Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ROWAN
She was as bright as a star, hovering over our heads.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I could only stare.
Her body was wreathed in blinding white light, hair streaming around her head like a corona of bleached silk.
The starlight pouring from her fissured skin was so bright it hurt to look at, but I couldn’t look away. None of us could.
The portal she’d made hung in the air before her, ten feet across. The event horizon was a perfect, shimmering disc of silver-white light, and through it, I could see straight through to the other side.
Emerald trees. Violet grass stretching to a horizon sky the color of crushed amethysts, and something that might have been a sun—or two suns—casting light in shades I’d never seen before. The air that spilled through the portal smelled sweet and floral and ancient and utterly alien.
Ophiuchus.
The Second Crossing.
I felt the shock ripple through every one of us, but before we could fully process, Rafe’s barrier dropped.
The magical dome shattered inward. Rafe was on his knees, blood streaming from his nose, his shield brothers catching him as he collapsed.
The barrier dissolved into motes of fading light, and the bane poured in.
“RUN!” I screamed. “EVERYONE THROUGH THE PORTAL! NOW!”
My shield didn’t hesitate. We moved as one unit, fanning out, shouting, grabbing people, shoving them toward the shimmering disc of light that lowered to the ground level.
Draco was dragging civilians off the floor.
Eris’s duplicates materialized through the crowd, forming a chain, pushing people forward.
“Move! Move, move, move!”
I don’t know why, maybe desperation makes people listen to anyone who sounds like they have a plan, but they stopped and listened. They saw the portal. They saw what was on the other side. And they ran for their lives.
It was a stampede. A tidal wave of bodies surging toward the light. Shield teams broke free of their fights and sprinted for the portal. They leapt through the event horizon in clusters, disappearing into that violet-green world without hesitation.
Assembly members went next. I saw Director Orion herself, her silver gown torn, her chignon destroyed, sprinting alongside her security detail.
She grabbed a young woman by the arm and shoved her through, then followed.
Bureaucrats who’d spent their lives suppressing the very knowledge of the home worlds were now diving headfirst through a portal to one, and the irony was so thick I could have choked on it.
Order members poured through to my immense, knee-buckling relief.
Tala was one of the last, her velvet dress shredded, her face streaked with blood and tears.
She paused at the threshold, looked up at Jupiter, at the burning, broken angel holding the door open, and I saw her mouth the words thank you before she stepped through and vanished.
The bond screamed. It wasn’t a sound, really.
It was a feeling. A white-hot feeling of agony lancing through every connection, every thread, every fiber of the magic that bound us to her.
Jupiter was holding the portal open through sheer, suicidal will, and the cost was written across her body in fissures of bleeding light.
The pain coming through the bond was indescribable. Something that felt like being slowly dissolved, like every cell in her body was being unmade and remade simultaneously. She was suspended in her magic, lost in it, beyond consciousness, beyond thought.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to fly up there and pull her down and wrap her in my arms and tell her to stop, to let go, that it was enough.
But I couldn’t. Because if she let go, the portal collapsed, and everyone still in this ballroom died.
So I kept shoving people through. Kept screaming. Kept moving.
Jupiter’s parents made it. Her father had her mother’s hand in a death grip, and he was running flat-out, his suit jacket gone, his face a mask of fucking terror and fierce, desperate pride.
He looked up at his daughter, at the vessel his daughter had become, and I saw his face crumple for just a second before he dragged his wife through the portal and disappeared with Noodle clutched in his grip, hissing and fighting to get back to Jupiter.
Then Lydia’s shield went in as a unit. Tye carried Kassie over his shoulder because she couldn’t see the bane, couldn’t understand what was happening, and he wasn’t going to leave her behind.
Lydia was at his side, ice still forming on her knuckles, her blue dress dark with blood that might have been hers or someone else’s.
Valeria was right behind them, lightning crackling in her wake, and Rafe—barely conscious, supported by his shield brothers—stumbled through last.
Lydia paused at the threshold, just like Tala had. She looked up at Jupiter. “I’ll see you on the other side, Jupe!” Lydia shouted, but Jupiter couldn’t hear her. Jupiter couldn’t hear anything. She was gone, lost in the light, holding the door open with the last shreds of whatever she had left.
