Moon Bound (Glorious Darkness Book 1) (28 page)

(55) Breathe No More

|Regan's POV|

Claws gashing through air, the whisper of wind that is a product of our own hectic movements, it's not really there, it's not kissing the earth supporting our feet, it's born from the energy that flows through our bodies.

War in its purest form.

Airborne forms of beasts that clash with my wolves, bones that stick out through flesh, wounds bleeding out truth, it's our whole world now, nothing more and nothing less.

The pack that's finally united cannot survive this night. We will all die. Most of them will live.

Scarlet is splattering my face, my talons tearing through, his own sinking in, splintering the skin, sailing further inside the liquid blur my body has become, teeth eating down, my own jaws biting back.

The Moon is gone with the dawn, the time when the darkness is so thick it makes you blind has come.

We see. Monsters always do. Each one of us is one in his or her own way.

Howls echoing around me wounded and broken as my own take their final breath, defeat is breathing at our necks, biding its time only to clamp hungry teeth over that sensitive spot, snap it in half, take the life that has been left.

Sounds of steel meeting fur are coming to my ears, I can't even look away from him to see who has died, who is still alive.

It's all there, in the periphery of my vision, yet I never see it, never risk a glance away from the man blocking my path.

The worst knowledge there might be, nothing to stop it from permeating a mind that's being held in the grip of the battle, I know she's still here with us. Fighting alongside her pack.

A promise unfulfilled.

I want to scream. I want to stop death. I want to be the only one tonight.

'Help me change this cursed fate. Help me prevent them paying the price for my mistakes. Help me grow into my fur and become the Alpha I should have been from the very beginning,' I want to pray to her now but She's already gone.

Only the wild is here to give their twisted justice to this pack, just like his claws are taking chunks of my flesh where they connect, ripping it apart, baring what's laying underneath, his people are doing the same to my own.

Pain is enveloping my world, reflected on his face as he gives me more. A kind of torture that can't be prevented. Sinking in regret. Helpless. I can't bare it.

The mockery in his laughter is ringing in my ears, jaws that are neither human nor wolf snapping in anger back at him, he's enjoying this fight, my every effort to block his swings at me, to keep myself standing against him for as long as my body would allow.

"Weak! Worthless!" words tumbling out of his mouth in rhythm with his body movement. His face is no longer flawlessly perfect, his eyes are no longer dark like an abyss staring back but glowing with certainty.

Blood is trickling down my chest, saturating the fabric until it sticks to my skin. It's oozing out from the gashes he leaves behind every time he gets through. He snickers at me when he hits the mark and hisses back when I manage to wound him.

"Do you see how stupid you really are now? Do you see how out of your league you are now, Regan?" He's not even trying to block me now, instead holding himself open for my attacks.

Morphed hands stick their talons in his chest, ripping the shirt he's wearing to shreds, they leave blood trails. 

Eyes flickering down for just a second, "Awww! That stings, Regan!" he says to me, corners of his lips turning up, fingers tracing down one of those marks to uncover healthy skin under the blood.

"How?" I ask, not believing my eyes as I watch the wounds close.

The last traces of my hope disappearing until he's whole again. A man that can't be wounded. A man that can't be defeated.

"Do you see now, Regan? You never stood a chance against me. Never!" he laughing at me, the sound collapsing into silence as again and again, I try. Fruitless efforts to find a weakness in him. 

A new force carried into my punches, a new determination to break the healing sequence, to mess up with the cycle of his natural response of his body against the wounds mine is inflicting on him.

There is no weakness. He is untouchable. Something out of this world, unimaginable.

Hands falling to my sides, I chance a glance over his shoulder to where she's fighting her friends, Micah and Adam. I can see her lips moving but I don't hear her words over the shouts and battle cries. All I can see is her swinging, pushing one off herself and then the other.

Both of them keep coming. No longer standing on the same side of the line, they've crossed over to the enemy' side.

A dagger is flashing in the other girl's hands when she's come unarmed here. She never expected something like this to happen. I should have known better.

Following every move they make, their dance as lethally graceful as they come, she's my only focus now that I'm watching them close in on her. Every breath a new strike, every move closer to harming her, I want to pull her out of her fight and send her away from here to meet the day and keep living.

