Chapter 14
“Can you all quiet down?” Heidara snapped. “Can’t you see he’s trying to concentrate? And you,” she added, jabbing a finger toward Holden, “why are you even here?”
The faintest flicker of hurt crossed his face at Heidara’s sharpness. Cillian did not know what history lay between them, and he had no desire to learn today. Not with Alaric lying on that bed, breathing like someone he no longer knew.
The room finally quieted.
Cillian drew in a careful breath and furrowed his brow, reaching inward for the smallest spark of light.
It shouldn’t have been this difficult. For weeks the power had insistently pressed against him, blooming beneath his skin like a sunrise that refused to stay buried.
It had wanted out. It had hummed through his bones, reminding him again and again that it existed.
But wanting to emerge was different from being controlled.
Now he had to seize it, shape it, master it. With an audience.
The doorway was crowded with wolves. His sister’s gaze remained fixed on him.
Heidara’s desperation filled the room like a storm waiting to break.
Even Kaldrek stood over Evelyne like a living blade, poised to throw himself between her and the bed the moment Alaric so much as moved.
Still, the sight of him there, guarding Evelyne, steadied something in Cillian.
It reminded him that, for this moment at least, his sister was safe.
“Cillian,” Evelyne murmured calmly at his side, “you can do this. And if you can’t, it is all right. We can stop and try again later.”
He nodded once, more for her than for himself.
Heidara refused to leave. She stood only a few feet from Alaric’s bed, rigid as a sentry, her eyes fixed on his chest as though she could will it to rise faster. And because she stayed, the others did too. Which meant Cillian could not have the things he wanted most.
Silence.
Solitude.
A chance to fail without witnesses.
He shoved the thought aside. Privacy was a luxury he could not afford just now.
So he did the only thing left to him: he closed his eyes and turned inward.
He searched for that warmth. Not the blaze or the blinding flood of light that had nearly consumed him before, but the smaller, gentler current beneath it.
The part that felt clean. Whole. As though his body had finally fallen into its proper shape.
He listened for it the way he had learned to listen for breath in the dark.
At first, there was only fear, pain, and the crushing awareness of everyone watching him. Then calm came in a soft, quiet rush, as though something inside him had exhaled at last. Yes, it seemed to say. Yes. This is right.
Cillian let the light bloom in his fingertips, then flow into his palms, up his arms, and across his chest. He drew in a long breath, released it, and opened his eyes to Alaric lying still before him.
He reached out and placed his hand against Alaric’s chest. There was no training to guide him, no promise this would work, only instinct and the memory of how he had once drawn darkness from Vaelora.
His fingers pressed through cloth and bandage until he found the heat of skin beneath. For one suspended moment, nothing stirred. The room seemed to breathe around the silence—until the darkness answered.
Not with sound, but with a sudden oily pressure pushing against Cillian’s palm, as though something inside Alaric recognized his touch and recoiled. The light within Cillian flared in answer, a hungry current rushing to the point of contact like water finding a crack.
Cillian gritted his teeth and tried to guide it. Stay small, he told himself. Just a sliver. But the light spilled anyway.
Heat flooded his arm, then his chest, as if his ribs had been filled with liquid sunlight. He felt it reach into Alaric like fingers slipping into cold mud. It found something knotted and rotten and wrong.
And it pulled.
Alaric’s body arched beneath his hand as a raw, strangled sound tore from his throat. Not a groan, but a broken wail, as if pain had found the only way out.
Someone in the room drew in a sharp breath.
Whispers stirred around him. Heidara made a sound that was not quite a sob, nor quite a prayer.
But Cillian did not look up. He could not.
The moment he did, he knew he would lose the thread.
The light had slipped beyond his control now, surging stronger, pulling harder.
He felt it catch on the darkness inside Alaric like a hook and begin to drag.
The warmth in Cillian’s chest intensified.
Too bright.
Too fast.
He tried to rein it in, to press it down, to pull back.
