Aaron
Ithrow my hand toward the archway and slam the doors shut, sealing them behind a wall of blue-gold light just as the first bodies hit it from the hall. The frame shudders under them.
I keep my other hand up, and when Hella takes a step toward me, I level it at her chest. “Stay the fuck back!”
She just grins.
“They’re going to kill us,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “No. They won’t kill you, or your mate. Maybe Kade, and this—“ she nods toward Josiah “—thing of a vampire might survive it. But no.” She looks back at me. “You’re going to be the new king of this Glen, Aaron. You’ll give it life again.”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me!” I growl.
Kade’s voice is pure venom, and she rounds on Ellie. “Bitch Ellie strikes again.”
She blurs, halfway across the room with her hands going for Ellie’s throat before Josiah catches her arm without seeming to move at all. He wags one finger at her, mild as anything.
Kade snatches her arm back. “What the fuck are you doing? Of all people, I’d think you’d be on board with this.”
“Page one hundred and forty,” Josiah says serenely. “‘The hand we raise in anger most often lands on ourselves.’” He tilts his head at her. “You’ll hurt your Leah. And it will hurt you.”
“Do not!” Kade jabs a finger at his chest. “Play therapist in here.”
He shrugs. “But they need one. We all need someone to talk to.”
“We are in the middle of getting ambushed. Again. And you want to—“ Kade stops and stares at him like she can’t believe he’s real. “You know what.” She spins to Hella. “Make them go away.”
“We can’t,” Ellie says from where she’s backed against the shelves, arms wrapped around herself. “They aren’t leaving until Aaron does what he’s destined to do. Or we all die.”
Mara drops into a crouch in front of me, teeth bared, and hisses at Hella and Ellie. Both of them back away, pressing into the shelves, and even Hella’s grin slips.
That’s all the time I get. “Fuck it!” I throw both hands out, and a shield snaps up around Mara, a dome of light closing over her head.
She rounds on me, hissing, slamming her palms against the inside of it. “Aaron. No. No.”
“I’m sorry.” I press my hand flat to the shield, over hers. “You tried to warn me, and I didn’t listen. I’m sorry.”
“Let them in,” Josiah says behind me. “I’ll talk to them myself.”
“When are you gonna fucking get it?” Kade’s already moving, dragging a podium up in front of her for cover. “They aren’t talking to any of us right now. They want to drain the life out of us.”
Josiah smiles. “Like a vampire?”
I look at him, at how calm he is in a room about to come apart, and I don’t get it. “Why is he like this?” The question comes out half to myself.
“Because he’s the same as them.” Ellie’s voice drifts up from the corner, low and almost gentle, her eyes on Josiah and not on me.
“Something got made out of him that he never asked to be. He’s the only one who’s ever come to this realm and not looked at my people like monsters.
” She tightens her arms around herself. “He looks at them like he’s looking in a mirror. ”
It lands somewhere in me and stays. I’ve known Josiah my whole life as the uncle everyone loves and keeps at arm’s length, and not once did I think to ask what put him out there to begin with.
Kade looks at Josiah like she’s thinking about killing him. Then she gives up on him and tears through the room for a weapon. She throws a hand out to teleport, but all she gets is a curl of black smoke. She tries again, and it’s the same. “FUCK.”
Josiah doesn’t go for a weapon or cover like the rest of us. He just stands in the middle of the floor, hands behind his back, loose and unbothered, his red eyes on the sealed doors.
I grab his arm. “Please protect Mara. Whatever’s about to happen, please. Protect my mate.”
He looks at me, and for once there’s nothing playful in his face. He nods.
I look back at Mara. She’s clawing at the inside of the dome, snarling at me. I shake my head at her. I should have listened. I can’t lose her.
Then the doors give, and they pour into the room.
There are too many of them. Half-human, half-something-else, the witches and warlocks of the Glen turned into this.
Some are barely changed, just gray and hollow, thin dark smoke leaking from their eyes, their movements jerking and wrong like the strings holding them up got tangled.
Some are further gone, skin split and cracked over a light that shouldn’t be inside a body, jaws hung too wide, fingers grown long and clawed.
And some have been remade all the way, into whatever shape the magic left behind—a man crowned with antlers of black bone, a thing that drags itself on too many limbs, a woman with great trembling wings spread over the swarm, butterfly-bright, beautiful and all wrong, her face still human under eyes gone black.
She fixes on me and flies straight at me.
