Chapter 30 #2
Brand glanced to Luna, to the tears streaming down her cheeks—lovely, cleansing, life-affirming tears. His own laughter died as he stared at her, heart squeezing at the sight of that smiling, beautiful face…
Fuck, it was everything.
“Right.” Magnus sighed, scrubbing both hands down his face. “Best we retrieve Hedda and wee Fern and get the fuck back to Straelon.”
“Fern?” Lunara asked.
“Aye, that’s what he’s taken to calling the Fae,” Thad snickered.
“I had to call her something,” Mag growled through his teeth.
“Why Fern though?”
Brand wanted to know the same. It wasn’t unlike his brother to give nicknames, but it usually depended on the person being conscious enough to hear it and be annoyed by the fact.
Magnus shrugged. “The first thought I had when I saw the shredded ribbons of her wings was that they looked like fern leaves. It stuck.”
“You’re coming back to the Montrealm?” Brand had assumed his brother would stay here. Try to make sense of what had happened by throwing himself into fixing it like he did with everything else.
Mag speared him with those golden eyes of his and stepped up close. “Faldir?”
Emotion flooded in to choke Brand. He’d done his utmost to bury reality, shoving it as deep as it would go so he wouldn’t have to acknowledge the awful truth.
Full strength and raging, Brand had barely gotten them out. Injured, lesser, alone… There was no way Faldir had survived whatever befell him. He’d realized it the second they came upon the army of Forgotten.
His twin shadows were no more.
Hedda was going to lose her stars-damned mind, especially after he’d ensured she had no part in it. No choices. When she found out her brother was… Fuck.
He wanted to forget and go back to laughing, but Brand forced himself to face it, vision clouding as tears filled his eyes.
Faldir—a life-long companion, as close to him as any of his brothers—was dead.
He couldn’t voice it out loud. All he could do was shake his head, words and sounds refusing to work their way past the strangled lump in his throat.
“Aye, then I’m coming back with you. Glynmor is…
” Mag’s eyes closed for a beat before they were on him again.
“Well, nothing more to be done here, is there? But it was me who asked for your help, and I’ll face Lyriat for the part I played in this dismal shite.
Hedda, too.” He enveloped Brand in a crushing embrace.
“And you, if you can ever forgive me,” he whispered, abruptly releasing him and walking away towards the trees.
Thad loped after him, sparing a quick glance back before being swallowed by the dwindling forest shadows.
“Are you alright?” Luna’s hand landed on his back, stroking softly.
Her touch siphoned away his melancholy, making way for gentler things.
The tension in his shoulders eased, the knot in his chest with them, the sharp knife of sorrow dulled to a manageable ache.
He’d lost Faldir, but he’d found her. She couldn’t replace him, but her presence was a balm, nonetheless. A light in the darkness.
“I don’t know,” Brand admitted.
“I’m sorry, too.” She moved to stand in front of him, tucking a wayward lock of hair behind his ear. “I feel responsible for cutting our time in the chasm short. We might have found him if I hadn’t—”
“No. We should’ve turned around as soon as he went silent.
Even without your injury…” He brought her hand to his lips, laying a swift kiss on her fingers.
“I can see now it was a fool’s errand. At least we can say the beast is no more.
That both Faldir and Glynmor have been avenged. It’ll have to be enough.”
Luna swallowed, averting her eyes. Her guilt was misplaced, as was Mag’s, neither of them responsible. Sometimes things were just fucking shite.
“Come,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m bloody famished. We’ve not eaten in almost two days, and the faster we retrieve our things, the sooner we’ll find ourselves feasting at home.”
Her head snapped up, an almost wild look about her as she blinked. “At… home.”
“Yes, mate. Home. Together.”
Brand pulled her against his chest and buried his fingers in her hair, seizing her mouth with his own. It was tame, meant more for comfort than anything else. To reassure her that he’d meant every word he’d said in their cave.
She pulled away, teeth sunk into her lower lip, her eyes still closed. “Okay. I… um…” She shook herself. “I wanted to fetch the talons. We might find something useful in them, or… I don’t know. Even if they’re just a trophy for those it would matter most to, it feels like we should take them.”
It made a strange sort of sense, and he could deny her nothing.
“You go on with Mag and Thad,” he said, running a finger over her brow. “I’ll get them for you. I don’t want you near it again, dead or not. Please.”
She lifted those perfect, sea-water eyes to his and nodded—a wealth of understanding passing between them before she left to join the others.
Brand jogged over to the beast and yanked the talons from its lifeless body. He considered hacking off the others so they’d have the full set, but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. He’d had enough violence the last few days, and he was tired down to his bones.
He gathered the spikes in one arm and moved to follow the others—
A whistling sounded behind him. High-pitched. Ominous.
Slowly—as if it might make a difference—Brand turned around and froze, dumbfounded, dread forming a pit in his stomach.
The dreadbeast was crumpling in on itself, shrinking by the second. With a blinding flash, it imploded, the aftershock knocking him flat to the ground.
A tidal wave of wind followed, battering against the earth and his body, a feminine scream shattering the looming dawn in its wake.
The keening sound was enough to make his ears bleed.
Brand groaned against the force of it—against the dark power it ushered in, bathing the land in shadow and pressing him into the dirt and mud.
The staggering weight of it only allowed him to pant in shallow breaths, so like his episodes it choked him.
“Brand!” Luna’s scream pierced the maelstrom around him.
It snapped him out of the mire of helplessness. He bucked against whatever was holding him down, desperate to be free, willing his body to obey. He had to protect her, had to—
With a final shove, the pressure lifted from his body, gone quickly as it had appeared.
Brand tried to gulp air into his burning lungs as the sky and his vision cleared, capable of nothing more than blinking up at the dwindling stars. Every inch of him was in agony, and he couldn’t…
Luna’s hands were there a second later, her brow furrowed in concentration. “Shite.”
Her healing glow encased him, burrowing in to the broken places.
He gasped as cracked ribs realigned, the sudden rush of breath like cool water after a day spent in the desert.
Could actually feel the threads of her magic as they sought out every bruise and bleed, every break, erasing the injuries like they’d never existed.
It wasn’t until she slumped back, his strength returned to him, that he saw the toll it had taken. Her entire body was trembling, purple smudges under her eyes.
She flinched when he sat up and gathered her close, her own breath hissing through clenched teeth.
“What the fuck?” Thad slid to a stop through the mud, but he wasn’t looking at Brand.
Mag hurtled in, only a few steps behind, gaping. “Sisters save us.”
Brand craned to look over Luna’s head, where the dreadbeast had been.
There, lying in the grass and gore, was an aged Fae male and a female Demon.
They had to be hundreds of years old, hair like the whitest snow around his pointed ears and her grey, curling horns.
Both were missing limbs, and what was left was broken and twisted—a perfect match for the damage they’d done to the dreadbeast. Including a smoldering hole in the center of their bodies, tendrils of inky smoke rising to dissipate in the air. No, not smoke…
“The shadows did this to them?” Magnus was looking at him, as if he had the answer.
Brand fought back a rush of bile, the scene twisting the last couple hours into something he couldn’t bear to examine too closely.
“It seems the darkness within the chasms is capable of a great many horrible things,” Luna whispered.