Chapter Twenty-Four
Connor
Connor stepped in front of Adrian, his muscles coiled, every instinct screaming. “Show yourselves,” he snarled.
The shadows stirred. Not the twitching Nightwrought from before. Something else. Something larger.
A silhouette began to form at the far end of the clearing. Tall as the trees, its edges dripping like ink underwater. Its body flickered between shapes: a robed figure, a gaunt beast, a thing made of smoke and teeth.
Adrian went rigid. “That’s not a Nightwrought,” he whispered. “It’s a Mouthpiece.” He looked at Connor with horror.
Connor’s heart hammered. “What does that thing do?”
“They speak through it,” Adrian said. “Because they can’t cross here. Not yet.”
The figure advanced, soundless, gliding inches above the ground. The Mouthpiece paused only a few feet away. When it spoke, its voice came from everywhere at once.
Return the Marked.
Adrian stepped forward, snarling. “No.”
Return what is ours.
“I am not yours.”
You carry our seal.
“I don’t care,” Adrian said between gritted teeth. “Nobody owns me. You don’t belong here.”
The Mouthpiece tilted its head.
One Marked. One Bound. One must be claimed.
Connor felt the words like claws dragging down the inside of his skull. “You think I’ll let you take him?” Connor growled. “You think I’ll hand him over like he’s a damned ledger to balance?”
Balance demands sacrifice.
“Balance can fuck off,” Adrian said defiantly.
The Mouthpiece didn’t react. Instead, a strange static sound echoed in the clearing. Adrian fell to his knees. His eyes glowed white. Brilliant and burning. “Connor. They’re pulling.”
Connor’s blood iced. “Pulling what?”
“Me.”
And then the rend cracked open.
The ground split behind the Mouthpiece with a deafening roar, light pouring out in a blinding column. The clearing shook. Trees groaned. Frost exploded from the soil like shards of bone.
Adrian screamed. Connor caught him as he buckled, lifting him into his arms as the mark flared bright enough to scorch through fabric.
The Mouthpiece stretched toward them.
Return the Marked One.
Connor roared back, the sound more wolf than man. “No. You’ll take him over my dead body.”
The Mouthpiece flickered.
As you wish.
The light surged. The trees bent inward. And the Council reached through the rend.
The world didn’t break all at once.
It split with a sound like a stone cracking under frost, a thin, hairline fracture of light tearing through the earth behind the Mouthpiece.
The ground convulsed, shuddering under Connor’s boots.
The rend widened. Adrian was struggling to resist, his muscles flexing as he fought against the pull, his face a grimace of defiance.
The light pouring out of the gap wasn’t natural. It wasn’t even close to it. It shimmered like oil and ice and starlight all at once, shifting colours too fast for the human eye to follow. Blue bled to violet, violet to sickly green, green to a white so bright it hurt to look at.
Connor’s wolf snarled violently, bristling. This shouldn’t exist. This wasn’t a doorway. It was a wound. And something on the other side wanted out.
The Mouthpiece’s form flickered—a skull of smoke stretched across a collapsing void—and its voice shattered through the clearing like splintered glass.
We shall have him. He is ours.
“I’m nobody’s fucking property,” Adrian gasped as he held on to Connor, their hands clasped around each other’s forearms tethered in an unbreakable chain. “You can piss the hell off.”
The Nightwrought circling the tree line bowed as one, their spindly limbs splaying like grotesque dancers greeting their monarch. Adrian’s breath caught in his throat, his entire body was shaking, the mark glowing beneath his shirt like a brand fresh off the fire.
“Connor,” he gasped, “they’re pulling—”
“I’ve got you,” Connor growled, tightening his grip around Adrian’s waist. “You’re not going anywhere.”
But he felt it. The tug. A horrible, invisible force hooking into Adrian’s body deeper. Into his spirit as well as his flesh.
Adrian gasped, his back arching against Connor’s hold. His fingers clamped around Connor’s coat. His knuckles blanched white. “I’m not sure how much longer I can fight them.” His eyes opened in wonder. “I can hear Irial. In my head. She’s trying to tell me something.”