But the light refused restraint. It strained for release, desperate to blaze.
And the darkness fought back.
A voice hissed through the thread of contact, not Alaric’s voice but something coiled beneath it, something slick and ancient.
No.
The word didn’t come as speech. It came as a shove, a spike of cold that slammed into Cillian’s mind.
No. Mine. He’s mine.
Cillian’s vision flickered. For a heartbeat he saw nothing but black roots and blood, a mouth full of teeth that were not Alaric’s, a mist that laughed. He jerked in place, but his hand remained pinned to Alaric’s chest as if glued there by the light itself.
His lungs seized as the heat burned across his sternum. It crawled up his throat and down his spine. It was too hot. Too much. He couldn’t hold it anymore.
Cillian tried to inhale and couldn’t get enough air.
Stop, he told himself. Stop. Pull away.
His fingers didn’t obey.
Instead, the power surged again, and Alaric screamed louder. The sound made the hair on Cillian’s arms rise and something primal inside him wake.
His gums ached. Painful pressure built behind his teeth, and then he felt it: the push of fangs pressing down, trying to break through flesh.
His nails sharpened, lengthening into claws.
His hands curled, not with intention but with instinct, as if his body had decided the only way to survive this was to become something made for violence.
A low growl vibrated in his chest before he realized it was coming from him.
“Cillian!” Evelyne’s voice cut through the haze. “Stop. Stop, you’re hurting yourself!”
It didn’t matter. The light kept pouring. His chest burned hotter, the sickening heat so fierce it stung his eyes and filled his mouth with the taste of metal.
“Cillian!” Evelyne shouted again, panic fraying her words. “Look at you, you can’t—”
Cillian couldn’t answer. Couldn’t even turn his head. It was like being caught in a current stronger than his will, dragged along by something that felt both holy and merciless. Alaric thrashed beneath his touch. Screaming and wailing in a voice not his own.
“Please,” Heidara cried, the word torn from her like she was begging him to keep going and pleading for him to stop all at once, caught between hope and horror.
Alaric snarled aloud, clearer now, his voice like claws scraping stone. “I said NO.”
Cillian’s light found the corruption the way heat finds ice.
Cold slammed up his arm and into his chest, so sudden it stole his breath.
Not ordinary cold. Not winter air. No, this was the same cold he remembered from Vaelora.
The wrongness of it. The way it didn’t chill the skin so much as the soul, sinking past bone and settling in the mind like a parasite.
And it came at him like it recognized him.
For a heartbeat, Cillian was no longer in the lodge.
He was back in that hollow place Vaelora had carved inside him, where the air tasted of blood and iron and the world lay dimmed, as though light itself had been smothered.
The cold pressed in at once, searching for the old wound, trying to slip into the same broken path it had once claimed.
This time, it found no emptiness waiting for it.
Light surged up to meet it, and the force of that collision cracked through Cillian’s skull like flint against stone.
The cold pushed to spread, to numb, to silence.
The light rose harder in answer, burning through rot and horror wherever it touched.
What began as warmth turned quickly into heat that demanded room, that pressed outward until there was nowhere left for darkness to hide.
The cold recoiled in thin, frantic tendrils, and Cillian knew with sick certainty that it was working, because the darkness was no longer simply there.
It was afraid.
In his mind it felt like dragging frostbitten fingers into flame. Like pulling a black thorn out of flesh that resisted and tore. The cold screamed without sound, lashing against his thoughts, trying to make him doubt, trying to make him remember how it had owned him before.
Cillian pushed back harder.
He felt the darkness blister as it gave way.
It was not destroyed, not wholly, but weakened, its edges scorched as it was driven inch by inch from the places it had burrowed into his friend.
Still it struck back, desperately reaching for Cillian instead, trying to crawl into him where it had been forced to retreat from Alaric. So he burned hotter. He burned it away.
“Stop, Cillian,” Kaldrek growled.
