King of Beasts

Chapter 4

She’s not dead.  She can’t be.  He’d—he’d used the rune, to touch her, to bring her back.  She wasn’t dead.

But the pack healer was shaking her head, tears welling in her eyes and falling down the lines of her old, aged face.  And people were grabbing onto him, the king of the beasts, holding onto his shoulders and muttering thing in his ear but—but she wasn’t dead.  What were they all so sad about she couldn’t be dead—

He pushed past everyone—they had all crowded when he had fallen in front of t healers door, begging for the battered girls life, panting from running so fast, so hard, just to get her here.  They had crowded around the old house and inside of it, in the small back room where the healer worked her magic.  Too many people, too many people.

He pushed the healer away as gently as he could in his desperation, hands touching the bruised and swollen face of his mate.  She wasn’t dead, see, she just couldn’t be.  Her chest wasn’t moving, sure, and he couldn’t hear a heartbeat with those magnificent ears of his.  But she wasn’t dead.  That’d be impossible, because he’s waited two hundred years for her and all he got was a bloody symbol on his chest and her dying breaths while he held her, running through the woods.

She couldn’t be dead.

He grabbed onto her shoulders, running his hands through that tangled mess of red hair on her head, wiping smears of blood from her cheek.  A hand rested on his shoulder, his second in command talking to him, telling him he was so sorry, that they’d have a ceremony, that it was a great loss for the whole pack.  But she wasn’t dead.

The king snarled and threw his friends hand from his shoulder.  “She’s not dead.” He growled, standing to face the room.  He was still naked, caked in dirt and his mates blood.  “She’s not.”

Odin shook his head sadly, reaching for him once more.  “She’s gone, mate, there’s no getting her back.”

“Out!” he roared, because these were cursed words they were whispering.  “Get out!”

Because he’d waited two hundred years and if she was gone, if she had really, really died then he couldn’t—he just—he couldn’t even think, god, she was gone wasn’t she?  She was really gone.

His shoulders shuddered violently, not his wolf but his human trembling from the weight of it.  Inside of him, that deep animalistic part that made it instinct to find this wild haired girl on that road was splitting in half and falling to pieces.  Misery, pure and unstained, burned his insides and Odin was there again, grabbing onto his shoulders.

They’d never seen their kind cry, and he didn’t now.  There was something too deep about this pain, too pure, for the tears to mean anything.  She was gone, she was really, really gone. 

“We’ll do a proper queens burial.” Odin was saying, muttering under his breath as their entire pack was shuddering, crying, howling, from the pain of their king and the pain of losing their new queen.  “She was a part of us already, Gabe, we’ll send her off like one.”

He turned and fell to his knees by his girl, by his beautiful, breathtaking girl, by the only piece of himself that had been missing.  He’d only heard her voice, defiant and small, a brief enough encounter to know she was perfect, god, everything about her had been so perfect.  She would be the perfect queen, the perfect mate, the perfect human to rule a pack of beasts. 

But—but no longer.  She wasn’t here anymore, she couldn’t feel his hand on her unbroken arm, fingers brushing over her skin, stroking it, not believing how soft she was, how gone she was, how quickly her skin was cooling.

There was nothing more, nothing more inside of him or before him, or anything else he could even think about.  Just his dead mate, lying in the healers room with his pack staring helplessly on, and their howls, god that wasn’t helping, the pain held in each ripping sound—

She sat up and her eyes opened, so green, so wide, so alive.  Her eyes were everywhere at once and her heartbeat was roaring to life, so loud in his ears and he could only stare back, the entire pack could only stare back as they felt life revived into their pack just as it was revived into her body.

And then she started screaming.