Camelot's Crow | ✓ [BOOK 3]

~ 44 ~

WHEN MORGANA CAME TO, there was blood on his hands. Red, hot, sticky blood, enough to make him dizzy. He didn't know whose blood it was just yet, but there was a terrible feeling in his gut as the tendrils of smoke cleared from his mind. He hadn't been in control of himself for a moment, he blacked out and woke up surrounded by nothing but ringing in his ears and far too much red.

Kristofer. He lay on the ground, unmoving, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. His eyes were wide open, staring directly at the faery. Perhaps they had once held emotion, but the light was entirely gone from them now, and all Morgana could see was how lifeless he'd become, how empty and cold he was. Blood blossomed from his middle, where a blade had cut through his armor, forming a pool around him, staining the ground.

"No," Morgana choked out. His knees buckled, and he fell to Kit's side, pressing a hand to his face. "No, no, no, what did I do? Kit, what did I do?"

When he looked around himself, desperate for a solution or even an explanation, Mordred was nowhere to be seen, but his friends were there, frozen in place. Chalice and Eurion were wide-eyed and shocked. Selene's face was hard and unreadable, while Giselle lay unconscious in her arms.

"Help me!" he begged them, hot tears erupting from his eyes and streaming like rivers down his face. "Please, I don't know what I did, I need help!"

Chalice was the first to respond, breaking from their stupor to join him at his side. They were calm despite their fear, a stark contrast to Morgana's hysteria.

The faery raked Kit's damp hair out of his face, avoiding his wide-open eyes, instead choosing to focus on everything else. "I need skin," he told Chalice, trying to keep his cool.

Chalice nodded, and together they worked at Kit's armor, until his torso and abdomen were free, leaving only his loose, blood-stained tunic to cover him. Morgana frantically ripped it open, revealing the nasty wound he'd left under Mordred's control. It was angry and swollen, blood still leaking even now. It had only happened a few minutes ago.

"Come on," he whimpered, placing both hands over the wound. He was already covered in blood up to his elbows, but somehow he still managed to convince himself that there was hope. "Please, Kristofer, come back to me."

He pressed against the wound, willing the skin to stitch back together, for his blood to flow again inside of his body, for his heart to beat and his brain to work, for Kit to come back to life. But no matter how hard Morgana tried, the flesh was unresponsive. Kit was still cut open in front of him, covering him and Chalice in blood with every passing second. Nothing was working.

"He's gone," Morgana cried. "He's gone, he's gone because I fucking killed him, what did I do?"

"Hey, hey," Chalice said. "Morgana, take a deep breath."

He tried, but his breaths were too rapid, too shallow, and he couldn't focus on the druid as they tried to calm him down. Morgana was spiraling now, blubbering incomprehensible nonsense about how much he deserved to die for killing Kit, about how he would never see him again and he'd never know what happiness was after this.

A hand struck him across the face, hard enough to stun him into silence. He was astonished to find that it was Chalice who'd hit him.

"Thank you," he whispered as he touched his stinging face.

"Don't mention it," they said. "Now listen to me. Titania brought me back from the dead. You're the Seelie Queen now, you have her power on top of your own Unseelie power. If we can figure out what she did, maybe we can get Kit back."

They were right. Bloody hell, they were right. And they had someone on their side who was there when Titania did the impossible. "Namyra!" he cried, turning back to the battle. Somehow, it was still waging on. Mab and the druids were fighting remarkably on their own, doing their best to hold the army back. Keeping Mordred occupied was inevitably weakening them, and it was working in their favor.