Lydia stepped through. The event horizon swallowed her, and she was gone. The ballroom was emptying. The last clusters of civilians were sprinting through, shield teams covering their retreat, bane swarming the crowd. We were almost through. Almost—
A strangled sound cut through the noise. Not a scream. Something worse. Something raw and broken and animal.
Percy…
I turned, and he was running. Not toward the portal. Away from it. Toward something on the floor near the stage, something half-hidden behind an overturned table.
It took me a second to understand what I was looking at.
The body was sprawled on its back, expensive suit torn, silk tie still knotted perfectly at the throat.
The face was turned toward the ceiling, and the eyes were open, flat, glassy, utterly empty.
The throat had been torn out entirely, the wound ragged and deep, dark matter residue still clinging to it, and the blood had pooled beneath him in a glossy, black-red lake that spread across the cracked marble.
Charles Callahan was very, very dead.
Not far from him, maybe ten feet away, lay another body. Ash-blonde hair gone white at the roots. Golden eyes staring at nothing. He was missing both arms, and half of his face was in tatters, staring sightlessly.
Percy was on his knees beside his father’s body.
His hands hovered over the ruined throat, trembling, like he couldn’t decide whether to reach for the wound or recoil from it.
His mouth was open, but no sound came out.
The bond was a howling void, every emotion Percy had ever buried, every ounce of hatred and love and complicated, devastating grief, all of it flooding through the connection at once.
“Percy—” I started, but Aiden was already moving.
He crossed the distance in three long strides, grabbed Percy by the back of his collar, and hauled him to his feet.
Percy fought back. I felt the resistance through the bond, the raw, irrational need to stay, to kneel beside the body of the man who’d broken him and built him and destroyed him and loved him in the only way he knew how.
But Aiden didn’t let go. He dragged Percy backward, away from the body, away from the blood, toward the portal.
“Percy, look at me.” Aiden’s voice was rough, stripped of every ounce of its usual arrogance. “Look at me, brother. We have to go. Now.”
Percy’s eyes found Aiden’s, and something passed between them, some understanding that went deeper than words, deeper than the bond. Two men who’d spent their entire lives trying to become something their fathers would never let them be.
Percy stopped fighting, his body going slack in Aiden’s grip, and Aiden kept dragging him toward the portal.
Eliza materialized from behind a column, her gold gown torn, her blonde hair matted with blood.
She was running for her brother. Aiden reached for her, caught her by the upper arm, and spun her toward the portal.
“Eliza, run!”
She stared at him, her mouth working, tears cutting clean lines through the blood on her face. “Dad—Dad is—”
“I know.” Aiden’s voice cracked, just once, and I felt the fracture ripple through the bond. “I know, Eliza. But you have to go before it closes. I’ll be right behind you, I promise.”
He shoved her, and not very gently, both hands on her back, pushing her toward the portal with everything he had. She stumbled, caught herself, and then she was running, sprinting the last few yards, her gold gown billowing behind her, and she leapt through the event horizon without looking back.
“Move!” I shouted as I realized the room was now nearly empty. More bane portals were ripping open, and the only reason they couldn’t reach the portal was because the starlight repelled them. They recoiled away, as if it burned them, creating a writhing wall of black grabbing claws and teeth.
Draco grabbed Percy’s other arm, and together he and Aiden half-carried, half-dragged Percy toward the portal.
Eris’s duplicates formed a rear guard, buying us seconds.
The portal pulsed. I felt it through the bond that Jupiter’s grip was slipping.
The agony was intensifying, and beneath the pain, something was fraying.
The threads of the portal were stretching thin, and I could see the violet-green world on the other side flicker, like a signal losing strength.
“Through!” I roared. “Everyone through, now!”
Theo went first, then Jamie with Gretchen on his shoulder. Lucas dove through. Draco shoved Percy ahead of him, and Percy disappeared into the light. Eris’s duplicates collapsed one by one as the real Eris sprinted for the portal, and then he was gone.
