Max
Dawn came gray and cold. I was awake before the first hint of pale light bled through the canvas.
The heirs stirred within seconds of each other—Aelindor first, rising in one fluid motion, then Caspian, who stretched with a groan and ran his fingers through his wine-red hair, then Drakken, who sat up like a man called to formation, alert and sharp.
I’d been lying between them with my eyes open for some time, listening to the camp come alive. Boots on packed earth. The low murmur of Spartans changing watch. The faint hiss of the DarkVeil that only I could hear, pressing against the edges of my consciousness.
“You can sleep longer,” Aelindor said, glancing at me as he pulled on his uniform coat.
I shook my head and sat up. I’d slept deeper than I had in weeks, shielded by their combined presence.
But I couldn’t stay. The heirs had done something generous by letting me into their tent, and I’d needed it.
If they’d left me alone last night, I’d have been halfway to the Haven by now, running south on a raw tide of adrenaline and grief.
No plan, no intel, nothing but the Coldiron arrow clenched in my fist and Missy’s scream ringing in my ears.
They’d kept me from making that mistake and spared me that reckless flight.
The Spartans were already up, sharpening weapons, checking gear, eating rations out of tin cups. Several gazes tracked me as I emerged from the heirs’ tent behind Caspian. I could feel the weight of their assessment.
I didn’t flinch. Didn’t explain. I walked the way I’d walked through the mine after a bad shift, shoulders straight, jaw set, eyes forward. Nothing had happened in the heirs’ tent. End of story.
The heirs didn’t care what the world thought. They moved through judgment untouched, as if other people’s opinions were weather in a different hemisphere. But I’d return to a barracks full of hundreds of cadets and a fortress full of thousands, and rumors spread faster than wildfire.
I was walking toward the Spartan section to make myself useful—haul supplies, help with the rebuilding, anything to keep my hands busy—when a familiar pewter-silver uniform fell into step beside me.
“Cadet Max,” Frost called. The Fae major’s cropped silver hair was neat as always, his lean fighter’s build moving with coiled efficiency. “Change of plans. You are to join the heirs and senior staff for the morning briefing at Greyhold.”
I blinked. “Why?”
“Orders from Prince Aelindor,” he said, which ended the discussion.
A battered jeep powered by Stormglass idled at the edge of the camp, mud caked to the wheel wells. The heirs were already gone, having left in the lead vehicle minutes ago. Frost held the rear door for me and climbed into the driver’s seat.
As I ducked in, Captain Jessa Holt slid into the passenger side.
The eagle shifter wore a worn shirt and trousers, the same nondescript outfit she’d worn when she’d delivered the demon intel on the train. Her sharp eyes found me in the rearview mirror before the jeep started moving.
“Morning, cadet,” Holt said. Her tone was pleasant, the kind that a spy used right before she extracted information you didn’t know you were carrying.
“Morning, Captain,” I said.
Frost pulled the jeep onto the dirt track that led toward the outpost. For a few seconds, the only sound was the hum of the Stormglass engine and the crunch of gravel under the tires.
“Heard there was some excitement in camp last night,” Holt said, turning in her seat to face me, her eyes bright, alert. “Some screaming sent even the Spartans scrambling. And Prince Aelindor carrying a certain cadet in his arms.”
“I had a nightmare,” I sighed. “It happens.”
“A nightmare?” Holt’s mouth twitched. “The heirs don’t comfort cadets over nightmares, Cadet Max.
Prince Aelindor doesn’t carry people. And not even high-ranking officers have ever had the honor of sharing a tent with the heirs.
Not once in the entire history of the Covenant. That’s not a thing that happens.”
I kept my face neutral. “It was a bad nightmare, Captain Holt.”
“Must have been.” Holt tilted her head, studying me with the focused patience of a raptor circling prey. “Because from where I was flying last night, it looked like the kind of nightmare that changes the course of—”
“Holt!” Frost’s sharp voice cut through whatever the eagle shifter was about to say. “Stop tormenting Cadet Max. There’s likely a reason she’s been summoned. You can wait for the intel with everyone else.”
Holt leaned back in her seat and grinned. She didn’t look chastened at all.
“There’s something about you, Cadet Max,” she said, “and we’re going to find out.” Then she turned to face forward.
“Good luck, Captain,” I said and watched the landscape slide past the window.
The outpost materialized out of the gray dawn.
