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Was Moon close to dying? Was he afraid Moon had slipped away?

Or had the fae found Chen? Maybe the king had returned with his army and Chen was now fighting alone.

No! He had to get to Chen. His mate needed to be protected.

Moon gave one last push with everything he had and burst through the darkness. He gasped, sucking in a lungful of air. But that first taste of normal was too brief. What once was black was now washed in a sea of red. Electricity surged through his body, filling every cell and organ until it lifted him off the ground. He was floating.

When he opened his eyes, everything was red with blood. He looked down to see the arm King Ash had left behind. The arm that held the sword that killed him. The arm of the man who tried to kill his love.

“Moon!”

His gaze jerked to Chen kneeling on the icy ground, clutching his own left wrist. Blood spilled out between his fingers.

Had the fae hurt him while Moon had been unconscious?

They were going to pay. They were all going to pay for hurting Chen. For hurting the Zhang clan by taking Yichen and holding him hostage.

Movement in the trees pulled his attention from his lover. Life. It writhed and pulsed, growing closer. He could feel the blood pumping through veins. That blood belonged to him now. All blood did.

Moon flung out his hand toward the approaching elves as they cleared the last line of trees. They stopped sharply, their bodies seeming to freeze awkwardly midstep. Moon closed his fingers and yanked hard, as if pulling on a rope. The blood coursing through the fae bodies surged out of their flesh. It hung perfectly suspended in the air a foot away from the bodies, still in the fae’s shape. The corpses collapsed to the forest floor, and the blood hung there.

“Don’t! Don’t drink it! Fae blood is dangerous to vampires!” Chen shouted.

That was fine. He wasn’t thirsty just now. No, he’d rather slaughter the fae with their own blood.

With another wave of his hand, the blood shifted and changed, sharpening into hundreds of tiny blades. Flattening his hand, he shoved it forward, sending the blood blades streaking through the woods to the castle. They would find their own kind and bury deep into hearts and veins. He’d kill them all.

“Moon! Stop! This isn’t you!”

Moon snarled and whipped around to shout at Chen that this was him. He was getting revenge for the pain Chen had suffered. For what his clan had suffered.

Chen stood, but he was leaning heavily on a tree as if his legs didn’t have the strength to support him. He still held his arm and blood dripped from his fingers. Something was wrong. Why was Ah-Cheng still bleeding?

“Come back to me, baobei. I need you,” Chen whispered.

Those soft words pierced his world of red, creating a pinpoint of white. Chen’s snowy white. The color of calm and peace. The color of Chen’s beautiful magic.

Moon poked at that pinpoint, expanding it, forcing it to fold in around him. With a soft cry of pain, Moon fell to the ground that was now a mix of snowy white melting into green and brown. White splashed with blood to make a sickly pink.

“Ah-Cheng?” he choked out.

“Oh, thank God,” Chen sobbed. He slid down the tree and sat hard on the cold ground.

“Chen!” Panic ripped through Moon and he crawled as fast as he could to Chen’s side, pulling the too-pale vampire into his lap, cuddling him so fucking tight. “What’s wrong? Why are you still bleeding? What can I do?”

His sweet lover huffed a soft laugh and his head lolled against Moon’s shoulder. “I think…I think I gave you too much of my blood. You…you weren’t waking up.”

“H-how do I fix this? Do you need to bite me again?” Moon stammered. He couldn’t lose Chen now. There had to be a way to fix this. His lover brought him back from the dead so they could be together.

“I need you to heal my wound. Lick across the opening and imagine pushing healing energy into it.” His lips quirked into a half smile. “Sorry. You probably think that’s gross.”

Moon bussed a kiss across Chen’s forehead. “Baby, I’ll lick any part of you that you want.” He turned his attention to the arm Chen was holding and pried his sticky fingers loose. Blood poured out of two holes that looked as if he’d tried to heal it, but ran out of energy.

Okay, so maybe this made his stomach queasy, but he could do it for Chen. He dragged his tongue across the openings while focusing all his attention on imagining those holes closed.

When he lifted his head and cracked one eye open, he found Chen’s wrist was pristine, without a single hint of broken skin.