Page 12

T heo felt like he had been swallowed whole by winter itself. The cold was razor blades on his skin. All the muscles in his body seized up, locking a scream behind his teeth. Too shocked to even fight the currents, all he could do was sink. His thoughts halted altogether as he stared up through the water's rippling surface growing further away by the second. He saw the outline of the leopard prince, opal eye glinting as he peered through the hole at the surface. But across from the prince was someone else. A figure made of moonlight reached out and put its hand on Sebastian's head.

Theo's mind didn't question what he was seeing as the last of the air in his lungs floated away in a series of bubbles.

Everything went calm. His world went dark. Then he was being yanked upwards.

He crashed onto the frozen surface over the lake. He sputtered, coughed, and shivered as he crawled forward on trembling hands.

There was a groan and he looked over his shoulder and saw the prince, naked and almost in his original form. He still had leopard ears sticking out of his hair, but his antlers were shrinking. One of his five tails lay long behind him on the ice, and the other four were gone. Unlike Theo, he wasn't shivering or affected by the cold at all. He just stared with a bewildered expression.

"Did I...did I attack you?"

"Yeah." Theo let out a sound between a laugh and cough as he spoke. "Yeah, you did. For fuck's sake."

"You were supposed to run. You shouldn't be here. You shouldn't have..." He trailed off as he saw Theo's bleeding arms and covered his face with a trembling hand. "Just go. Please." He nodded to the left. "Walk that way. Keep going. You'll see the gate. I won't follow."

Clutching his bleeding chest, the prince wobbled getting to his feet walked a few steps, and then collapsed with a grunt on the frozen lake.

Theo got up, and still coughing stuck out his hand. "Come on. We can lean on each other on the way back."

The prince shooed him away. "I won't be of use if another creature attacks. It's safer outside the kingdom at night, so you need to hurry."

"You're too weak to protect yourself, too, right? Can you even get up?" The prince scowled and Theo knew he couldn't. "I'm not leaving you out here to get eaten." He pulled him up and his own arm stung with pain, but he fought through it. "Hold my shoulder. There you go. Which way back to the castle?"

Sebastian nodded the general direction and the two started their long cold trudge back in the dark.