Chapter XXV. Domenic
XXV
DOMENIC
WINTER
Through the storm’s churning blackness, Peak only came into focus as he skidded to a halt beside them.
He raised Targath. Its calcified wood gleamed like a hot coal, and its heat scorched across Domenic’s skin as its warming spell expanded, making every magician in a one-hundred-foot radius slump in relief, even cheer.
The darkness of the courtyard thinned, like smoke-tinged amber.
“You both all right?” Peak asked.
Domenic’s panic blazed, a fuse dangerously close to explosion.
Bearing the weight of the world had been burden enough before the world had shifted beneath them.
He didn’t know what to make of these ghasts who fought with strategy.
What to make of Ellery, calling Kythion by name.
What to make of the countless Living Wands around them, each burning with a presence that felt suddenly unnerving, monstrous.
Least of all, he no longer understood the wand in his own hand, which seemingly possessed no presence entirely.
The boom of a collapsing building rumbled somewhere beyond.
“’Course we are,” Domenic croaked, and Ellery managed a bleak nod.
“Have you two gotten a good look around?” Peak squinted through the whizzing shrapnel of snow.
“I don’t know how it’s possible, but these ghasts are here with a mission, a goal.
So the three of us, we figure it out, we stop it, and we save as many people as possible.
’Cause my guys—they’re good, but they’re not trained for this.
And if I have any shot of bringing that thing down”—he gestured at Kythion overhead—“I can’t be worrying about collateral damage, you hear? ”
“You bring it down?” Ellery repeated. “It took me and Dom together to slay Decibel—”
“Well, Thundersnow isn’t like Decibel, is it? It’s got nature magic. No tricks or illusions to worry about.” Peak tilted his head back, and he didn’t flinch as Kythion’s lightning detonated across the scurge. “Maybe Targath and I have finally met our match.”
At first, Domenic swore Peak had reached their same conclusion.
But as Peak smiled crookedly at the monster, the cracks between his teeth shining molten, Domenic realized that this, this was the truth of Peak.
The man who ran into danger without a single thought for himself.
Who strolled through Winter’s cold without need for warmth, whose very presence had made the snow melt in a circle beneath him, had made the once frozen grass blacken with char.
Who held Targath high—not to help him see in the darkness, but as a beacon to anyone else in need of hope.
“G-good luck, then,” Domenic stammered.
With a final thumbs-up at the pair of them, who both awkwardly returned it, Peak charged off toward his epic war story in the making. A strange nerve tightened in Domenic’s chest as he watched Targath’s glow diminish through the scurge. Surely Peak was the last person he ought to worry about.
“Do you think he’s valiant or deranged?” Domenic asked Ellery.
“Both,” she answered grimly. “Now, with this many ghasts, I still think you’re right—finding the eye is the only way we’ll ever stop this scurge.”
“But what about all the people here?”
The surrounding magicians shivered and shuffled around as one of that afternoon’s stern-faced generals corralled them into units.
With his magic like magma in his veins, Domenic had forgotten about the cold, and he hastily cast a warming spell of his own.
The blackened grass greened, and the storm receded into a roiling dome overhead, their small pocket of refuge free from the smothering darkness and torrential winds.
As onlookers cheered again, Ellery answered, “Stopping the storm is the best way to save them.”
“But that will take time. And you heard Peak—they’re not trained for this. We need to get them out of here.”
Ellery winced at another crash of thunder. “Then we split up.”
“What? No. No way.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. One of us should find the eye, while the other should evacuate the NDC.” Her lip quivered even as she bit it down. “A-and you see how they look at me. If they’re going to trust anyone to lead them to safety, it’ll be you.”
Spite simmered in Domenic’s core. While the pair of them stood there, still, Ellery’s shadow lashed across the ground, alive and wild with magic. Several nearby magicians pointed at it. Some even lunged from its path as if it might strike them.
They didn’t notice how even beneath the glare of Valmordion, Domenic had no shadow at all.
“Fuck what they think,” he growled. “They won’t give a shit so long as we’re saving them from—”
“Dom, this is a better plan,” Ellery snapped. “You know it is.”
Domenic had never loathed his costume more than in that moment. That he couldn’t reach for her. That he was bound to be noble. That he ought to care what anyone else thought of them when no one could ever see the entirety of who they were anyway.
“Please,” he said desperately. “Be careful.”
“You, too,” she told him.
Ellery ran off, and Domenic raced toward the closest building—a garage. One of its doors whipped in the storm. He ducked through it.
“Hello?” he called. Even inside, the wind wailed, and icicles speared down from the ceiling rafters. Shards of those already fallen littered the concrete.
“Over here! Help! Please!”
Mimicking Peak, Domenic raised Valmordion higher and sped toward the voice.
He found a trio of magicians behind a utility vehicle.
One slumped against the corrugated steel wall, wheezing—magical frostmaul crusted scarlet and crystalline over half her face.
Another knelt beside her, his training wand quivering in his hand. The third was dead.
Dimly, Domenic’s vision tinted red as he took in the body, and that scared him even more than the corpse did. That after all the agony of remaking himself into someone stronger, someone better, there was no version of Domenic Barrow that wasn’t a little bit broken.
“It’s you,” the magician gasped. “Thank everything. I thought I’d lose her, too.”
“We won’t,” Domenic assured him, then withheld a cringe. He sounded comical.
But the man only slackened with relief and scrambled out of the way so Domenic could crouch beside the wounded magician.
She reached for him, and Domenic clasped her blood-slicked fingers. His stomach turned in aversion, though he thought he hid it well.
Immediately, she stopped shuddering. “You’re so warm.”
