Chapter 37 Harper
HARPER
My hands won’t stop shaking. They tremble so violently that my vision blurs every few seconds, wavering between the forest, the mangled bodies, and the sickening stillness of Liam’s chest. Theo is folded over him like someone trying to shield a flame that has already gone out.
The rise and fall that should be there is gone.
His pupils don’t track movement. His lips are an unnatural blue that mocks every memory I have of him laughing.
Ares had tried, long after any logical person would have stopped, he kept pressing down on Liam’s chest, each compression more frantic than the last. It took both of Poppy’s shaking hands on his shoulder to finally force him still.
Now she’s kneeling in the dirt, sobbing into her sleeves, her entire frame convulsing with helplessness.
Sebastian drapes himself over me in a frantic attempt to anchor me, but his voice is buried beneath the white noise filling my skull.
He keeps calling my name, keeps trying to force my face toward his, but all I can do is stare at my brother.
My brother, who followed me into this forest. My brother, who tried to talk to me. My brother, who died on ground I led him into.
“Sebastian, don’t touch me right now.” The words scrape out of my throat, barely audible.
His grip tightens anyway, either from panic or heartbreak or both, and when his fingers brush my wound I shove him so hard his breath catches in surprise.
Air tears into my lungs in jagged, uneven pulls.
I’m losing control of my own breathing, my own pulse.
The forest is shrinking around me, one claustrophobic heartbeat at a time.
The moment I raise my hand to signal distance, Sebastian freezes.
Poppy wipes her eyes and looks at me like she’s afraid I might crumble into dust. Theo’s sobs fracture the air, splintering something deep inside my chest each time his breath breaks.
And Ares...Ares stands several paces away, not touching anyone, not speaking, but his expression flickers between sorrow and something darker, harder.
His jaw is locked so tightly that a tremor moves through the muscles of his cheek.
“Harwood, get over here and help me!” Ares snaps, trying to pry Theo away from the corpse he refuses to let go of.
Sebastian hesitates, torn between me and Theo’s unraveling grief. But eventually, he moves. Ares needs help to pull Theo back from whatever edge he’s dangling over. And I...
I don’t move at all.
I stare at the blood on my robes. At the dirt under Liam’s fingernails.
At the way his head tilts unnaturally to the side.
And then something inside me breaks. My knees buckle, dropping me to the earth.
A sensation like drowning takes root behind my ribs, a blanket of hopelessness so thick I’m half-convinced the forest is swallowing me.
A blade presses against my hip from inside my belt. For a moment, I feel its call. One quick thrust. Silence. Escape. If Liam couldn’t survive what follows me, why should I?
A flicker of movement in my peripheral vision rips me out of the spiral.
A straggling poacher, still alive, stands hunched over with a handful of dead animals dripping from his grasp.
His eyes are hollow, feral, locked directly onto me.
Before I can even lift my wand, his leg snaps backward with a crack that echoes through the clearing.
He screams as he collapses, and I follow the line of motion.
Ares.
He stands with one hand extended, fingers flexed, the air around him bending as if gravity itself is kneeling. His wand glows faintly, but the power radiating from him is not spell work. It is older. Crueler. Forbidden.
Shadeborne blood magic.
The straggler is dragged across the forest floor in a single jerking motion, gravel tearing his skin apart.
He claws at the dirt, sobbing, but he doesn’t get far, not with Ares pulling him like a hound on an invisible leash.
The closer Ares draws him, the more the air thickens with heat and static.
His eyes darken. The veins in his neck rise.
His breathing deepens into something almost primal.
Sebastian steps behind me, resting a hand on my hip to keep me steady. But even his touch feels distant. My attention is fixed on Ares, the unnatural glow humming under his skin, the hunger in his magic as it reaches out.
And then it hits me.
Not the fear. Not the grief.
The realization.
There is a magic capable of pulling someone back from the brink. A violent, ancient Shadeborne rite my father whispered about only once, mocking those who tried to use it. A magic born from sacrifice, from blood, from power no one should possess.
Ares has it.
“Ares,” I say, stepping forward despite Sebastian’s grip. “Can you save him?”
