Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 97188 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 486(@200wpm)___ 389(@250wpm)___ 324(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97188 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 486(@200wpm)___ 389(@250wpm)___ 324(@300wpm)
Siobhan appears through a hatch and smiles tightly when she sees us. “Good. I was worried you wouldn’t make it in time.”
Lizzie holds my hand as she helps me step onto the gently swaying ship. “Did you have any trouble in town?”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle.” She nods at me. “Glad to see you back on your feet.”
“Glad to be here,” I say faintly. What I don’t say is that I’m minutes away from collapsing.
Lizzie, of course, knows. She wraps an arm around my waist. “Tell me there are decent cabins in here.”
“There are.” Siobhan nods at the hatch. “There’s only one extra room, but I assume that’s not a problem. Bath and a small kitchen are below. We’ll share both. I don’t need you to help get us moving, so you might as well head down and make yourselves at home.”
A bath. Gods, I would commit atrocities to get clean. My body aches with each move I make, and while I adore salt water, I don’t adore what it does to my hair. Plus, the journey to this part of Drash has left me shaky and covered in sweat. “Thank you.”
It’s only when we’ve settled in the cabin below, the ship swaying gently as we head for open water, that I broach the topic that really needs to be dealt with. “How am I alive?”
Lizzie pauses in the middle of filling the tub. “I gave you my blood. Not a lot. But it was the only way to heal you.” She glances at me over her shoulder. “It will still take time for your body to replenish the blood you lost, so you’re going to take it easy for the next couple days and let me and Siobhan do all the work.”
I worry my bottom lip and try to decide how I feel about that revelation. It seems like it should bother me, but it just . . . doesn’t. Except for one thing. “Will I turn?” If I do, surely that means losing my ability to transform.
“No.” She turns off the faucet and twists to face me. “Turning someone into a vampire—if it’s even possible with a selkie—takes a massive exchange of blood and, according to my mother, a ritual. I don’t know if the latter is true, but I only took a mouthful from you the night before last, and I only gave you the bare minimum required to heal your wounds and keep you alive.” She’s so incredibly serious when she says, “I won’t pretend I wouldn’t make that decision for you if the alternative was your death. There was some concern my blood might affect you negatively, but”—she shudders out a breath—“you were dying. I had to try.”
“I’m glad you did.” I don’t feel any different, aside from the exhaustion weighing me down. “Come here.”
She walks over to sit on the bed next to me. I lean my head against her shoulder. “You know, when the rebellion is successful, there won’t be many enemies to murder your way through. What will you do then?” I have to believe the rebellion will be successful. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
“There are always enemies, baby.”
“Lizzie.”
She carefully wraps her arm around me, tugging me into her lap. She props her chin on the top of my head, but I swear I can feel her smile. “I’ll love you, Maeve. Beyond that, Threshold is massive, and I think I’d like to explore it. If we get bored with that, we could always take jaunts into different realms in between visiting your family. It sounds like a good life, don’t you think?”
I smile against her throat. “Yeah. I think it sounds like a really good life. A perfect one, even.”
chapter 36
Lizzie
The journey south is peaceful. Siobhan isn’t much of a talker, which suits me just fine. I try to keep Maeve confined to bed, but after three days, she’s out and about. Sometimes she helps Siobhan sail. Sometimes, she swims beside the boat, her pale gray body cutting through the waves even more efficiently than our ship.
There may come a day when seeing her swim in the open sea doesn’t make my chest tight. It won’t be anytime soon. I worry. Fuck, I worry about her so much. If she’s healing as well as she seems to be, how will I keep my virtuous selkie from throwing herself headfirst into the first conflict we come across? What will it take to make sure she survives the rebellion?
The nights are my favorite, though. I finally get to properly map the freckles on her body, though it takes me hours, and we’re both shaking by the end of it. The sex is outstanding, of course, but some of my favorite moments are when we lie next to each other as our bodies start to cool, listening to the steady rhythm of her heart. Again and again, it hits me that she almost died. That if I don’t do something drastic, she will die. Not of old age, safe and peaceful, but in the coming battle.