Guard the Dawn by Becca Andre

Author:Becca Andre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Becca Andre
Published: 2021-04-09T16:31:26+00:00

14

I dropped to my knees beside Xol, furiously blinking back my tears as I gripped his shoulder. His skin was warm, but where the heel of my hand rested on a glyph, it was icy.

“Xol.” I shook his shoulder, and when he didn’t respond, shook harder. “Come back to me.” I gave him another hard shake, but all it did was cause him to slump to the side. I quickly crawled forward and caught him against me before he fell face first into the leaves.

I wrapped my arms around him, struggling to keep him upright. He was heavy and little more than dead weight like this.

“Bad word choice,” I whispered, hugging him tight. I pressed my cheek to his, a detached part of my mind noting that his hair was still wet. But then, the injuries he received in either form remained in the other. Maybe the wet hair made sense.

“Xol, come back to me,” I sobbed. “Please come back to me.”

Just as I was about to give in and truly let the tears come, he took a deep breath and jerked as if awakening from a bad dream. Little did he know it was the other way around. This was the nightmare.

“Xol?”

“Tegan,” he whispered. “What—”

“Oh God.” I wrapped my arms around him again, unable to hold the tears at bay any longer. “I’m so sorry.”

He pulled back a little to look at me. “What’s wrong? Why—” He took a deep breath as he leaned back to look down at himself.

“I didn’t think,” I whispered. “I just assumed…” My gaze dropped to Xol’s chest as I spoke. Now that he was sitting up straight, I could see the glyphs much better. The design was slightly different with the three blue—living—glyphs that ran down his sternum.

Wait. Three?

I reached out a shaking hand, my index finger stopping just short of the third blue glyph. “Is that…”

Xol looked down, his exhale uneven. “A jaguar,” he whispered.

I shoved myself to my feet, unable to accept this latest horror. Not only had I made Xol the psychopomp, but I had also failed to make Tezcatlipoca whole. He could still shift into a monster. He could still kill an Element and take his magic. I hadn’t fixed a single thing. I’d only made it worse.

Certain I was about to vomit, I turned and fled into the trees.

“Tegan!” Xol called after me, though I saw no reason for that. He should be relieved that I was out of his sight.

With my blurry vision and complete disregard for my headlong rush through the forest, it was a miracle that I didn’t run into a tree. However, I did catch my foot on an exposed root and tumbled down a bank. I came to a stop on my back, staring up at the darkening sky through the tree branches. I was suddenly reminded of that Oscar Wilde quote: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at stars.” Except in my case, the stars weren’t out yet.

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