Captive Of The Warg, (Wargs of the Outland #2)

The Wrong Way

The torchlight whispered against her eyelids, the hiss of the flame rousing Reia from a deep sleep.

She was alive.

Her eyes sprang open as the realization struck. She was alive! Or...no. Somewhere betwixt and between. A halfway stop of eerie beauty awash with impossible colors. So strange to feel both asleep and awake—dead and alive—in the midst of shimmering hues.

She sucked in a breath as she took in the strange, vivid gold seething over the ice-coated walls of her hideaway. So she was still in the burrow. Yet it looked...wholly different. She blinked, rubbing her eyes and then gaping anew. The stain of light was like no flame glow she'd ever beheld. It was bright and viridescent, highlighting the colors in the crystalline ice. Colors she couldn't even name. Who knew ice could look so radiant and warm? So vibrant with movement and life.

But who'd lit her torch? Reia sat up, grunting in pain when she hit her head on the low ceiling. Pain meant she wasn't dead yet, wasn't that an acknowledged truth? Nearby, Basil vented a sleepy growl and she whipped her head around to stare at him.

She shook her head, taking in the deep scar bisecting his eye. Her brain throbbed with uncertainty. A cold knot settled in her gut. A flash of black wings cut across her mind.

Basil studied her with his good eye, the gold in his iris swirling with flecks of dark honey. In the dark, his eyes were mesmerizing, settling her. She inhaled a long breath, sifting through what was nightmare and what was reality. The wolf cub seemed to track her thoughts with steady eyes. How had she never noticed all the variegated gold in his eyes before?

She tore her gaze away to glare down at her leg. The pain there was yet another clue she wasn't dead. A small, dull twinge—nothing of the violent throbbing of earlier. That's when she noticed her boots were off and her mitts gone.

Had she removed them in a delirium? But where there ought to have been black flesh staring back at her, her skin was flushed with blood and health. She covered her mouth with a shaky hand and began peeling away the dirty bandage from her thigh.

Nothing made sense. The colors dancing in her vision and the slight pain in her leg all worked to assure her she was very much alive. Or was that some clever shield of the mind? There was no hint of frostbite on her flesh and...her flame had somehow been resurrected. More importantly, where was the ice bear?

If she wasn't dead, she was suffering under the strangest delirium of her life. It invited her to marvel at the beauty of the lethal ice and the strange warmth coursing in her veins. The flicker of another presence, like a breath in the dark of her mind. No, a tug of her flesh, too warm and vital to be the wind. Too comforting to be Death. Or was that what Death felt like? An invisible tether keeping her soul from drifting off into nothing.

If indeed she was dead, and the ice bear was feasting on her dismembered corpse, her spirit was good enough to insulate her from that horror. She shook her head again. Thinking so hard, even in the spirit realm, hurt her brain. The last of the bandage fell away.

Her spirit eyes widened as she beheld what was left of her mortal wound. The flesh was sealed entirely shut. Her mouth parted, her heart stumbling from one beat to the next. If indeed it beat at all. This was too strange. Too surreal.

She brushed her finger lightly over the large, pink scar, mind reeling. It ran partway down her thigh, the periphery still streaked with dry blood. The flesh still trembled with soreness. More like an echo of the ache.

She held her breath, a tremor in her underlip. If this was a dream, it was wretched and cruel, for it meant she was dying and none of this was real. Perhaps already dead and her anchorless spirit lingering in some strange hallucination. She'd have preferred seeing the ice bear devour her legs. Better the sight of that horror than not knowing if she was dead or alive.