He pressed his hands to her wounds, but the blood pulsed through his fingers with a speed that made his efforts useless. “Why? Gods dammit, Ams, why?” She laughed again, that same high-pitched desperate sound that set his chattering teeth on edge. “You’ll go to her when I’m dead,” she whispered. “You’ll ask for the collar. I told her I could make you. Now you will. I broke you. The one he loved best. You tell him that, when she takes you.” Kaie heard her speak but the words rolled off him like water. They made no impression. His eyes combed the empty white world, watching the dark red puddles from his vision form and grow in the snow at his side, seeking some miracle that would save her. “Vaughan!” he screamed. “Vaughan, help me!” Time stretched and danced, seeming both unbearably long and impossibly short with each fading pulse of blood spilling through his fingers. When the boy materialized from the ether he didn’t know if it was an instant or an hour after he called.
