drained, and his ability to control it was nearly burned out completely. He had never strained himself like this before, never even dreamed of controlling so much energy. There were a few swirls of magic left and just enough strength in his mind. “I can do that much.”
“Do it then.” Scarlet took his hand and they walked slowly up to where Gizelle was lying curled against Conall’s still side. Lydia and Jenny were sitting on either side of her, offering mute comfort and the rest of the staff was in a loose, grieving semi-circle around them. They had pulled most of the rubble off of Conall, and tried to lay him out in a less unnatural position.
Scarlet took her hand back, but didn’t gesture or chant. She only looked at the fallen shifter and Mal didn’t understand that she was using her power until Conall suddenly took a shuddering breath, groaned, and began to die from his injuries once more.
Gizelle gave a frightened squeak of alarm, shrinking away in shock. “Conall!”
Jenny stood and stepped back, nearly colliding with Scarlet, and Lydia reached for Gizelle and clasped her hand, murmuring a prayer.
The rest of the staff gasped and whispered and swore in surprise.
Mal cursed and brought his scattered thoughts to bear, naming the runes as he gestured to them. Conall’s body arched as the last tattered remains of Mal’s magic knit his bones back together and mended crushed organs. He had underestimated the amount of damage the man had taken, and for a bad moment he feared he wouldn’t be able to do as he’d promised.
Then Scarlet’s pure power was bolstering him again, flowing into him like water after terrible thirst.
Life, her power was life.
Her entire forest, now both sides of the island, gave her a deep wellspring of energy without even trying.
Mal would have laughed, if he had the energy left for it. It all made so much sense.
Then Conall began to cough and rolled to one side with a moan of pain. Gizelle reached for him, weeping and shaking.
“I can’t... hear...” he said breathlessly, when her hands were on him. “No, I can... but it’s so quiet.”
“The door is shut,” Gizelle said simply, laying her head on his shoulder. “I only hear things that are now.”
Mal couldn’t stand any longer, every muscle in his body trembled as badly as Gizelle ever had, and he felt like he had worked his brain into the same kind of weak exhaustion. He could not have managed the most basic of portals or simplest of power sights. He could barely handle the effort of his own thoughts.
He sat down in his tracks, and he might have fallen over on his side, but Scarlet was suddenly behind him, holding him cradled in her arms. The scent of her damp hair swirling around him made him feel utterly, completely safe.
We are safe, his dragon told him, feeling equally stretched thin. We are safe and we have fulfilled our destiny and our mate will protect us while we rest.
It wasn’t the destiny that Mal had come to Shifting Sands expecting, and he didn’t have answers for their future: Would he move his hoard from New York? Would she agree to marry him, or was she too independent to accept such an earthly conceit? Would there be children? Could there be? Would her staff ever accept him as one of them? Wasn’t there something else he had to tell her...?
Blackness darker than the sky of Gizelle’s place took him at last.
Chapter 32
Scarlet could feel the tiny flicker of life in Mal’s chest, the slow, tired sparkle of it, just as she could feel the soul-deep weariness that had driven his body to collapse. For a long moment, she only held him, while the warm rain slowed to nothing as the wyrm’s power dissipated.
She had expected victory to feel... like victory.
But there was no sense of celebration to the scene.
The wyrm, frozen out of time, was stretched from the edge of her battered rain forest, across dozens of crushed cottages, to the cracked, tiled expanse of the pool deck. Columns lay scattered in coins of concrete, as if she had gone for Greek ruins in her architecture aesthetic.
She did not need to be an engineer to know that the central buildings were a complete loss. What wasn’t caved in had been badly shaken, wind-damaged, and nearly washed away in the torrential rains. The pool had cracked; the water features were silent for the first time in years. The slopes were eroded, her trees—her precious, life-giving trees—had been toppled. The event hall appeared to have collapsed. Hedges had been stripped of flowers and leaves, leaving only bare sticks.
It was weirdly quiet, except for the sound of running water. All of the bugs and frogs and birds had been driven to ground by the rain and wind.