Survive. Just survive. A little longer. Another second. Pain is only in the present.

Blood rusted my fingertips. The onyx surface and sun's warmth melted the frost outside my palm's shadow. Through a numb stare I watched it form and melt and reform against my quivering digits, over and over again, over and over, delicate whorled crystals to pink beads.  My body wasn't numb. Some spots were, the longer he played. Some spots tingled and twitched, and that was relief over the throbbing pulse of electricity surging through my back and lower body.

This would end, I told myself, balling my hand into a fist. It flattened again with a sharp cry as Akta ripped the quill loose. His chin nuzzled my slick waist; large hands massaged my burning muscles, pushed gashed skin back together and pulled and pushed until everything felt like a wet, stinging smoothness, like rubbing ointment on a fourth degree burn. The demon's vocal range plunged into guttural grunts and thunderous bellows.

I tried to push myself up. On the edge of the stone as I was, my toes strained for the tips of shriveled grass, but whenever I would find the strength to move, even just to get my elbows underneath me, fresh pain exploded along my back and my legs would give out and Akta would press his weight on harder.

On my latest feeble attempt, he grabbed me with strong hands and flipped me over. Instead of air and sunlight needling and drying and irritating flayed skin, coarse stone ripped what had barely clotted. Akta drove himself against me, his beautiful face the brightest shade of carmine. His eyes gleamed wild and green through the smeared colors. He leaned in. Words rolled off his tongue faster. My breath came in teary gasps.

Both sounds faded in the silence of a sanguine kiss.

It happened so fast, so abruptly, I didn't even have time to bite him. The golden stag pulled away. I stared up at him, my back paralyzed in fire, my muscles so tense they threatened to go limp with exhaustion.

Keeping me pinned with the weight of his torso, he wiped his chin. His head turned to one side, droopy ears curved slightly as if listening to distant instruction. At last, with a smile that knotted my abdomen, he cleared his throat and spoke in the mellifluous tone I recognized. "You aren't what It was hoping for," he said, pushing down on my shoulders, grinding my back against the stone until I cried out. "So that makes you all mine."

He left me weak and panting. With casual grace he picked up my discarded shirt and wiped his face and shoulders down. Another few short clicks and he'd hoofed it to the tree to hang my shirt on a lower branch. Too stunned to throw up, I pushed myself onto my elbows, then finally into a seated position, trying to ignore the sizzling pull of flesh along my spine. I drew my feet up onto the stone, hugged my legs and took a few shallow breaths with my forehead pressed to my knees. I wrapped one shaking hand over my wrist and peeked through my hair at the result: the blood against my skin had cracked and freeze-dried in a tiny breadth of space no large than a quarter. My skin was untouched (well, in the sense that I hadn't frozen myself, which honestly would be a blessing right now).

A soft kick, a stumble, an odd shuffle of pebbles, stole my attention. Akta's hoof had tripped on a stone, but he was at my side without delay, staring down his flat nose, green eyes imperious and loathsome. He lifted me into his arms, oblivious to the vitric hue on fingers tucked away against my chest. As he straightened, he paused, shook his head with a snort of annoyance.

"You don't look so well," I stuttered through a woozy smile. Ajax had the spear. Just a little longer now. Everything might be okay. "Maybe you should sit down."

A branch snapped. On the far side of the oak, Dakota stood frozen against willowy saplings. Alarm filled her blue eyes. Her hands tightened around a crude spear.

Akta's head turned around. Before he spotted her I funneled my waning energy into my palm and slapped him hard across the face. Frost glittered red on his cheek, melted, and dribbled down his chin. Rage tightened his slim features.

Dakota crouched lower against the grassy horizon.

And I fell hard onto it, dropped from the stag's arms with a hiss.

I landed square on my shoulders in a shock of pain. Not a second later a hoof connected with my thigh, bruising the skin instantly as I tumbled. The antlers came next as he charged, thrusting razor-edged tines at my chest. With a scream I forced my body into a short roll, catching only the tips from half his spread. The tines gored into my naked side, puncturing the skin like paper. My feet kicked valiantly at his snout, desperate to stop any more forward progress. But the barest feeling from the waist down wasn't enough. My legs collapsed. My body skidded helplessly back into the rock as he shoved, antlers first, driving the points deeper and deeper. My fingers grappled helplessly against him, unable to create more than a patchy frost.

Claws sank into the back of Akta's exposed shoulders. A violent motion ripped the stag off his feet and me with it. In a terrifying flash I felt myself hoisted into the air, gravity holding me to the stag's antlers, and then I was gone. Momentum slammed me into the ground near the base of the tree. I blacked out under ghastly dresses.

Seconds, maybe minutes later, my eyes fluttered open with an enormous gasp. Tufts of tawny and golden fur blew across the primal battlefield as two unhallowed opponents brawled.

A huge swath of skin had been raked from Akta's belly, the telltale marks of missed opportunity by a big cat. Always chanting, the stag spun in a quick circle, but he was tackled down by the massive shadow, dragged braying and screaming in a crashing gray dust.

Vines tore through the charred soil as Chiro dislodged one saberfang from Akta's shoulder, his legs subjected to pummeling kicks as the stag struggled. Covered in gore and locked on his target, those grey eyes missed the creeping tendrils. I couldn't find the voice to shout, and I doubt he would've heard me anyway.