“In a minute, you will be, too,” he promised, training Valmordion on the creeping frostmaul.
His hand trembled. Frostmaul this advanced would consume her in minutes.
And healing required an uncompromising attention to detail that had always been Hanna’s forte, never his.
Yet gradually, the frostmaul melted, its sanguine water oozing down her neck and soaking into her scarf.
“Thank you. Thank you,” the man sputtered, leaning so close over Domenic’s shoulder that Domenic could smell the staleness of his breath. “The two of us came in here to hide”—he nodded at the corpse—“but when I went back to carry Manning inside, he was already…” He bit down on his fist, shaking.
“She’s going to be fine, thanks to you,” Domenic told him. Instantly, the fear on the man’s face snuffed out, replaced by hope. And even if Domenic swore he was only wearing a costume, that hope felt almost real.
After Domenic finished healing the frostmauled magician, he led them to the edge of the compound, where an NDC team ushered others out of the gate.
At his approach, the commanding officer rushed toward him.
The man’s jacket was spangled with medals earned in more winters than Domenic had seen in his entire life, yet he saluted him without hesitation.
“How many are left to evac?” Domenic shouted over the wind.
“The east side of the compound has been cleared. But the west…” The officer nodded dismally toward the lightning and explosions flashing through the obscurity, warning of some horror that awaited in the unknown.
“We know Thundersnow took out at least half a dozen buildings. But that’s the last we heard. Our recon unit still hasn’t returned.”
“Then I’ll bring them back,” Domenic vowed immediately.
The officer smiled—he didn’t catch his falseness either.
As Domenic sprinted across the compound, he swore he was in a dream, a nightmare.
It wasn’t the light of his magic that lanced through the darkness.
It wasn’t his hands that tore and bled as they sifted through rubble.
It wasn’t his voice that urged other magicians away so he could battle winterghasts alone.
It couldn’t be.
Their shoulders shook as they hugged him; their hair got in his mouth, their blood smeared on his shirt.
Many of them wept, in grief, in relief, in horror, in so many emotions that Domenic felt smoldering in them, like every tear was kerosene and he was ablaze.
His hands burned from the grasp of desperate fingers.
He bled where nails had stabbed into his skin.
Once he swore he saved a man who’d already gone, had forced the air to return to his lungs and heard him choke back in his final breath.
And it terrified him, how deeply their hope burrowed beside his own. He couldn’t bear to be made a fool.
But it felt fucking real. The costume, the act—all of it did.
After scouring the final barracks and determining it empty, Domenic allowed himself a single moment to lean against a warehouse wall. Until a sudden, familiar warmth pressed against him, and Domenic threw up a noise muffling enchantment a second before thunder detonated directly overhead.
Then Kythion’s antlered head reared over the warehouse, impossibly, grotesquely huge. Domenic clambered back, and his sight locked on a smaller shape atop the roof—Peak.
Peak aimed, and a torrent of flames spewed out of Targath toward the whirling ice of Kythion’s form. On impact, fire and lightning erupted across the sky, so powerful that every window of the warehouse shattered.
Valiant, Domenic decided. Then he shook off his exhaustion and sprinted for the eye of the storm.
The darkness embraced him, abrasive like a shroud of burlap, so dense he couldn’t breathe through his mouth without gagging.
Blades of frost sliced his skin, and even as Domenic healed each scrape, leftover blood coated his hand and marbled Valmordion in crimson.
He stopped twice: once to catch his breath and once to slay a ghast that lurked amidst a decimated vehicle, a corpse still dangling through the windshield where a pincer had skewered him through the glass.
When at last Domenic found the storm’s whirling center, he didn’t pause to despair at the immensity of it—far vaster even than the category five in Oldermere.
He hurled himself within and broke through staggering and gasping.
And for the second time, he found Ellery Caldwell at the base of an alban tree.
The scurge raged around them, ribbons of incandescence twisting through the blackness.
“Dom,” she choked. “Help me.”
Domenic had expected to find her trying to quell the storm from within.
Instead, she pointed Iskarius at the tree, clutching the wand with two hands.
The color of the leaves bled out, gold fading into brown then gray, as if in death.
But no, not death—Winter. Just as the leaves tore from their branches, a frost replaced them, glittering and ominous, seeping over the canopy and down to the roots.
“No,” he rasped, as the pieces locked together.
The hundreds of ghasts, Kythion showing itself …
This was the monsters’ true goal. Domenic and Ellery had come to the border to reclaim the fallen territory, but as it turned out, the invasion the prophecy spoke of had been Winter’s—and it was succeeding.
Domenic reached frantically into the very core of his power, the unfathomable depths of it. His magic radiated through the tree, and immediately, buds sprouted from its barren branches. Petals unfurled. Leaves revived to their lush, golden glory.
But the frost still came.
As the last leaf tore away and disappeared into the storm, a part of Domenic tore away with it. He doubled over, retching, as the warmth of Summer’s magic ebbed from the alban roots beneath him. As Winter conquered this land as its own.
He managed to lift his head to spot Ellery a short distance from him, staring stricken as the scurge’s vortex closed in.
Domenic threw himself against her and pulled them both against the trunk, and she clung to him as the world caved in around them, the feeble glows of their wands the only light against the all-consuming dark.
Even if this loss wasn’t their fault, it might as well have been. They’d gotten ahead of themselves. They’d gotten distracted. Whatever they felt, whatever they wanted, these stakes were too great to risk another failure.
There won’t be another failure, Domenic promised. Not ever again.
As Domenic held Ellery against his chest, a cry of defeat wailed in the wind.
no battles can amount to victory
until Summer’s traitor is condemned