“Magnificent,” Josiah breathes.
Josiah doesn’t even brace himself. He watches the winged woman come for us like he’s glad to see her.
Then they’re on me, and there’s no time to think.
I throw everything I have at them, both hands, light cracking out of me, knocking them back, raising walls they tear straight through.
There are too many. For every one I drop, three more climb over it.
Across the room, Kade’s tearing through them, hurling anything she can lift, breaking bones with her bare hands, while Hella and Ellie press back into the far corner.
Worst of all, a knot of them breaks off and goes for Mara. They rake at the dome, dozens of them, and she swipes and hisses from inside while the light flickers where they hit. I don’t know how long it’ll hold.
I don’t get to find out. The rest come for me all at once and drag me down.
They’re clawing my shoulders, biting my arm, ripping my shirt.
There’s nothing around me but gray skin, leaking eyes, the stink of rot.
I can’t see Mara. I feel them digging into me, and somewhere over my head I hear her shield crack.
Then the bodies shift, just enough, and I see it—a hole torn in the top of the dome, hands reaching down through it for Mara.
Something in me snaps.
Whatever I’ve been holding back tears loose all at once.
It blasts out of me, and the bodies on top of me go flying.
Some don’t fly so much as come apart, blown to pieces across the marble.
I’m still pulling myself up when it hits me.
I killed them. I didn’t mean to. More are already climbing over the ones I broke to take their place.
“Get the fuck off my mate.” I throw my hand out and rip the rest off Mara’s dome, slamming them into the wall.
Across the room, Josiah’s buried under his own pile, red eyes flashing as he throws them off and they climb right back.
More keep pouring in through the doors and the windows.
I turn and see Kade go down, one of them on top of her, a jagged stake in its fist, the point pressed to her chest while she holds its wrist off by inches.
I get it then. I have to siphon the magic out of every last one of them—it’s the only way this ends.
I stop holding it back, and it floods out of me. Blue-gold light spills off my skin, and my feet lift off the floor. I rise, and I feel myself reaching past the tower, out across the whole dead realm, to every witch and warlock left in the Glen.
It starts slow. Threads of light peel off the ones closest to me and drift toward my hands. The winged woman beats up toward me to drag me down, and I throw out a hand. The light catches her by the throat—not crushing, just holding her in the air.
The creatures on Josiah start to sag, the fight going out of them as I pull. He shoves up out of the pile and blurs to Kade, pulling her to her feet.
“No.” It doesn’t sound like me. “Please. I don’t want to hurt them. I just want it to stop.”
I throw a shield over Josiah and Kade without looking. Josiah hisses as the light closes over them. “What are you doing—“
I can’t answer. The pull’s getting stronger, dragging from everywhere now, the walls, the floor, the ones hiding in the dark corners of the tower. It fills me up and keeps coming, more and more, until my head tips back and my eyes fall closed.
I drain the Witching Glen.
I feel it leave them—not just the magic, but the thing it made of them. The light pouring off me goes so bright that Mara throws an arm over her eyes inside the dome. I keep mine shut and let it take me. It feels strange, and better than anything, like every nerve I own is lighting up at once.
It isn’t dark magic that floods in. There’s none of that left here to take.
It’s what it left behind when it bled out and left them hollow: the despair.
All of theirs at once, every soul in the Glen.
They were abandoned, used up, thrown away by everyone who should have protected them—Aya, Amir, and then my own mother.
Dark magic was the only thing that could make them feel anything.
I feel their remorse for what it made them do, and under it, their grief. It’s mine now, all of it.
It fills me until I’m screaming. It’s too much, the despair and the power under it both, and it doesn’t stop. It keeps coming, more than any one body was ever meant to hold, until the light finally dims.
My knees give out, and I drop onto the floor. I stay there on my hands and knees, and for a long moment I don’t know where I am or what I just did. There’s just this power in me now, more than I’ve ever held, and it feels like a part of me already.
My vision comes back, and I look around the room.
The floor is covered in bodies, hundreds of them, fallen across the marble and the broken glass—but they aren’t creatures anymore.
They’re witches and warlocks now, just people, out cold, their skin whole and their faces slack, the wrongness gone out of them.
There’s not a monster left in the room. I turned them back.
I drag myself to my feet. The shields drop, and Mara’s through hers before it finishes falling, crashing into me, her arms locking around my neck. Josiah and Kade reach me right behind her. I hold her against me, my face in her neck, and just breathe.
