Hunt or be hunted, he whispered in my ear, the memory of his feverish, rancid breath so vivid my back arched up, my body uselessly trying to roll itself away.

And the hammer.

The hammer coming down over and over, Hakkon’s excited panting, the all-consuming agony…

I gasped for breath, shooting straight up, and looked at my hands, expecting to see the bloody, shattered stumps he’d left in their place, terrified that Hakkon would loom out of the darkness, hammer in hand.

But there were no stumps at the ends of my arms, no useless twists of flesh. They were bandaged severely, from fingertip to elbow, in soft cocoons of cotton and salve. Straight sticks stuck out from the ends, still smelling of fresh sap.

A shiver ran through me; what did they look like under there? But there was no sensation to tell me whether they were still attached at all; a pleasant sort of numbness filled me. I stared down at my hands with the odd sensation that they weren’t a part of my body at all.

A coarse wool blanket had fallen into my lap when I bolted upright. I was in a bed of sorts, the kind of camp cot I’d seen in Wyn’s tent before. There was no light but a single lantern, flickering weakly in the dark on top of a chest next to a glass of water.

“Cirri. You’re awake.”

His voice was heavy with relief, almost choked with it. But his words sounded thicker than usual, formed by a mouth that wasn’t meant for speech.

As Bane emerged from the shadows, I saw why. My breath caught in my throat at the sight of him, fully fiend, the face he hated above all else.

It had always been simple to pick out the parts of him that seemed more human than the rest. The general shape of him, the way he smiled… the vampire he used to be had been hidden in there, just glimpsed from the corner of the eye.

There was not so much as a whisper of that vampire now. His lips were gone, his jaw distorted with distended fangs, the bridge of his nose giving way to a blunt snout and slitted nostrils amidst the crags and valleys of his face. A crown of horns spiraled from his skull, and the sharp tips haloed him like armor. A fine down of black fur gleamed on his ashen skin.

And all of him had been torn to pieces. Harsh scars covered his smooth skin, half of his face ragged and shiny with newly-healed tissue.

He was hunched over to fit within the tent, resting on feet and hands as deformed as the rest of him, bulkier and more monstrous than I’d ever seen before.

And gods, what a sight I’d missed.

I held up my hands without thinking, but my fingers didn’t move at all, splinted and bandaged as they were.

Cold fear trickled down my spine. What if they never moved again?

I was grateful to be alive, unsure of how it had happened, but if I couldn’t communicate for the rest of my life… it would be a small death in itself, consigned to the one thing I’d always feared most before I met Bane.

But a greater fear had supplanted that one, twining through me in sickening tendrils.

Bane still hadn’t come to me. He remained half-shrouded in darkness, his black and gold eyes fixed on my bandaged hands.

Whatever Miro had written to him, it had hurt him deeply. Bane couldn’t know I wasn’t the one to write those things. And now… I couldn’t tell him.

What if I could never tell him? I imagined Wyn unwinding these bandages to reveal fingers so shattered they would never be whole, gnarled, stiffened twigs unable to grasp a pen.

“Cirri,” Bane said again, sounding bewildered. “Why are you crying? Does it still hurt? I’ll call for Wyn.”

Was I crying? I couldn’t feel it. My face was numb.

I shook my head, lifting my shoulders to rub my cheeks against them, and looked down. There were wet spots there; the tears were real.

I held out my shaking arms, terrified of the numbness, sickened at the thought that he’d reject me.

But with a single sentence, Bane managed to lift the terrible weight of terror that was pressing in my chest and behind my eyes: he shifted in place, ducking his horn-crowned head, and he muttered, “She’ll kill me if I touch you and disrupt the healing. She means it this time.”

I laughed a little even as a few more tears dripped out against my will. Gods, I hated to cry, but after the days spent in Hakkon’s tower, it was like a dam breaking; I’d spent so much energy holding myself aloof from the warg, denying him the satisfaction of my tears, that I had none left over to hold them back now.

I held my arms out again, and Bane crept closer, until I could carefully maneuver the awkward bandages around his shoulders. I kissed his hard, jagged face, breathing in his familiar, musk-and-woods scent that felt like coming home, and simply rested my head against him for a moment.

But he didn’t curl his arms around me. A small shudder of fear went through me again, cutting through the haze in my head, as Bane gently pushed me back down onto the cot.

“Don’t move. There’s nothing to worry about here. The war is over, the wargs are gone, and you must rest.”

I shook my head, licking my dry lips, and Bane picked up a glass of water from the chest. “You need to drink this.”

By the Light, I didn’t want water, dry throat or not; I didn’t want to do anything but find a way to tell Bane that I never would have left him, that I’d been taken, that anything wrong between us could be repaired.

But he held the glass to my lips implacably. “Drink.”

I finally obeyed, hoping that obedience would earn me the reward of leaving the cot to find some new way to communicate. I supposed I could mouth the words if it came down to it, though it would be imprecise and awkward.

But as Bane returned the empty glass to the chest, I squinted at it, seeing the finest white sediment sliding down the side and into the bottom.

The haziness became more blurry with every breath, the impression of sinking filling my limbs.

I accused him with my eyes. You drugged me. 

“Sleep, Cirri. I’m right here.” He stroked my hair carefully, his jagged claws catching the hairs. “I’m going nowhere, and you will never leave me again.”

Good, I wanted to say, but the fog reached out and pulled me down, down, down.

Later I was told that I had slept for a week without interruption, kept numb by some ungodly concoction of Wyn’s designed to create a dreamless, healing sleep. Nobody would tell me exactly what had been in it, which made me think that it was probably better to live in blissful ignorance.

But although that wasn’t the first thing I was told upon awakening, I knew perfectly well the moment I opened my eyes again that something was missing, and whatever it was, it had held an ocean of pain at bay.

I sucked in a ragged breath, shifting under the blanket as the mild discomfort of sore, bedridden muscles gave way to the relentless agony of shattered bones knitting themselves back together.

There was a strange sensation in my abdomen, a tender soreness like I’d been ripped apart and sewn back together, a creeping ache in my back. I felt… like I’d fallen a long, long way, and if I closed my eyes, I could just recall the moment the horizon tipped over and the ground rushed up at me…

“Cirri, breathe.” Enormous hands clasped mine, and the soft scent of forest pines and musk fell over me. “Breathe. Don’t think about it yet, not yet.”

I cracked my eyes open, the light fractured by tears.

“Move aside,” a familiar voice said, and Bane’s rumbling reply resonated through my bones.

Wyn replaced my husband’s presence, though I could still see his shadow, a watchful, looming gargoyle overseeing what she did.

And Wyn… was shocking in appearance. An old woman, her hair thin and white, stooped over as she palpated my ribs and sides with knotted fingers.