Chapter 14 Jade
Jade
Skye's hand goes limp in the air where Harlow was holding it, and then both of them are gone.
One second they're sitting in front of us, Harlow's grip tight around Skye's fingers, Skye's aura flaring bright enough to leave spots in my vision.
The next second there's nothing but empty ground and the faint smell of something cold, like stone after rain.
The bonds don't break, but they stretch so thin and so far that I have to press my fist against my chest to make sure I can still feel them.
They're there, muffled and distant, but there.
Stellan's hand finds mine. His fire is already spiking, heat rolling off him in uncontrolled waves, and I squeeze his fingers hard enough to hurt because it gives us both something to focus on.
"They'll make it," he says.
"They'd better." My voice comes out rougher than I intend. "Because if they don't, I meant what I said about killing death itself."
Rumi stands with his wings half-spread, his head tilted like he's listening for something the rest of us can't hear. After a long moment he exhales and folds them back. "They're alive. I can feel Harlow at the very edge of my range. They're moving fast."
"Then we move too." Ambrose is already shouldering his pack. "The faster we travel, the sooner we reach them."
We cover more ground in two days than we managed in the previous five, driven by fear and the muted pulse of two bonds stretched to their limit.
Nobody talks much. The silence where Skye and Harlow should be sits heavy between us, a gap in our formation that we keep adjusting around without acknowledging.
My hunger feeds on the anxiety whether I want it to or not.
The fear and worry bleeding off my three remaining mates filters through me constantly, and I learn to use it instead of fighting it.
I convert the raw emotion into alertness, keeping watch while the others rest, scanning the treeline for movement.
A small group of loyalists finds us on the first day.
Six of them, barely trained, more desperate than dangerous.
We handle it, but sloppily. Stellan's fire flares too wide without Skye there to calibrate the connections between us, and Rumi overcorrects to compensate, pulling his balance so far toward stability that he loses offensive power entirely.
Ambrose's contracts hold, but he's burning through reserves faster than he should because he's covering gaps that Skye and Harlow would normally fill.
We function. We survive. But we're incomplete, and every fight makes that harder to ignore.
On the second night, I catch Ambrose before he hits the ground.
One arm around his waist, his full weight sagging against my chest. His monitoring contracts have been running nonstop since Skye and Harlow left, tracking the sanctuary's deterioration, tracking our mates through the faintest echoes in the network, tracking loyalist movements across three territories.
He hasn't slept more than an hour at a stretch since they disappeared.
"Put me down." His voice is barely audible. "I need to check the eastern feeds."
"You need to sleep."
"The eastern feeds are showing increased activity near—"
"Ambrose." I lower him to the ground, keeping my arm behind his shoulders. "The eastern feeds will still be there in six hours. You won't be if you keep this up."
He tries to argue, but his body betrays him. His eyes are glassy, his hands trembling too badly to form contract symbols even if he wanted to. Centuries old and undone by two days without sleep and the stubbornness to keep working until his body quits.
I make a decision. When I healed Stellan in the canyon, something new opened up in my abilities.
I didn't just transform the damage, I generated something, created essence from the process of transformation itself.
I've been turning the idea over since then, wondering if it was a one-time thing or if I could do it deliberately.
I press my palm flat against Ambrose's chest and push.
The opposite of hunger. I reach for the energy I've been converting from everyone's fear and anxiety, all that raw emotion I've been processing and refining, and I feed it into him. His eyes widen and his hand comes up to grip my wrist.
"What are you doing?"
"Taking care of family. Shut up and accept it."
The energy moves between us, and I can feel him more clearly than I ever have.
The exhaustion goes deeper than I realized, layered over fear that's even deeper than that, buried under the constant grinding need to be useful because somewhere in his centuries of existence he learned that his worth is measured in what he produces.
He's terrified that if he stops working, stops contributing, the rest of us will realize we don't actually need him.
"You matter even when you're not working," I tell him. "You know that, right?"
His laugh is thin and watery. "I'm starting to believe that."
"Good. Now sleep. That's an order from your demon in-law, or whatever we are."
His eyes close before I finish the sentence. I keep my hand on his chest, feeding him a slow trickle of refined energy, watching the tension drain from his face as real sleep takes hold for the first time in days. Stellan drapes a blanket over both of us without a word. Rumi takes watch.
I sit with Ambrose's head resting against my thigh and wonder when I became the kind of person who takes care of people instead of feeding on them. The bonds where Skye and Harlow should be pulse faintly in the distance. Whatever they're doing at the sanctuary, they're holding on.
The night passes slowly. Ambrose sleeps deeply for the first time since the death realm took our mates, and I keep my hand on his chest through all of it, a steady trickle of refined energy flowing between us.
Rumi sits at the edge of our camp with his wings folded and his eyes on the treeline, and at some point Stellan curls up against my other side, his fire dimmed to embers, seeking warmth that has nothing to do with temperature.
Tomorrow we push the final stretch.
I close my eyes and let Ambrose's steady heartbeat under my palm keep me grounded until sleep takes me too.
We break camp before dawn. Ambrose wakes steadier than he's been in a while, the refined energy still working through his system, and he squeezes my arm once without saying anything as he shoulders his pack.
Rumi takes point, his wings catching the first light.
Stellan walks beside me, close enough that our arms brush with every step.
Phoenix Sanctuary is less than a day away if we truly push. The bonds from Skye and Harlow grow stronger with every mile, shifting from muffled echoes to something closer to real presence. The fear bleeding through even at this distance is enough to make my hunger sit up and pay attention.
Fuck, I hope we make it.