“Stay with me,” Connor barked. The wind ripped the words from his mouth, swallowing them in the thunderous hum of the rend splitting wider.
The ground cracked again, a jagged line racing toward them like a lightning strike etched into soil. Light spewed upwards, searing the air. Connor dragged Adrian back, step by step, his boots slipping in the fractured earth.
Connor’s rage went white-hot. “Over my dead body,” he snarled at the rend. His hands thrummed, all heat and lightning, something powerful struggling to break free.
Use me, something thundered in his mind. Use your power to set him free. His wolf side snarled. I am more now than I ever was.
He held up his hands, staring at the purple flames that engulfed them. Steady flames, interspersed with silver motes that drifted through the fire.
What the fuck is this? And what the hell do I do with it?
A cold wind poured through the clearing, carrying a chorus of whispers, overlapping, layered, each voice unnatural in a different way.
Valour. Send him. Send the Marked.
Balance must be restored.
Adrian bent his head in desperation, his muscles taut with resistance. “Let. Me. Go,” he shouted.
Connor slammed his palm against Adrian’s cheek, forcing Adrian to look up. Adrian’s eyes widened when he saw what Connor’s hands held.
“Why are your hands glowing?”
Connor shook his head. “I haven’t figured that out yet. Now listen to me, Adrian Gauthier. You stay with me. Right here. Right now.” He pressed his forehead to Adrian’s, ignoring the heat of the mark searing through Adrian’s chest. “Do you hear me?”
Adrian shuddered against him. “I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
A broken laugh, thin and pained, slipped from Adrian’s lips. “You’re not very gentle, mon ami.”
“Not trying to be.”
The rend widened again, belching another surge of frost and wind that nearly tore Adrian out of his grip. Connor’s boots slid in the dirt, his heels digging desperately for purchase. The light lashed across his vision. Adrian cried out in pain as the mark flared white-hot.
And the Mouthpiece leaned forward, its shapeless face cracking open into something that might once have been a mouth.
The Veil claims its own.
Connor roared, lunging forward, using his body as a shield. “He is not yours.”
He carries our seal.
Something like a hand formed out of the Mouthpiece’s swirling smoke. Long, skeletal fingers that stretched toward Adrian. Connor shoved Adrian behind him with a snarl, swinging his rifle like a staff. The butt cracked across the smoky limb. The limb dissolved, then re-formed.
Adrian froze. The mark’s glow spilled from beneath his shirt in harsh pulses now, like something alive.
Connor grabbed his arm. “Adrian, talk to me.”
Adrian didn’t blink. “I can feel them. They’re reaching through me. I think…Connor I think I’m the anchor.”
“Like hell you are.”
“Connor.”
“No.” He jerked Adrian closer, his fingers gripping his shoulders. “You aren’t their door. Or their path.”
“Then why mark me?” Adrian snarled, his gaze wild.
The question stabbed Connor through the chest. Because he didn’t know.
A thunderclap shook the ground, and the crack across the clearing split wider, lightning erupting from the earth.
Max shouted from the tree line, “Connor. Get him out of there!”
Fraser echoed him. “The rend’s unstable. Move.”
Connor didn’t move. Neither did Adrian. Because the rend was changing.
The spiralling colours began to synchronise: blue, violet, and green. Then they collapsed inward like an eye focusing. The light froze, then shot out in a wave of blinding brilliance.
Connor threw his body over Adrian as the blast slammed into him. The force lifted him off his feet, hurling him across the ground. Adrian was ripped from his arms. Connor hit the earth hard, pain exploding down his spine, the air knocked from his lungs.
The world spun. He tasted blood.
“Connor.” Adrian’s voice.
Connor forced his eyes open, his vision swimming, and pushed himself up, his muscles screaming. Adrian knelt several paces away, clutching his head in both hands, his eyes wide and glassy with pain. The mark blazed like a star about to collapse.