His attention cuts sharply to me. The blue in his irises flickers, gold for a heartbeat so quick I almost doubt I saw it. His jaw clenches. Something pained twists across his face.
“Tell me you want me to do it,” he murmurs, voice strained, “and I will.”
Sebastian bristles. “What’s the cost?”
Ares ignores him. His eyes move slowly, deliberately, from Liam to Theo to me. They linger longest on me. He looks at the way my body shakes, the way my breath breaks, the way Sebastian holds me as if I might disappear. His expression hardens, not cold, but resigned.
“I didn’t know it was him,” he says quietly. “If I had known-”
“I know.” My voice cracks. “So fix it.”
He flinches at the command, as if it strikes something deep inside him. His attention drops to the dying poacher, the unwilling vessel of whatever ritual he intends.
“I’ve already paid the cost,” he murmurs, turning back toward the man with a new, terrible focus.
And for the first time since Liam collapsed, hope curls like a dangerous spark inside my chest.
“Do it.”
The words leave Theo and me together, merging into a single jagged command that trembles through the clearing.
His voice cracks under the weight of grief; mine breaks on the razor edge of fury.
The two of us stand bracketed around Liam’s still body, our anger shaping the air into something sharp enough to cut.
Ares doesn’t react immediately. He watches us both for a long, suspended heartbeat, a strange, unreadable expression tightening the line of his mouth, before turning toward the dying poacher sprawled in the dirt.
When he reaches for the man, he does it with a dreadful calm, closing his hand around the man’s throat with certainty rather than violence.
The poacher isn’t even fully conscious, yet Ares drags him upright as though offering him to some unseen altar.
He leans in close, his forehead nearly brushing the man’s, the proximity intimate in a way that makes my stomach turn. And then he begins to speak.
Not in the common tongue.
Not even in the Shadeborne dialect used in my childhood home.
This sound is older, thicker, an incantation so heavy it seems to bend the air around it.
“With your dying breath, you offer the sanctity of life. All your years never yours. All willed by my design. May your life bring on new ones. In my palm it now rests.”
The forest reacts to the words long before we do.
The temperature drops first, subtly, like a breath pulled inward.
Wind chokes into stillness. The leaves overhead hang rigid and suspended.
Even the birds seem to vanish from the canopy, as though diving away from whatever curse has taken root in the soil.
The transformation is grotesque.
The man’s eyes sink inward as though collapsing under their own weight, darkening to bottomless pits.
His skin shrivels and tightens, clinging to bone in an unnatural rush, years of aging happening in the space of a blink.
Wrinkles carve valleys across his forehead.
Liver spots bloom across his cheeks. His blond hair pales into brittle strands of silver before disintegrating between Ares’s fingers.
He never screams. He doesn’t even gasp. He simply folds inward, life peeling off him like a discarded husk.
When Ares releases him, the corpse drops soundlessly, light as paper, into the dirt.
For a moment no one breathes. No one dares to.
Ares turns toward Liam without wiping the blood from his hands.
His face is tight with something I don’t recognize, not triumph, not annoyance, not the cruel composure he usually wears.
This is sharper. Raw. Determined. He kneels beside Liam’s body and places both palms firmly against his chest as though grounding himself to the boy he is desperate to retrieve from the brink.
“I need your blood,” he says, but the words are meant for me alone.
Sebastian lunges forward, fear and fury twisting his features. “Harper...don’t-”
He should have known the plea was useless.
My blade is already in my hand, the motion so smooth it barely feels like a choice. The slice is swift and punishing, pain splitting open my palm in a bright, blistering wave. Blood spills instantly, hot and vivid against the dull gloom of the forest.
I step forward, refusing to flinch at the gasps behind me. Ares reaches out without hesitation, his fingers curling around my wrist with a grip that is both grounding and consuming. My blood runs down his arm, tracing every line of muscle, every old scar, until it pools at the base of his palm.
With a careful, almost reverent movement, he guides my bleeding hand toward Liam’s mouth, letting the drops fall onto my brother’s still lips. He closes his eyes again, this time not to summon death, but whatever twisted inverse of it he’s about to wield, and begins the second incantation.
“An eye for an eye. One life for another. Let your first breath be freeing… and your last your prison.”
Magic snaps through the air like a live wire.