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If I could feel my body, I was sure it would have electrified. “He deserves to get in,” I explained. “Wolf is the one that should make it, not me. I cannot enter The Golden City without him.”

She floated closer to me, her midnight power illuminating the darkness. “He is half a vampyre.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Yet you love him.”

A sob filled the air around us, and it took me a moment to realize it was mine. Love.

Was that what the flip of my stomach was every time he entered a room? Was that the warmth I felt when he unlaced my boots for me, the pull in my heart when he tended to my wounds?

How quickly he could piss me off, how rapidly I forgave him, even though I pretended to stay angry?

Was that love?

“Yes,” I admitted, breathless. “I do love him.”

Era eyed me, and I could feel her gaze piercing the space in the void as sharply as a dagger would. This was it. This was the moment I died, or I continued living.

But my words were true. I did not want to make it into that place without him.

“Your heart is pure,” she breathed. “His heart is dark, but you have shown him the light. There is something I need from you.”

“Of course,” I stuttered. “Anything.”

“You will not understand what you see when you wake up, but you must trust yourself. Yourself, and the boy. Your heart tells the truth, and you must not abandon it. I will see you again, child. Very, very soon.”

“What does that—”

“Hang in there,” she interrupted. “You will understand in time.”

Her blue light faded before I could ask any more questions, before I could make sense of the encounter.

Era, Goddess of Vaehatis, let me live.

Hands held my face as I opened my eyes.

Familiar hands.

Strong hands.

“Wake up, Huntress.”

Wolf.

My eyes shot open, finding him leaning over me with his blood-stained face. His wings were no longer burnt and bent. His black feathers had regrown, fully healed.

Alive.

Breathing.

“Is this… Are we…?”

“Dead? No, not as far as I can tell, though I’m not sure we should be relieved. I saw—”

“The goddess,” I finished for him. “I know, I saw her too.”

I sat up and looked around. We were now on the other side of the massive white wall, but it was no longer clean, no longer perfect.