A life without me. A life that will be happier and carefree.

"What, cat got your tongue, wolf?" chuckling at his own joke, eyes probing at everything I've thought I was but am not, bodily shapes flickering all around us, my mate struggling to get her attackers off herself, the male holding her in place as the female swings her blade...

I see it, I watch it as if it's playing in slow motion in front of my eyes. I listen to the distorted sound of his laughter, to those of my own falling to their knees and meeting their end under the taloned hands of the wild... I notice the man against me raising his own, bringing them closer to me, bare, no need for a weapon when they are the only one he'd ever need.

The blade cuts, sticks into her chest. Those hands reach me. The wild rejoice in dying cries, nothing more than whispers that will be carried by the wind that's not really there.

Screaming and howling, both man and beast meet the claws tearing through our flesh, no longer fighting for another breath but welcoming the lack of one.

Nothing... there's nothing in this world that matters now when we can see her falling to her knees, body giving in. Death is coming, life is leaving with that sigh I can only see but never hear sizzling out of her lips.

The world is still. The place is quiet. Silent tears are raining on the ground, saturating my skin before they land. Body shaking, flesh being ripped apart, hands that are snuck inside my chest, holding my heart, still beating through the grief of losing her, those claws a hair short of digging into it, ending me like his people ended her, I long for that completion now.

"Do it!" gritting words out through the pain, looking at the abyss in these eyes of a monster, the inferno raging inside staring right back, he presses those claws making my heart bleed in the most physical of ways before he retrieves his hands.

That eery smile on his face, it's the last thing I see before darkness eats the world, swallowing down the day.

Epilogue

A figure hid behind the shadows of the treeline. The wind swatted at the curls falling down to his shoulders. The air carried the raw scent of fresh blood and death.

He hoped he wasn't too late.

He hadn't known why the Oracle had sent him here up till a few minutes ago but now, seeing what laid before his sight, he understood her urgency. What he couldn't figure out still was why those people were so important.

"Look for the moon-kissed girl," the woman had told him, then added, "Bring back everyone you can. Bring them all if you can."

Bodies laid scattered on the forest floor. Void shells that had housed life inside not so long ago. There were so many of them he couldn't find a spot on the earth that wasn't saturated with blood or supporting the heavy weight of the fallen.

This had been a furious battle. A battle to the death.

The first signs of the new day were glimpsing through the heavy clouds that hung in the sky. Slowly, the clouds were dispersing from sight to give way to the Sun that was a merciless master of the world. Nothing could stop him when he decided it was time to show his golden face. 

The man walked to the middle of the clearing, wrinkling his nose in disgust as his eyes fell on the mutilated bodies. He had a hard time imagining all that had happened here. He didn't feel inclined to imagine such horror at all, but then again, considering his line of work, it was something he usually found himself unable to prevent.

Looking from person to person, skin that had held a healthy glow was now nothing but deadly pale, he stopped in front of a girl with a face that was paler than the others. Her skin looked translucent when it should have been ghostly gray like the others'. There was something about her that gave him a pause, something that, even in death, drew him in towards her.

It was a feeling he had never experienced. A pull he didn't recognize as anything even remotely familiar.

Right then and there he knew. This was the one the Oracle had spoken about. The moon-kissed girl. 

She was a beautiful young woman. So small, almost like a child, the fact that she was a grown-up woman was unmistakable in her well-defined curves even if her face was too innocent and misguiding.

Maybe when this was over he could try his luck with her. It was a well-known fact amongst his people that he enjoyed female company more than the average male and he was looking forward to the opportunity to conquer and explore this new-found pull towards this woman.

Letting out a shaky breath, he adjusted himself in his pants, aggravation beating against his chest that he would think in such way about the dead.

He kneeled down next to the girl and placed his hands on her forehead. Glancing briefly at the gaping hole in the middle of her chest, he closed his eyes, shooed away the thoughts of what he would do to her later and instead concentrated on what he had to do to her right here and now.

Feeling the fabric of his pants getting wet against his skin, he ignored the thought that he had gotten her blood on himself and searched deep into himself for that warmth only he could feel.

