22. Basir
Basir
A sea of bodies hit me.
Thousands of people were jammed inside the compound, spilling out of every corridor and alleyway. Shifters of every age moved in the same slow, steady current toward the ritual site.
Some walked with the glazed, unhurried patience of people who believed they were heading toward something worth celebrating. Others simply stood where they’d been left, packed shoulder to shoulder along walls or sitting on the ground, waiting their turn to be swept forward with the rest.
By the time the arena came into view, the crowd had thickened into something nearly impossible to move through.
Bodies were packed into the open ground around the altar and spilled into the stands beyond, flooding the entrance.
Some wore ceremonial white, the kind of fabric meant to signal devotion.
Children perched on their parents’ shoulders for a better view.
An old woman near the edge of the crowd was praying, quiet and fervent, her hands pressed together like this was the holiest night of her life.
That she was set to receive a true blessing.
None of them seemed aware of the war echoing behind us.
That was the part I couldn’t ignore as we pushed through the outer edge of the crowd, trying to move without drawing the kind of attention that would signal to Ivan or any of his bastard pack members that we’d breached the compound.
Although, I wasn’t sure any of these people were capable of a reaction.
Their eyes were glassy and unfocused—they weren’t truly seeing anything around them in their desire to get to the altar.
There was no way that Ivan had simply persuaded this many people to gather so willingly.
Something in the air itself, or in whatever they’d been fed, had begun loosening their grip on reality.
It wasn’t a full trance but close enough that I doubted a warning from any of us would have broken through at all.
Not that we wanted them to leave. Our counter-ritual needed exactly what Ivan’s ritual did: this many souls with bonds in one place. If we scattered them now, we might save them from Ivan only to lose the one weapon capable of stopping him for good.
I knew what it was to be someone else’s tool, and I hated that we were in a situation where it felt like we were doing the same.
We moved through the mass of bodies in a tight formation, people parting around us without ever quite seeing us.
The closer we got to the front of the crowd, the thicker it grew, until we broke through into the open space directly across from the altar.
The same place we had saved glow from only a month ago.
We shifted back the moment the space cleared, human again, and I instantly clocked the bastard I’d been looking for.
Graeme Sharp stood near the altar, flanked by a handful of soldiers who looked far less certain of their positions than he did.
He’d lost weight since the last time we’d seen him, his once-polished appearance gone ragged at the edges.
It was the visual desperation of a man who’d fled one territory only to become a guest in another.
“Well.” His voice carried across the open ground, forced bravado layered over real fear. “The rescue party finally arrives.”
“Where’s Ivan?” Ravik asked.
Sharp’s laugh came out cracked. “Ivan does not answer to you. He has a gods-blessed path ahead of him, one you will see soon. My job is to keep every eye looking up at the sky and to stop you from—”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
The ground behind the altar split open, a deep cavern yawning where solid stone had been a moment before. In the dust that bloomed upward, something rose, and it took me a full second to understand what I was looking at.
Ivan Rivers.
His skin had cracked open across his throat and hands, thin lines of light bleeding through the fissures—gold in some places, deep crimson in others, and pulsing erratically.
His eyes were completely black, the whites of them having disappeared.
Where he appeared, the air around him seemed to bend, warping like heat rising off pavement.
Like reality itself was straining to accommodate whatever he’d let take root inside him.
He didn’t look at us first. He looked at Sharp.
We barely had time to register the monster he’d become before he crossed the distance in one stride, faster than any mortal should have been able to move. His hand shot through Sharp’s chest in a single, brutal motion.
Ivan tore out his heart like it was nothing.
Beside me I felt Gracie tense, the sound of her breath catching so sharp that I heard it even over the chaos. Sharp’s body hit the ground a second later, already still, already forgotten. Ivan didn’t spare him a second glance.
“Useless,” Ivan growled, his voice layered, reverberating through the air with something ancient and primordial moving beneath the words. His gaze moved past Sharp’s corpse to find Gracie standing at the center of our group.
“There you are.” Ivan’s voice softened, almost gentle, which was somehow more unsettling than the fury I’d expected. “My favorite failed sacrifice. Come to try again?”