It was Aiden, Phoenix and me left.
The fissures in her skin had deepened. Blood and light poured from them in equal measure, dripping downward in slow, glittering arcs that evaporated before they hit the floor.
Her dress hung in tatters, the midnight silk shredded to mid-thigh.
Her face was tilted upward, eyes open but unseeing, silver irises consumed by the same blinding white that was consuming everything else.
She wasn’t coming down.
“Jupiter!” I screamed, my voice tearing raw in my throat. “Jupiter, come down! We’re going! We’re all going through, but you have to come with us!”
Nothing. Not a flicker. Not a twitch. The bond was screaming, and beneath the pain, I could feel her thoughts spiraling.
Fragments of memory, shards of instinct, the deep Ophis knowledge that lived in her blood—all of it was unraveling.
She was losing herself in the magic, dissolving into it, and the part of her that was still Jupiter, still the girl who laughed at her own jokes, had a weird ass Twilight merch collection and fished for pixies with marshmallows, that part was drowning.
“She can’t hear us,” Aiden said beside me. I could feel his terror through the bond. “Rowan, she can’t fucking hear us!”
“JUPITER!” I tried again, my throat bleeding, my voice cracking. “Baby, please. Please come down. We’re not leaving without you. Do you hear me? We are NOT leaving without you!”
The portal flickered. The violet-green world on the other side dimmed, brightened, dimmed again, and I felt the threads of it straining. She was losing control. The magic was eating her alive, and if she held it much longer, there wouldn’t be anything left to save.
We were not leaving her. This was not going to be the First Crossing all over again. She was not going to be the last Ophis. She was not going to seal the portal from the wrong side and die in this room while we stood on the other side.
“Phoenix, bring her down!”
Phoenix didn’t hesitate. He didn’t ask if it would work.
He didn’t ask if the magic would hold. He just dropped to one knee, planted both palms flat on the shattered floor, and reached inside.
The marble split, and a massive root erupted from the ground, thick as my thigh, dark and gnarled and alive with green light.
It shot upward like a spear, twisting and growing as it climbed, and Phoenix’s jaw was locked, his eyes burning emerald, every muscle in his arms and back straining as he poured everything he had into the vine.
It reached her, the root wrapping around her suspended body in a tight, careful spiral around her waist, her ribs, her shoulders—and Phoenix pulled.
A scream came from somewhere beyond her body, somewhere in the starlight itself, and it tore through the room. Phoenix was on his feet now, both hands gripping the vine, his feet braced, his body shaking with the effort of dragging her out of the magic’s grip.
She came down, but not gently. Not slowly.
The root yanked her out of the column of light like pulling a fish from water, and she dropped, the starlight clinging to her like threads of molten silver, and Phoenix caught her full weight against his chest, and his knees buckled, but he didn’t fall.
He held her, one massive arm wrapped around her back, the other cradling her legs, and she was limp, unconscious, blood and light still weeping from the fissures in her skin.
“Go!” Phoenix roared, and he was already running.
Aiden and I moved with him. We ran flat-out toward the portal, the bane closing in from every direction.
They’d breached the starlight perimeter, the repulsion weakening, failing as Jupiter’s magic faded.
They were pouring through the gaps, swarming the floor, climbing the walls, and the portal was flickering faster now, the violet-green world on the other side stuttering.
The bane were everywhere. I felt claws rake across my back, tearing through my suit jacket, and I didn’t stop. Aiden’s fire erupted in a wide, desperate arc, buying us a heartbeat.
Phoenix hit the portal first, Jupiter cradled against his chest, and he leapt. Aiden went next, diving headfirst through the shimmering disc. I was last, and I felt the bane at my heels, felt the cold, wrong pressure of dark matter closing around my ankles as I threw myself forward.
Everything went white. Blinding, absolute, total white. The kind of white that wasn’t a color but an absence of everything. The absence of sound, sensation, thought, time.
I was nowhere.
I was nothing.
I was a point of consciousness suspended in pure, featureless light, and for one endless, weightless second, I couldn’t tell if I was falling or flying or if I existed at all.