Strong hands clamped around Cillian’s shoulders and yanked him back. The instant Kaldrek touched him, the light surged, spilling into Kaldrek’s hands as though it had found a new vessel. Kaldrek recoiled with a strangled breath and stumbled backward, catching himself on the bedframe.
Cillian’s hand ripped free from Alaric’s chest. The broken contact hit with brutal force, the light snapping back into him so fast it tore a gasp from his lungs. He staggered, clutching at his sternum, the burn still raging beneath his skin.
Alaric’s scream broke off into a ragged choke.
He collapsed back against the mattress, heaving for breath, sweat shining at his temples, his face contorted with pain.
Cillian swayed where he stood, claws still half-formed at his fingertips.
His fangs throbbed, caught between human and wolf, and his whole body trembled beneath the strain of power too vast to contain.
Evelyne grabbed his face between her hands, frantic, searching his eyes. “Cillian—Cillian, look at me.”
He tried. Gods, he tried. But all he could feel was heat and exhaustion and that awful, hungry song inside him—still begging to be let out.
“Alaric,” Heidara whispered. “Alaric, please wake up.” Holden reached to embrace his sister, but she scowled. “Do not touch me, Holden.”
For a long moment, no one moved. The lodge was filled with the aftermath. With the stink of sweat and tonic. Cillian’s breath came uneven as he clutched his chest, trying to convince his body it was safe, trying to will his claws back into nails, his fangs back into harmless teeth.
Evelyne’s hands stayed on his face. Her eyes flicked over him, then down to his fingers. “Your hands, Cillian.”
He forced himself to blink and regain focus. With effort, his claws began to recede, the sharpness easing, bone and tendon shifting back into place like a reluctant surrender. The ache in his gums remained, but the fangs stopped pushing.
Kaldrek stood a step away, chest rising and falling hard. His eyes were narrowed, his teeth clenched as if he’d just bitten down on lightning. He rolled his shoulder once, as though trying to shake sensation out of it.
Heidara moved slowly to the bedside and leaned in. “Alaric,” she whispered again.
At the sound of her voice, his mouth parted with a low rasp, and a thin ribbon of black mist slipped free, curling upward like smoke.
Evelyne gasped. “Is that—”
“Wait,” Cillian croaked, his throat still raw. “Wait.”
The mist shuddered, as though something within it resisted exposure.
It clung to Alaric’s lips for a moment longer, then peeled away in a reluctant strand and dissolved into the air.
And at his throat, one of the darker veins, one that had pulsed too near the surface, began to fade. Only slightly. But a small retreat.
Alaric’s eyes opened for one brief moment—rimmed red with exhaustion, but his. Bright blue and human.
His gaze found Heidara first and his lips parted.
“Hei…” he rasped.
“I’m here,” she said instantly, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I’m here. Don’t go. Just… just stay with me.”
Alaric blinked slowly, as though even that cost him. His eyes shifted, barely, toward Evelyne, then to Cillian.
“I…” he breathed, the word thin as paper.
A broken sound slipped from Evelyne. Beside her, Cillian struggled to stay on his feet.
“Heidara,” Alaric murmured.
“I’m right here,” she said again, her voice breaking.
One last breath shuddered out of him, and then his eyes closed once more.
This time it was sleep, not oblivion, the tonics reclaiming him at last. Heidara’s hand hovered over the bandages, trembling, as though she could not trust what might answer if she touched him.
Around the room, everyone let go of the breath they had been holding, the sound soft and shaken, relief tangled with surrender.
Then Cillian’s knees gave out.
Kaldrek caught him before he hit the floor, steadying him with one arm, though even that touch was careful now, as if none of them fully trusted what lived inside Cillian’s light.
“That’s all I can do,” Cillian whispered, more to himself than anyone else. “That’s all I have right now.”
“Then we learn,” Evelyne said, her voice hoarse. “We make you stronger. We make you better. And you do only what you can bear.”
The lodge door swung open, and Nathan stood there with Ravena of the Moonshade pack.
“Alpha,” Nathan said, “we need you. Now.”