Gracie didn’t flinch. Through our bond, I felt her steady herself. She was scared, but buried beneath was something harder, something that hadn’t been allowed to exist in her a month ago.
My wolf pressed against my ribs anyway, unconvinced by her calm, wanting nothing more than to put itself between her and the thing wearing Ivan’s face.
Gracie wasn’t his anything.
“Or have you come to attempt a rescue?” Ivan continued, taking a slow step closer, unbothered by the three of us standing around her. “I’ve heard you carry something special with you. Something the gods think they’ve given you.”
He tilted his head, considering her the way a predator considers something it’s already decided isn’t worth the effort of chasing. “It’s beautiful, truthfully. A pretty piece of magic. But it isn’t enough, and it never was. Especially compared to what I’ve been given.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Gracie’s voice had a darkened edge to it, and through the bond I felt her fear fold itself into something closer to fury.
“I know far more than that.” His smile spread, turning patient and certain—the smile of a man who had never once doubted his own inevitability. “Bonds like yours were built for small mercies. Small dangers. What comes tonight was not built to be survived.
“I am going to remake the world, Gracie Holloway, and nothing you carry was ever meant to stand against a god.”
Ivan’s arms spread to each side and the moon above seemed to bend toward him, answering a call that vibrated the earth. I felt the wrongness before I saw it, pressure building against my skin like the sky itself had drawn breath and refused to release it. Then the light broke.
The pale pink and silver of the full moon bled into red at the edges, spreading inward. Within seconds it had swallowed the whole of the moon, a full and violent crimson orb pressing down over the arena like a fist closing around the world.
“Ah.” Ivan’s gaze lifted with the rest of ours, something close to reverence crossing his ruined face. “It begins.”
Behind us, the crowd’s low, unfocused murmur changed pitch, a single collective breath drawn in and held.
I turned in time to see it happen. Thousands of glazed eyes turn fully vacant in the same instant, bodies swaying into unnatural stillness, faces tilting up toward the crimson moon like flowers turning toward a sun that was about to burn them alive.
“No.” Gracie’s voice cracked with panic that surged through our bond. “No, we have to get them out!”
Movement at the edge of my vision. Allied soldiers, some of Waylon’s people, broke from the perimeter and pushed into the crowd’s edges, trying to physically drag people back toward safety. For a moment I let myself hope it might work.
Then the crowd turned on them.
Not violently, but with a mindless, immovable resistance: bodies locking together, arms linking, people who moments ago had barely registered our presence now fighting with a sudden, unnatural strength to stay exactly where they stood.
A screaming soldier went down under the weight of three trance-bound civilians climbing on top of him, not out of malice but out of some deeper compulsion to stop him in any way they could.
“You see?” Ivan said, almost kindly. “They want to be here. Every single one of them. Nyxarra’s blessing runs deep once it takes root.”
“That’s not Nyxarra,” Gracie growled, a phantom wind whipping around us. I moved closer to her as the ground shuddered beneath us. “Do you even know what you’re feeding?”
Something flickered across Ivan’s face—there and gone—before the confidence slammed back down over it like a door.
“Careful,” he snarled. “Some truths aren’t yours to speak on.”
Ivan closed the distance in less than half a second, faster than any of us had time to react to. The fissures along his arm flared white-hot as he reached for glow, the earth cracking beneath his feet from the sheer force of the motion.
Instinct took over before I could decide anything, something older than thought driving me between Ivan and Gracie a half-second before his fist would have found her throat.
It found my shoulder instead. The impact felt like a building collapsing on top of me.
Bone gave way. I heard it more than felt it at first, the pain arriving a beat late and then all at once. I hit the stone and the world tilted sideways, my vision fracturing into pieces before it settled again. For one horrifying second, I couldn’t breathe.
“Basir!” Gracie’s scream tore through the air.
Ivan straightened and looked down at me with mock disappointment. “That,” he said, “was a mistake.”
His gaze lifted past me to where Gracie stood with her fists clenched, her skin flickering faintly gold. She was on the verge of truly glowing.
“Now let’s see what the rest of you are willing to break for her.”