The Vampire & Her Witch

Ashlynn was already moving when Sir Elgon started shouting about Devlin’s injuries.

She crossed the corridor in four quick strides, the cavalier hat’s feather sweeping behind her, and knelt beside Devlin without hesitation. Elgon shifted to make room, his blood-covered hands hovering uselessly at his sides as he watched the woman he’d known since she was a child reach for the sailor who had served her family faithfully for more than two decades.

Devlin’s eyes found Ashlynn’s face, and for a moment, something like recognition flickered in the glassy depths. His lips moved, but no sound came out except a wet, rattling exhale that sent a thin mist of pink into the cold air.

"Be still," Ashlynn said and placed both hands over the wound.

The blood was warm against her palms, pulsing with the weakening rhythm of a heart that was running out of the strength it needed to keep beating. She could feel the damage beneath her hands, the way she could feel the grain of the wood in the manor’s doors, as clearly as the lines on her own palm. The halberd had carved a furrow along his ribs that went deeper than the padding and the flesh beneath it, deep enough to nick the muscle between the ribs and open a vessel that was pumping blood into the space around his lung.

He was dying. Not quickly, not yet, but the leak was steady, and his body was losing the battle to replace what it was losing. Without help, he had minutes. Perhaps less.

Ashlynn closed her eyes, and the words came to her lips the way they always did when the need was greatest, rising from her heart and all the desires that dwelled within it, calling out to the power of the world and shaping it to her will.

"Drink the sun’s soft fire through every leaf and vine,

And weave the forest’s breathing life with thine."

The words were barely louder than a whisper, but beneath Ashlynn’s hands, the warmth that flowed from her palms was anything but small. It poured into the wound the way sunlight pours into a clearing when the clouds part, suffusing the torn flesh with a heat that was gentle and insistent and absolutely refused to accept a threat to Devlin’s life.

Devlin gasped. His back arched and his hands clawed at the stone floor, not in pain but in the shock of feeling something that his body had no frame of reference for. The sensation of flesh knitting itself back together was nothing like the agony of being cut open. It was warm and strange, like the feeling of muscles unclenching after a long day’s labor, and it spread from the wound outward in a wave that pushed the cold from his limbs and the fog from his mind.

The bleeding slowed. The vessel that had been leaking closed, the edges of the wound drawing together as though invisible fingers were stitching the flesh from the inside. The torn muscle fibers reconnected, the bruised flesh around the cut flushed with fresh blood, and the raw, gaping furrow that had been pumping Devlin’s life onto the stone floor sealed itself into a line of angry red scar tissue that looked weeks old rather than minutes.

Ashlynn opened her eyes and lifted her hands. Her palms were still covered in Devlin’s blood, but beneath the red, her skin was warm and steady, and there was no tremor in her fingers. The healing had cost her; she could feel the drain in her chest the way Ollie felt the drain of maintaining the guardian wind, but it was a cost she would have paid a hundred times over for the man lying before her.

Devlin stared up at her with eyes that were no longer glassy. The color was returning to his face in uneven patches, and his breathing, while still rapid, had lost the wet, rattling quality that had made everyone who heard it fear the worst.

"My lady," Devlin said, and his deep, steady voice was hoarse but present in a way it hadn’t been thirty seconds ago. "What... what did you just..."

"Later," Ashlynn said, helping him sit up. She retrieved his curved fighting knife from where it had fallen and pressed it into his hand, closing his fingers around the familiar hilt. "Can you stand?"

Devlin tested his weight, pressing a hand against the scar on his side and finding nothing but tenderness where there should have been a mortal wound. His jaw worked for a moment as he struggled to process everything that had happened to him, but some things, he realized, didn’t need to make sense in order for him to accept them.

Like the rising and lowering of the tides, they simply were. He’d already begun to suspect there was much more to Lady Ashlynn’s survival than she’d told them, and now he understood two things. First, Lady Ashlynn was either a Saintess or a Witch, capable of wielding tremendous power and snatching a man back from the jaws of death itself.

But the first thing he understood didn’t matter next to the second: Lady Ashlynn was a woman who truly cared for her people and would do whatever it took to protect them from harm, even if that required her to work a miracle in front of everyone in the corridor.

"I can stand," he said. "And I can fight."

"Then stay behind the Templars and protect Samira," Ashlynn said, rising to her feet. "I need you alive, Captain. We all do."

Around them, the corridor had gone very still. The soldiers who had surrendered were pressed against the walls, staring at the woman who had just closed a killing wound with a whispered couplet and the touch of her hands.

Elgon stood motionless, his own wound forgotten, watching Ashlynn with an expression that was equal parts recognition and revelation, as though a question he had been carrying since the night before had just been answered in a way he couldn’t deny...