Page 16 of Orc's Veil

“You’re poisoning the Veil.” Her voice is sharp, urgent. She grabs my arm anyway, turns it so she can see the wounds. The four parallel gashes are deeper than I realized, the edges already turning black from the shadow-creature’s toxin. “Every drop of your blood that hits the ground tears the boundary wider.”

I look. She’s right—where my blood has fallen, the soil has gone darker, deader, and the air above it shimmers with that sick luminescence. The Veil is retreating from my offering the way a wounded animal retreats from fire.

“Then let go.” I try to pull my arm back. “My blood is poison. Your blood?—”

“Heals.” She doesn’t release me. Instead, she presses her bleeding palm against my wound.

The effect is immediate.

Her blood mingles with mine—crimson meeting crimson, witch-blood meeting orc-blood—and the Veil stops screaming. The shuddering eases. The tear doesn’t widen further. Instead, it hovers, balanced, caught between the poison of my ancestry and the healing of hers.

The sensation is indescribable. Heat floods through the wound—not the acid burn of the shadow-creature’s toxin, but clean warmth, spreading up my arm, settling into my chest. Her blood pulses against mine, and I swear I can feel her heartbeat through the contact. Fast. Unsteady. Matching my own.

I stare at our joined arms. At the blood running down my skin—mine dark, hers darker still, threaded with the faintest shimmer of twilight magic. The wound still burns, but it’s a distant pain now, muted by the shock of what I’m witnessing.

“How—” My voice comes out rough. Wrong.

“I don’t know.” She looks as stunned as I feel. Her gaze has gone wide, fixed on the place where our blood meets. “I’ve never—this shouldn’t?—”

She stops. Swallows. Presses her palm harder against my wound, and I hiss at the pressure even as the Veil settles further.

“My blood—boundary witch blood—is the opposite. It heals. It feeds. And when they mix…”

“They cancel each other out.”

She nods. Her hand hasn’t moved from my arm. Her blood is still mixing with mine, and the Veil is settling into a hum I’ve never heard before—not distressed, not hungry, but stable. Balanced. Calm.

The implications hit me like a blade to the gut.

If I kill her—The thought forms slowly, dragged into clarity by the evidence in front of me.If I follow my orders?—

The Veil will have nothing to counter the damage my presence causes. The boundary will fall not despite myexecution, but because of it. I will destroy the very thing I was sent to protect.

“You see.” Eirene’s voice is quiet. She hasn’t pulled away—her hand is still pressed to my arm, her blood still flowing into my wound. “You see why I can’t die.”

I see.

And for the first time in twenty years, I don’t know what to do.

We stand there,joined by blood, while the Veil hums its strange new song around us.

I should pull away. Should break the contact, wrap my own wound, maintain the distance appropriate between executioner and target. But her blood is the only thing keeping the boundary stable, and the moment she removes her hand, my presence will start tearing the Veil apart again.

So I don’t pull away. And neither does she.

“This changes things.” My voice sounds wrong to my own ears. Too rough. Too uncertain. “The order—Kravos—they don’t know about this.”

“Would they care?” She looks up at me, defiance and exhaustion warring in her expression. She’s so close—close enough that I can see the dark circles beneath her eyes, the way her lips have gone pale from blood loss. “Would knowing I’m necessary change the sentence?”

I want to say yes. Want to believe that the order serves justice, that the wardens protect the boundary, that my entire life hasn’t been spent enforcing laws that have nothing to do with what’s right.

But I remember Kravos’s message. “No delays. No exceptions. Complete your mission.” He didn’t ask for evidence. Didn’t request verification. Didn’t care about the truth of her crimes or the consequences of her death.

He just wanted her gone.

“I don’t know.” The admission tastes like ash. “I don’t know what they would do.”

“Then you have a choice.” Her hand shifts against my wound—not pulling away, but adjusting, settling into a grip that feels less medical and more… intimate. “Follow orders and doom the barrier. Or defy them and buy the Veil more time.”