It sat just over two miles from the DarkVeil—a fortified compound of concrete bunkers, Zodiac banners flying on the sandbagged walls, and watchtowers built from salvaged steel and raw timber. No elegance here, no carved stone. This was a frontline position, designed for function and survival.
The guard towers anchored each corner, manned by soldiers in field fatigues with iron-tipped crossbows and Stormglass-powered scopes. A fleet of military vehicles sat in a muddy motor pool behind blast barriers. The air smelled of diesel substitute and damp concrete.
From this distance, the DarkVeil was still visible, a vertical ocean of shadow hanging from the sky, stretching from one horizon to the other.
Its hissing was fainter here, reduced to a low drone that you could almost mistake for wind if you didn’t know better.
But the pull wasn’t weaker. If anything, the longer I was exposed to the Veil’s presence, the stronger it became.
A gravity in my chest, in my blood, tugging at the hollow behind my ribs.
I fought the pull, clenching my jaw, pressing my boots flat against the jeep’s floorboard as if physical resistance could hold back a metaphysical tide.
The pull had to be for the demon passenger in me.
It recognized the DarkVeil. Or the DarkVeil recognized it as its kin.
The connection was getting harder to ignore.
We’re here! We’re here!
The chorus started again, dozens of voices braiding together, rising from the direction of the Veil, harmonic and ancient and hungry for contact.
Shit, it was Coldiron.
I knew its song the way I knew my own pulse. I’d heard it every day for a decade in the deepest shafts of Crimson Ridge—chattering, chirping, calling out to me like children who wanted attention. And now I was hearing it from the DarkVeil.
The sentient metal was in there. Inside that wall of eternal shadows, calling to me.
The implications sent a cold wire through my stomach.
I filed it away. One crisis at a time.
Frost parked the jeep inside the compound walls, and we climbed out into the gray morning.
Soldiers moved through the compound with the grim efficiency of a garrison that had been under siege—tired eyes, tight jaws, weapons within arm’s reach.
Two sentries saluted Major Frost and Captain Holt at the entrance.
Frost led us down a concrete corridor, past supply rooms and a field kitchen, to a heavy door at the end. Beyond it was a basic war room: fluorescent Stormglass tubes bolted to the ceiling and a cluster of tables shoved together into a central briefing surface.
Maps covered two walls, pin-marked and annotated in tight military script. The metal-framed chairs were mismatched and had seen better decades. The whole room bore the battered, hard-used look of a place where life-and-death decisions were made on too little sleep and not enough coffee.
The room was already full.
I recognized Commander Lee in black fatigues. She was one of Drakken’s commanders. Beside her sat Commander Marco in oxblood fatigues. He was the vampire who’d ridden with Team Wraith into the Scorched Wastes.
Three officers I hadn’t met before occupied the outpost’s senior positions at the end of the table. Frost leaned close and murmured the introductions:
Colonel Karrik, the commander in Greyhold, was a heavyset man with the weathered face of someone who’d spent years staring into the DarkVeil.
His executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Reeves, was a lean woman with ink-stained fingers.
Beside her sat Major Adrian, the intelligence officer, wearing wire-rimmed glasses with a tablet balanced on his knee.
The princes sat at the head of the pushed-together tables. Aelindor in the center, his silver coat draped over the back of his chair. Caspian to his left, leaning back with one arm slung over his chair. Drakken to the right, upright and radiating command like heat off an engine block.
I followed Frost and Holt’s lead and saluted.
Every gaze in the room shifted to me.
I was a first-year cadet. By every protocol in the Zodiac Covenant’s military structure, I had no business being here. And I was taller than everyone in the room except Aelindor and Drakken.
Aelindor’s gaze found me. His expression softened to a smile.
Caspian grinned at me, open, warm, and uncomplicated.
Drakken’s gray eyes sharpened, tracking me the way a sniper tracks a target through a scope while Frost, Holt, and I took positions along the wall with the other lower-ranking officers and aides.
An attendant soon entered with a steel trolley loaded with a coffee urn and two boxes of donuts. Coffee went to Aelindor first, then Drakken and Caspian, then the colonels and commanders. Donuts sat untouched on either side of the table.
The cup reached my hands last. I nearly embarrassed myself.
I’d only discovered coffee at the fortress. Every cup since had been a small revelation. The warmth spreading through my chest, bitterness cutting the fog, the world sharpening at the edges. Back in the mine, the best I’d had was boiled water with rock dust. This was heaven in a paper cup.