Connor staggered toward him. But the rend pulsed, and Adrian howled. The sound cut through Connor like a knife.
Adrian lifted his face, his eyes glowing pure white, a corona of wild light radiating around his pupils. Connor stopped, horrified.
Adrian’s voice came out as two voices layered together: his own and something older, something vast, something cold enough to freeze marrow.
The path is open.
Connor’s blood ran cold.
Adrian rose to his feet without using his hands, as if pulled up by invisible strings. The wind coiled around him. His hair lifted. Frost formed beneath his boots in spiralling patterns.
Max cursed behind Connor. “Christ above. Connor, he’s—”
“Don’t,” Connor snarled without turning. “He’s still Adrian.” He stepped forward, grabbing Adrian. “Fight them.”
Adrian’s mouth twitched, a flicker of panic breaking through. “Connor, Irial—” His body jerked violently, his head snapping back.
A shape stepped through the light. Long and tall, dripping with shadows like liquid night. Its eyes were twin voids. Its limbs moved erratically. It stayed in the rend, not making a move onto the solid ground of the forest.
“A Soul Cleric,” Adrian gasped.
Connor was beyond asking how Adrian knew so much about a world he’d never seen. He shoved Adrian behind him, his teeth bared, his wolf rising in a surge so violent it left black spots in his vision.
The entity tilted its head. Then it spoke with a voice that was not one voice, but dozens:
The Marked belongs to us.
Connor growled, low and lethal. “I’m the Veilwarden. You won’t take him on my watch.”
The entity raised an arm, its fingers elongating into blades of living shadow. It lunged. Connor met it head-on. The entity struck like winter given claws.
Connor met it mid-lunge. His hands exploded with light, shades of lavender, purple, and silver pulsing in the air around them. The energy he now felt almost begged to be let loose.
The shaft of his dirk cracked through shadow as if it were brittle stone, and black vapour exploded and recoalesced around the blow, re-forming fingers that ended in hooks of night. The creature’s weight was too light, too swift, and moving with the logic of smoke and the intent of a blade.
“Behind me,” Connor snarled without looking back.
He pushed his hands toward the entity, which shrieked in anger as the flames hit it.
A scorching smell filled the air as it stepped back, and Connor stepped forward, resolute and victorious, as his fingers sent his new essence into the Soul Cleric’s form.
Connor. The word wasn’t spoken so much as pushed through the tether between them. They’re pulling—
Adrian didn’t say more. The mark across his chest had become a brand of pale fire, each pulse synced with the rend’s widening breath.
“Hold.” The word came out part man, part wolf. Connor bared his teeth and drove forward, pushing every emotion and all his fury into the rend, into the Soul Cleric.
The being’s limbs scissored. Steel screamed, fabric parted, and corporeal mist and shadow scorched.
The edge kissed Connor’s arm, and the cold burned hotter than flame.
He twisted under the second strike, slammed his shoulder into the thing’s torso, and shoved.
It slid back across grass that had frozen mid-bend.
Frost shattered under its feet, shards of it hurtling toward the being and disappearing into its shadowy depths.
A terrifying scream of anguish and pain erupted as the Soul Cleric tumbled back into the rend. Another shape unhooked itself from the rend’s light, this one taller and thinner with eyes like holes cut into a sheet of midnight.
“Another one of you bastards,” Connor breathed. “Fine.” He revelled in the power he held, and his gaze fixed solely on annihilating the being in front of him.
He let the wolf rise beneath his skin. Bones didn’t form. They remembered. His muscles thickened, and the world focused into edges he could use. He moved, the tendrils of energy he held reaching out to the unwelcome intruder.
The thing slashed. Connor stepped in, too close for it to reach him, and drove the silver under what passed for its rib cage, simultaneously forcing his energy into the opening he’d created.
The creature convulsed. The scent of old ash and wet stone hit the back of Connor’s throat. He ripped the blade free and spun low, his hands still engulfed in power.
“Come try to take him,” Connor growled, and the clearing seemed to flinch.