Soon, she was going to feel it too.

The place was cold despite the Sun that was pouring out his grace onto the earth. The lingering ghosts of the dead were struggling against the need to depart from here and go to the world beyond.

They could do that. He didn't care if they decided not to bother staying any longer. It was just that girl he couldn't let go.

"She needs to stay," Oracle had told him. "She's still at the beginning of her path. She needs to do so much more."

"What is it so important she needs to do that you're asking me to bring her back?" he had asked then, looking at the somber expression of the white-haired elder.

The woman had not answered his inquiry. Instead, with a flick of her small, wrinkled hand, she had said, "Go, Lucas. You're wasting time you don't have."

And he had gone. He had come here. He had found the remains of the battle.

The dead.

Tapping into that power he could feel waiting to be released, he guided it out of its well deep inside him and to his hands resting on her forehead. Spilling out through the skin of his palms, rushing out of his fingertips, it flowed into the girl. 

Her inert body started to warm up, her skin glowed like a bulb being lightened in the dark, only it was a day outside. Yet, that glow overshone the shy rays falling to the earth, it lightened up the air in the clearing, sizzled and crackled as if static had been released into space.

The man's breathing became shallow and rapid, his heart sped its rhythm as the wound on the girl's chest began to close, new and healthy flesh replacing the one that had been torn by the blade stuck into it.

Blood that had been still in death started to circulate through vessels until, finally, that vitally important organ inside her squeezed it inside itself for the first time since hours.

Rushing in and out, beat after beat, she came to life underneath the hands of a stranger who never knew he was going to perform a miracle like none other he ever had.

Her first breath came like the air had been pushed inside her lungs, tore into her chest with a brutality that only life possessed. No strangest sound than the one you could hear then as the dead took their first breath of life once again.

Her lids fluttered open. Her body jolted awake.

Only a moment later, that sound of air rushing in was followed by others, just the same.

The dead was coming back one after another.

The man's eyes opened as well. His hands retreated back from the girl's forehead, the pull to her like electricity that flowed through his every fiber, so more intense in life than it had been in death, he knew with certainty that it was something else.

It was scary beyond everything he had ever felt.

A gasp left his lips when his blue orbs connected with that stormy gaze. Holding him prisoner inside as her dilated pupils constricted back to clarity.

He wanted to shout. He wanted to cry out. Yet, his lips stayed frozen as shock coursed through his every cell.

"W-here... where am I? What happened? Who are you?" the girl whispered, her voice so raspy that it sounded like the words were spoken by someone much older than her.

Yet, he loved every note of it. He longed to listen to it. He wanted to hear his name spoken by those lips.

Bringing his hand to her, slowly as not to alarm her, he caressed the top of her head, fingers playing with a lock of her chocolate hair.

He wanted to tell her then, to speak words he never imagined to say in his life and he wanted to say them to this girl.

"It's alright. Breathe," he said instead. "I'm Lucas and I brought you back."

"Brought me back? Brought me back from where?" she asked, confusion written all over her face. 

"You were dead. I brought you back." Words that were meant to comfort, soothe the worry out of her, the blood that had barely reached her face draining from it, fear in her eyes when there should have been peace.

"It's true. All of it is true," she said, voice becoming stronger, ringing clearer with each syllable, turning into a scream.

"Where is he? Where is Regan?" Raising herself from the ground, limbs straining to move her body upwards, she looked around in panic, gaze stopping at the form of a man laying nearby.

Running to him, crouching next to his body, shaking it in despair Lucas had witnessed many times before.

"Bring them all..." Oracle had said.

"Come back to me, Regan. Come back! Live! Breathe! Breathe for me, Regan!" Her back turned towards him, he could imagine the tears raining upon that man as he watched her shake him, listened to her plead for him to come back, return to her.

Praying he won't listen to her broken prayer, he could have missed the signs of fire returning to the cold body of the man if he wasn't watching so attentively. But like the others that had come back from death, only a few seconds passed before the man's lungs filled up with air and his heart beat again.

"Regan." Such relief in that single word, it wasn't his name she spoke but the other's.

A word that broke a heart he had just found back.