Page 66 of The Frost Witch (The Covenants of Velora #1)

“Koryn. Koryn. I need you to keep breathing.”

But breathing hurt. Everything hurt. It was so much easier to just stop…

“Koryn! No, you can’t go! I will not let you!”

So much pain. Pressure on my chest, a mouth on mine.

Cinnamon. I could taste cinnamon.

“Koryn, you must not give in,” a voice chided, gentle and distant. It was familiar, that melodic female voice. I’d known her in another life, or was that this life? Was I still alive at all?

No, I was dead. I died alone in a frostbitten forest.

A life governed by rules and cruelty. That was where the voice belonged. It had never sounded gentle before.

My mouth formed around a name, but even moving my lips hurt. I tried to think it instead. Dark God, how my head ached.

Auri… Auri… Aurienna.

“Do not slip away, frost witch,” she urged, her voice gentle. But Aurienna had never been gentle with me before. She was never a friend, never truly a sister, either. She belonged to Maura, to the Midnight Coven, but not to me. Never to me.

“Do not slip away,” she said again. But it was she who was slipping away, her voice coming to me from somewhere distant. Not real, not like the hot words that he begged over my skin. Or was the heat from me? Was I burning? Was I sick?

I think I am dying.

That could not be. I was already dead.

“Fight it, Koryn. You have always fought so hard. Do not give in now,” the green witch said. I felt her vines curling around me, holding me like a sister.

A sister I’d never had.

The sisters who had died.

The sisters I had doomed. And the one I killed.

My body burned. The frosty cold of my power deserted me, consumed by the kaleidoscope of colorful flames. I could not lift my arms. Nor my legs. But still I moved, floating through the air. A flash of shimmering, iridescent lavender flickered somewhere overhead.

Isanara .

She was alive.

The sky was an unrelenting sheet of white, a sharp contrast to the Dark God’s frigid hell and what awaited me there. Only darkness. When I closed my eyes, there was darkness.

Opening them was getting harder and harder. Soon I would not be able to at all. Soon I would surrender to the darkness.

But at least Isanara was alive.

Cold touched my neck, then my cheeks and my stomach.

My clothing was gone—had probably been burned away by the flames licking at my flesh.

But gods, that was snow against my skin, and it felt like ecstasy.

Maybe I had not been damned to hell at all.

Maybe someone had relented and granted me access to eternal paradise.

A dark laugh filled my head until it throbbed, until I could not see at all. Darkness flooded my vision. I dragged in a breath, but my lungs did not want to work.

More cold. More snow.

A faint whiff of cinnamon mingled with sweat and terror.

“You cannot have her!” he screamed into the night.

I knew him. I dreamed about his face, his shimmering silver hair, the impossible glowing ring in his eyes.

But that voice belonged to a stranger. It raged with emotion. “She has suffered enough!”

Heat subsumed the cold. I was moving without moving myself. A force more powerful than my understanding pulled me to him, against him.

“This was not the sacrifice that was demanded!”

I could hear his heartbeat.

My sisters came to me hand in hand with my mother.

Janessa with her freckles, Rylynn with her high cheekbones and elegantly styled hair.

My mother wore the pendant that Rylynn had secreted away from my father and the golden circlet armband I’d taken the night I died.

That was how I knew it was her and not Xyta.

But I had no words to give to them, no apology that would compensate for everything that I had done.

So, I turned them away.

“Stay with me, witch,” he whispered against my neck.

But staying was hard. Going was easy.

I have failed everyone in my life.

I could hear his heartbeat. I could feel it in my bones. “Did you ever consider that they were the ones who failed you?”

I did not choose to leave my coven. I was cast out.

“You told me that before.” His heartbeat sped up. He pressed something cool to my forehead. “But you did not tell me why.”

I did not have the words, not even now as I danced the line between life and eternal death. I had only the weight of my own failures in my chest. I longed for the block of ice instead.

More than anything, I longed for him.

What made you attempt the gates?

He would not answer. He could not. After all, this was nothing more than a fever dream. I was not even speaking. My voice had ceased working days ago. Or maybe weeks.

But cinnamon and destiny burrowed into my senses as he exhaled against my neck— “Duty.”