Chapter 26
Ash
No one knows where my soul keeper disappeared to.
The guys still look panicked over losing him. I laugh. They have no idea that the little demon does this. I assure them he’ll show up. Eventually.
Orion looked the most disturbed. I save the question for another time as I grab boots.
I don’t put them back on. It feels wrong to.
Each step on the soil does something I don’t have a word for yet. Not healing. More like remembering. Like the ground has been waiting and my feet finally showed up.
Jadeve’s people move around us like they belong to the forest. Because they do. The creatures that have been trying to eat us for days part for them like water.
The path through the Dark Forest is thin and we’ve been walking for a good hour. Quietly in line. Jadeve and Kestra at the front with multiple men between all of us. Behind them, Tiana. The four of us bring up the rear, no men behind us.
That was intentional.
Kieran and Finnian walk side by side, their heads bent together. Behind me, Orion’s warmth almost heats my back.
And as much as I want to turn toward it, I’m lost in my own head. The walk more meditative than I want it to be.
Sabina once told me that healing isn’t linear. That sometimes grief of who we were sneaks up sideways, steals your thoughts before you notice they’re gone.
I notice mine are gone when I’m already somewhere else.
My heel presses deep into the soil, toes between leaves, and the forest breathes out as I breathe in—the boundary between here and somewhere else going thin the way it does when the trial decides I haven’t suffered enough today.
“Duck!” Pepper shouts.
I drop, moments before the whiz of a blade arcs over my head. I roll out of the way as Pepper cuts his head off.
Wheezing, I lie on the cold, wet, disgusting Philadelphia sidewalk, breathing hard as the stars twinkle overhead.
“I think there’s a hypodermic needle at your head.” Pepper offers her palm.
Slapping mine in hers, she hauls me up then yanks me close.
It’s unlike her.
Off balance, her eyes become lighter. More blue than grey. “I still don’t forgive you.”
I’m falling backwards. Strong arms catch me before I finish the thought.
The forest snaps back. Too bright. Too loud. My heart is doing something irregular and my feet don’t know where the ground is.
I step away from the arms holding me before I’ve decided to. Then I clock the warmth. The steadiness.
Orion.
“Ash.” He touches my elbow. “Ash.”
I gulp in air that my lungs don’t expand for. Like I’m inhaling through a straw. Too tight. Too restrictive.
“Ash.” Orion sweeps me up in his arms, his stride never faltering.
No one notices. I’m thankful for that small mercy.
“I can walk.” I protest even as I rest my head on his shoulder.
“I know you can walk. But…” His throat works. “I want to hold you right now. Your distress is running through the bond like static.” He runs his jaw along the top of my head, holding me tighter.
“Pepper won’t forgive me.” I tell him my truth even though I know he won’t have any idea who or what I’m talking about. And that is also the problem.
This is the first time I’m even talking to him.
That’s what I notice first. I’m not fighting it.
I just let him carry me.
The forest moves around us. Jadeve’s people in formation, silent and efficient, the dark between the trees belonging to them in a way it doesn’t belong to us.
Orion’s warmth at my back has become his warmth at my side, my cheek against his shoulder, his jaw resting on the top of my head.
“Pepper,” I say. Because he asked why, and because he caught me when I fell, and because the vision is still sitting in my chest like something lodged. “She’s my oldest friend. Twenty-five years. Since before I understood what friendship even was.”
Orion says nothing. Just walks. Just listens.
“Her name is Pepper O’Malley. She runs a bar in Philadelphia that moves walls when she’s emotional.
” I pause. “That’s not a metaphor. The walls actually move.
She has chaos magic and five mates and a daughter she named Lucinda Elspeth after our friend Lucy who died.
” My throat closes on the last word. I push through it.
“She named her after Lucy. And I sent a stuffed bear with a card.”
The forest breathes around us.
“I didn’t go,” I say. “I could have. There were missions, there were always missions, but the truth is I was afraid.” The word tastes like the thing Pepper called me.
Coward. “I watched Sabina get her mates and her pack. I watched Vanessa find her mates. I watched Pepper get five men who would burn the world for her and a daughter with chaos magic already humming under her skin before she could walk. And I—”
I stop.
Orion waits.
“I had a kitten Jasper gave me,” I say. “I don’t even know where she is.”
Something moves in his chest. Not a laugh. The almost-kind.
