Page 86 of How to Woo the Undead

She dragged the trees with her magic over him, burying him with more stone from the broken house. “I will eradicate them all from my grove.”

She slammed the last bit of the house over him before growing a thorny bush up and around its rubble. “And when I am done and bathing in a river of blood, I will fix this mangled corpse you’ve made of me. And I will be the witch for which this grove exists again.”

Sabine twisted from him. Fists curled, blood boiling, she only saw red. Roses. Blood. Rubies. The red like flames. It stopped her dead in her tracks once more. Red. She saw nothing but red.

She definitely didn’t see the giant hand that jutted out of the house till it dragged her back into its mess.

Chapter Forty-Four:

Austin

No,youdon’tgetto hurt her. You don’t get to remove her. You don’t get to destroy anyone else.

Austin breeched the top of the rubble. Fighting through the thorns and the sticky leaves that tried to rip his flesh off, he stumbled forward. Sabine fell first, taking him with her till he had her pinned. She thrashed, back and forth, howling like a banshee. Austin grunted. Bearing the brunt of her thrashing limbs, he searched for a way out of this. A way he got his girl back.

My flower.

Austin stared down at the blood-covered woman thrashing in his arms and could only recall them in bed. Sharing little kisses, the feel of her head on his chest…the sound of her light breathing when she finally fell asleep. He replayed how her eyes lit up when she was excited. The deep well of sadness that slowly leeched away from her features. Day by day, because she grew to understand herself. To love being alive!

Grew to love him.

Austin croaked, “Please.” Sabine bared her teeth at him. She scratched at any inch of him she could get. Vines lashed out athis back, but they couldn’t touch him. “She doesn’t want you to hurt me.”

“I do notcarewhatshewants!” Sabine seethed. Her heels dug into him, and he felt the bite of thorns she’d wrapped around herself. They sank their teeth into the back of his thighs and up his back.

“This isn’t your body anymore,” he yelled.

“She’s the thief! You and your masters are the poison in my veins!” Sabine threw her head back and forth.

“I know,” Austin gasped. “I know, and I’m sorry.”

Sabine stilled, her eyes welling with bloody tears. Her hands froze by his face. Fingers curled, as if stopped seconds before clawing his eyes out.

Austin’s throat trembled, guilt spilling out of his mouth. “I’m sorry. We didn’t know you could regenerate. We didn’t know you were a grove witch. We didn’t know you had a tree, or why those clerics hunted you down. We thought you were dead. And it’s all my fault. Lord Rosemont didn’t want me to be lonely anymore. And that’s not fair to you. You didn’t ask to be gutted and rearranged. We tried to keep everything as it was, but some things were so damaged. If we knew you were able to heal yourself…we wouldhave neverreanimated you.”

Sabine softened. Only a hair, but he could feel it. Her eyes wavered as they searched his face. “Lonely?”

“Very,” he whispered. His thumbs stroked the inside of the wrists he had ahold of. Soothing circles that applied enough pressure to ease her shoulder’s tension. “I lived in a house full of people in love and asked when was it my turn? I believed was not worthy of love because of my failure to protect them. That I was destined to be lonely and hollow for all of eternity. Maybeit would be better if I was, because I never fell in love, I could never betray their trust or fail them. Fail to protect them.”

Sabine’s lower lip trembled as her feet fell flat beside his knees. “You failed to protect them?”

Austin nodded, slowly putting her hands back against the ground. “I did, and I thought being lonely was my punishment. But it’s not. It’s just pain that I was living in. I never let myself heal from it. Just like any other wound, it needs to heal but I let it fester.” Austin slipped his hands from her grip to her face. The face of his Hyacinth, all dirty and covered in muck. Underneath the ghost and the bloody tears was his flower. She was waiting for him, he could tell. She just needed him to do what he did best.

And this time, when he played the decoy, it wasn’t in hope that someone would come to their rescue. Smith with the matches that used to be in Austin’s pocket was already on his way to the tree. The second they saw the tear in the shield, Austin knew what they needed to do. He sent Smith to burn the tree. Austin would stop Sabine. It was his duty to keep her from hurting anyone else. But more importantly, he would keepherfrom getting hurt.

“I let it nearly ruin me. I let it consume me till I was dangerous to myself, because I thought there was no need for me around. I worried if my stitches were pulled, there would be no use to put me back together again…then I met her.” He choked on his own tongue as the emotions welled up so quickly to the surface, he feared he would drown in them.

Sabine glanced away, her lower lip trembling until he redirected her gaze back to his face. Hyacinth was in there. He could feel it in the way Sabine melted into his palm. Hoarsely, he whispered, “You’ve been in love before.”

She nodded stiffly as more tears spilled from her eyes. “They took him from me. I only had him for a blink of time. And yet, the moment I was without him it was like they stole an eternity from me.”

Austin licked his lips, nodding slowly. “Is that why you’re a grove witch? Here in King’s Fall?”

“I was here before the city,” she croaked, voice drifting as her gaze wandered down his chest. “I tried to make it my tomb after the dragon attacked…but someone woke me.”

Austin brushed the tears from her cheeks. All the vines in the street steadily went limp. The dryad that she’d made from an Enforcer crumbled into pieces after barely crawling out from underneath the house. His focus, however, was on the dead woman who trembled in his palms.

Austin smelled the smoke. His head snapped up out of pure shock, but her crackling laugh brought him back. She wheezed, like her lungs were failing. A little, black puff of air escaped her as she spoke, “I felt your friend light the fire…it took him a few matches. Then the Lord Commander dumped oil on my branches. I’ve been burning for some time now.”