“Are they all dead?” I ask into her hair.
Kade turns a slow circle over the bodies. “No,” she says. “They’re not.”
Then she turns toward the far corner, where Hella and Ellie pressed themselves against the shelves. “Hella—“
Ellie’s standing there alone, holding Hella’s empty cloak against her chest.
Ellie sucks in a breath, then breaks down.
I pull back from Mara and turn to her. Ellie’s shoulders are shaking, her hands twisted in the cloth.
“Hella said it had to be done,” she gets out between sobs. “She said it was the only way.” She clutches the cloak tighter and presses her face into it. “She sacrificed herself to shield me.”
I already understand, because I felt it as it happened.
The others had their own magic underneath the rot, what they were born with—when I pulled the dark out of them, they just dropped.
But Hella had run on it too long. It was the only thing holding her up, and there was nothing underneath to catch her when it went.
She spent the last of it shielding Ellie, and then she was gone.
“Well.” Kade’s voice cracks. She’s staring at the empty cloak in Ellie’s arms, the fight gone out of her. “I don’t know what the fuck she did that for.”
She doesn’t look away from it.
“I knew her a long time ago,” she says, not to any of us.
“Back when we were in the same coven, before I was ever turned. When she still laughed at things.” She pulls in a breath, and it shakes.
“Then the whole coven started turning to dark magic, every one of them falling in behind Aya Bailey. I didn’t agree with any of it, so I left.
Told myself everyone I knew there was already gone. Guess Hella wasn’t. Not all the way.”
Josiah steps to her and puts a hand on her shoulder. Kade shrugs it off hard, and when she wipes the back of her wrist across her eyes, she does it fast, like if she’s quick enough none of us will have seen.
“Kade—“
“If there’s anything I want to do right now, more than anything,” she says, glaring at Ellie, “it’s get you the fuck out of this Glen before you get any ideas.”
“You can’t leave us now, Aaron.” Ellie lifts her wet face to me. “Please.”
“I never agreed to stay here,” I say.
Ellie doesn’t argue. She looks around at her people, all of them out cold on the floor, and says nothing else.
“I have to get my mate out of here.” I look down at my hands, at the faint light still moving under my skin. “I don’t know what just happened to me.”
“We know.” Josiah’s watching me with a look I’ve never seen on him before—not his usual amusement, something closer to awe. “You just siphoned magic from hundreds of witches and warlocks. Thousands, maybe.” He shakes his head. “I can only imagine what you’re holding now.”
I look down at my hands again and wince. I can feel it all settling in—every power I pulled out of them, more than I know what to do with.
I find Mara. She’s staring up at me, her ears flat, her whiskers trembling, her tail lashing—the look she gets right before she breaks.
“I have to get my mate out of here,” I say again. “And I have to find Eric.”
“Oh.” Josiah straightens. “I know exactly where Eric is. I don’t need a location spell.”
Kade frowns at him. “What?”
“I can feel it—the magic’s lifted off this whole realm, and the teleportation guardrails with it.” He turns toward an empty stretch of floor. “Thanks to you, Aaron.” He glances back at me, the grin easy and bright and maddening. “Tell Layla I’ll be home late for dinner.”
“What—“
Josiah snaps a portal open in the air, its edges swirling. “I’ll be right back,” he tells me, and steps through.
Kade lunges after him, but the portal closes before her fingers reach it, and she stumbles through empty air. “Motherfucker!” She spins, both hands in her hair. “AHHH!” The scream tears out of her. She rounds on Ellie. “So what in the actual fuck!”
“I’ll come back,” I tell Ellie. “But right now, I have to go.”
Ellie nods, holding the cloak. “I’ll promise them you will,” she says. “But don’t let us fall into despair again.” She looks around at the bodies on the floor. “We need a leader.”
I don’t answer. I turn to Mara, and she throws herself into my arms—then pulls back, frowning up at me. “Aaron...”
“What?”
She keeps staring up, past my face, higher.
“You’re fucking levitating,” Kade says.
She scrubs a hand over her face. “We are in so much fucking trouble right now.”
I look down. The floor’s a foot below my feet, and my whole body’s lit up again, blue-gold sparking off my skin and pooling in the air under me. Mara stares up at me, her lips parted, her eyes wide, and under all that fear there’s something else—wonder.
“Okay.” I turn my hands over and watch the light move across my palms. “This is cool.” I look back down at her. “But how do I get down?”