“I stopped answering the phone,” I continue.
“Then I changed my number. Told myself it was protocol. New assignment, new location. All of it true. None of it the reason.” The soil is gone beneath his arms but I can still feel the ghost of it on my feet.
“Pepper said I left because watching all of them get what I wanted reminded me of what I didn’t have.
And instead of letting them love me through it, I ran. ”
“Was she right?” Orion asks.
“Yes.” The word comes out without resistance. “Completely right. And the worst part is I knew it when I was doing it. I just named it duty. I named it Artemis. I named it anything except what it was.”
The path curves. Jadeve’s hand signals something to the men around us and they shift formation. Two moving ahead, two falling back.
“Sabina forgave me,” I say. “In the dream. She forgave me the way Sabina does things—completely, immediately, like it cost her nothing even though I know it cost her everything.” My chest aches with the specific warmth of it.
“Vanessa, too. Vanessa who I was the closest to, who I hurt maybe the most, who looked at me and said I know you and meant it.”
“But not Pepper.”
“But not Pepper.” I breathe out. “Pepper said she stopped leaving the light on for me a long time ago. And she’s right to. She’s absolutely right to. I set fire to that bridge and walked away and she has every reason in every world to be done with me.”
Orion is quiet for a long moment. The forest fills it with wrong-birdsong and the creak of roots, and somewhere ahead of us, faintly, something that might be music.
I lift my head.
“The thing is,” Orion says, and his voice has changed. Gone careful in a specific way. The way voices go when someone is about to say something true at their own expense. “The thing is I know what it’s like. To not be there when it mattered.”
I wait.
“I had people in the eastern quadrant,” he says.
“Scouts. Patrol formation, outer ring. They filed a report three months ago and didn’t make contact after.
I read the report. I filed it. Told myself I’d investigate when I had time.
” A pause. “I didn’t have time. I was at the Academy.
I was learning to count someone’s heartbeats I had no business counting. ”
I swear I hear music somewhere off in the distance. Soft, melodic, and almost mesmerizing in a way.
“I never learned their names,” he says. “The scouts in the eastern quadrant. I saw what was left of them in the forest and I realized I never learned their names.”
The music is closer now. And something else—firelight, warm and orange, bleeding through the trees ahead.
“Orion.” I sit up slightly, enough to look at his face. “You were there. You tried. Multiple times, suicide missions according to Kieran—”
“Kieran’s not wrong.” His jaw tightens. “I threw myself at walls for weeks. Bled everywhere. Accomplished nothing. And while I was doing that my people were dying in a forest I was supposed to protect and I was too consumed by my own—” He stops. “By you. Too consumed by you.”
“I’m not saying it was wrong to want to reach you,” he says. “I’m saying I let everything else fall away. The Cauldron. The court. The scouts in the eastern quadrant.” His voice drops. “A guardian who only guards one person isn’t a guardian. He’s just a man in love.”
He doesn’t realize he says it. And no, it’s not that he said he loves me. In an indirect way, a parrot of words I swear I heard him utter before.
Never mind any of that.
The Cauldron.
I nearly gasp at the drop. But I don’t. He didn’t mean to tell me, not really. But he can’t take it back either. It’s mine now.
So, I don’t say anything. I file it where I’m filing everything else he’s handing me right now—the confession, the guilt, the weight of names he never learned. But that word. Cauldron. It sits different. Heavier.
I don’t interrupt. But I heard it.
The firelight is close enough now that it touches the path ahead of us, warm and amber, and I can smell it—woodsmoke and something roasting and underneath it all something green. The particular scent of a place that has been tended with intention for a very long time.
“Pepper will forgive you,” Orion says quietly. “Not because you deserve it. Because she loves you and love doesn’t stop just because you gave it reasons to.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No.” He adjusts his hold on me. “But I know Sabina forgave you. And Vanessa forgave you. And the people who know you keep choosing you even when you make it difficult.” He says it like he feels like that about me. Have I been difficult? “That says more about you than it does about them.”
I don’t have an answer for that. But reality steals the answers away anyway.
The village arrives the way the best things do. Before you’re ready for it.
Light first. Warm and gold and nothing like bioluminescence. Actual firelight, multiple sources, scattered through a space that opens between the trees like the forest exhaled and made room. Then sound—laughter, real and unguarded, rolling toward us through the dark.
I make Orion put me down before we enter.