The vines writhed as one, coiled like a serpent, then lashed out. In a mad speed they caught the cat's hind legs and ripped him from his prey, choked thick tendrils around his neck quicker than I could wobble to my feet. Chiro whipped around to slash blindly at what held his haunches. The vines constricted tighter, tighter, as sheer, ardent volume outmatched the cat's claws. Head lowered, Akta drove his antlers straight into the captive cat's belly, once, twice.  That unholy voice roared curses through the air.

I staggered forward. My body pleaded with me to just lay down, to just let things play out, that it wasn't worth it, that we should wait for Ajax to finish the job.

A sea of vines swelled over Chiro as the stag tormented him. Akta reached into one open sieve of a wound and filled his tongue with blood. He continued to chant, his hands raised, his head bobbing, knees shaking in drunken, sideways steps.I tried to move faster but wasn't sure I was even moving at all.

"Tay!" Dakota shouted, a distressed echo in my eardrums. She caught me by the wrist, then dropped her grip in an instant, clutching raw, red fingers. Even if she wanted to, she couldn't pull me back unless she grabbed my hair or my pants.

I tumbled into the vines when I reached them, dropped straight onto my knees and caught several thorns. My fingers curled around the twined plants. Cold relief spread through my veins, poured through the blood in my cut palm.

Dakota gasped. Frost spread down the length of the vines, turning them first beautiful, glittering blue-green, and then the dying plants shriveled into withered browns and blacks that curled away from Chiro. The great cat dropped to the earth, hurtled through the shattered remnants and crushed Akta into the ground. The stag's slender legs folded beneath the weight. White fangs sunk into the demon's shoulder and throat.

And then, mid bite, the bronzed sabercat flinched. Pain flashed through his grey eyes. He was ripped back into human form, easily thrown and gravely wounded, drenched in blood with a knife shoved deep into his side.

I grabbed Dakota's rough hewn spear.

"Asshole!" I yelled, and drove the end into Akta's flank.

The deer whipped around in a flash of glazed, white pupils. I staggered back with a smile.

He plucked me from the ground and slammed me back against the stone, squeezing my body. There was a pop, a sharp, searing pain in my arm and then I grabbed his. Akta's hand and then the arm that gripped me pooled into caliginous shades of frostbite. Color spread down his arm as if the frost had seeped into his veins. His eyes rolled back. The antler's weight made his head weave and bob as he was called to another world- my world.

The priest fell flat with me trapped in his grip. He bounced off the rock and slumped sideways on the ground. The wind sucked out of my body in a painful rush, and stayed that way until Dakota managed to push his frigid arm off and drag me free.

This was our chance.

My fingers struggled to pull the knife from its sheath. The second I touched it, the hilt iced over. Dakota felt for a heartbeat in the stag's chest, harder to do with him out cold, but it was there. I was in too much pain to think about the horrors of what I was about to- with no time to squirm around I dug the knife in and chipped away as flesh and bone froze around my touch. With Dakota's help on the rib cage, I reached inside his cooling chest and cut the damned thing loose. Coated in a layer of frost, Akta's heart crackled as I pushed my fingers through the ventricles and crushed it.

In that moment I swear fire gleamed through the dead man's eyes, and then there was nothing. I threw the remnants at the bleak stone with a fierce screech, yelled at Dakota to check for a second heart in the stag-half, and collapsed.

*

The meaty crunch of bones woke me up. From where I lay Shail was shoulders-deep in Akta's belly. Dakota sat several yards outside of the lone tree's grotesque shadow, covered in a lot more blood than I remembered. Her feet were stained cherry-red. Drying at her feet were the remnants of a much larger heart.

I laid my head back against the ground and worked up the energy to sit up.

Every part of me was stiff; the second I so much as started upright a hot trickle of blood freshened my back and filtered from my waist. I took a deep breath, decided sitting up was impossible, and just laid there prone. It took me a few seconds  to reason why, perhaps, Dakota was so far away and yet looking so concerned.

Everything in a twenty foot radius was frozen or frosted, this despite the blazing afternoon sun. Wincing, I raised a hand up to my eyes. The edge of my fingers were blue with magic. "Shit," I said. Chilled vapors rose past my lips as I dropped another bomb.

Dakota, watchful, pushed herself from the ground. She'd retrieved her spear, hefting it over her shoulder as she tread to the cold boundary. "What's the matter?"

"I can't turn it off," I said in a panic, looking at my dusky fingers. Gowns drifted elegant shadows over me. The longer I stayed conscious, the more the pain burned through me. I just kept turning my hands over. "I don't know how it works. I can't turn it off." And that was my mantra for the next few teary minutes, as the fears I'd put off came roaring through my pain-addled brain. Dakota, unable to help, squatted down in the shade, pursued her lips and told me to breathe deep and slow.

"Where's everyone?" I asked when I'd managed to recover myself, wiping my stained cheeks.

"Holed up with the wolf," she told me quietly. "Just relax. You keep moving around and you'll bust yourself open and I'm gonna puke. I've done that like a hundred times in the past hour and I'm getting dehydrated in this heat, alright?"

Shaking my head, I sat up. The world rotated. Dakota pushed the butt of her spear against my chest, applying just enough pressure to keep me laying down. "You've gotta get back to the castle now. Chiro will take you. I'll be alright, I just need time, okay? There's a girl who ran from Lord Yerik. I'll find her and take her back." I tried to keep the pain from my expression. "Lots of time."

Dakota brushed sticky blonde hair behind her ear and bit her lip. "We can't go without you."

My brain worked through the recent struggle with a sinking feeling. "You mean you can't go without me because you like me so much, or because...?"

The woman kicked at the frozen grass. "Ain't shit you can do for him, so just heal up, okay?"