Chapter 37
Nyxiana
Icome out of the dark in the clearing outside the lodge, the case at my hip, the star awake on my wrist.
The landing is clean. None of the drag I got used to the first time I carried Valen across.
The blood my parents put in my hands is still working.
I could make that crossing twice more tonight and be standing at the end of it.
I left Blood Moon earlier than I’d planned to.
My father’s court started running hot while I was there.
Short tempers in rooms that have run on ritual for four hundred years.
A steward snapping at a page. Two of the old council going at each other over nothing.
Blood Moon runs faster than here, so if it’s reached that far, it reached here first. I look at my own compound and I know I’m right before anybody says a word.
Wolves cross the yard too fast for the hour.
Three separate people look at the treeline in the time it takes me to breathe, none looks long enough to be checking for anything.
Under all of it the air has gone thin in a way I’ve never read off a warded valley in any realm. It makes something cold run through me.
Kaspian is across the yard before I’ve finished settling. He has both arms around me, holding on longer than a homecoming needs. His skin runs warm against my cheek, warmer than a vampire’s ever should, dragon heat pushing up through the same control that has kept it banked since we were children.
“How was Blood Moon?” he says into my hair.
“The key’s whole. It’s here, in the case.” He steps back, the ease is already gone out of his face.
“Sit down before I say the rest.”
“Just say it.”
“Nyxi.”
“Kaspian.” I stay on my feet. “Say it.”
“Samuel came for Ben’s debt while you were gone, it was never a payment, he came to tell him and the pack has all of it now. The one world, the war, the sealing.”
“I found the same in Blood Moon. I have the mechanism.”
“Then here’s the part you won’t have.” He walks me toward the lodge and gives me the rest as we go. “The Ascent was built brutal on purpose. Tuned to strip a man down to nothing so that only the real thing would survive the climb, because they had to be certain it was in Ben before they spent it.”
I stop walking in the middle of the yard. “They knew what letting him climb would open.”
“They knew. They let him climb.”
I’ve spent this whole hunt reading the founders’ work off stone and pages. It never occurred to me to put the Council in the same sentence.
“Harper’s mark went first,” Kaspian says. “The same night. It hasn’t stayed with her either. Every person in this valley carrying more than one kind of blood has felt it since, and it’s worse today than it was yesterday. Faelan is at that crack right now.”
The lodge is full. Dane’s at the long table, Lyanna beside him with her crystal in both hands. Its light still fading down from blue, which means somebody was in it inside the last minute.
“Doria,” she says when she sees me. “My father. He says the seams into Gleann na Sidhe won’t hold a portal open and nobody there can tell him why.”
Rafe comes in behind her, his coat still on and dirt up to his knees. He’s been out on the line since before dawn by the look of him.
“It isn’t only Doria,” he says. “I’ve had my hands on the ground from the north cut to the water and every seam I can reach is running wrong. Drakoria’s the worst of them. I couldn’t tell you what’s doing it but I can tell you it’s doing it everywhere at once.”
Nova is at the hearth with one hand locked around her own wrist, knuckles gone white with it. Her breath catches every few seconds, hard enough to stop her mid-word. She keeps talking through it.
“The night Samuel came,” she says. “It started that night. Before you ask.”
Kari’s in the corner. Her hand is pressed to her right palm, her whole arm is shaking with the pressure she’s putting on it.
Rafe crosses to her, stretching a hand toward her shoulder, she shifts half a step out from under it without looking at him.
His hand stops mid-air and comes back down to his side.
I’ve known those two since before there were two of them.
Evren is by the door with his arms crossed hard over his chest. There’s sweat at his hairline in a room that’s comfortable for everybody else. One of the younger wolves asks him whether he has the north perimeter tonight.
“I don’t know. Ask Callum.” It comes out hard enough that the kid takes an actual step back.
Evie is at the far window with her forehead almost against the glass, looking out at the treeline.
I have read that girl since the first week I met her.
She’s always come to me easily, the way most people do, everything she’s carrying sitting right there on the surface where I can reach it.
Tonight I put my attention on her and there’s nothing to take hold of.
Something is sitting between us that wasn’t there a week ago.
I put it aside. It’s the only thing in this room I can afford to do.
I set the case on Dane’s table and tell them what I learned in Blood Moon.
“There’s no fourth shard. There’s no fourth object anywhere in that realm.”
That gets Dane’s attention off the table.
I push my sleeve back. “It’s this. It woke in Blood Moon because I’m what their system was built to find.
” I hold my arm where the room can see it.
“They didn’t build me. They built the fourth point and left it sitting there dormant, waiting for a particular convergence to come along.
I turned out to be it. Valen was made on purpose and put where they wanted him.
I was born to my parents and the mark attached to me by accident of what I came out as. ”
“What does that mean for what’s coming?” Dane asks.
“It means the door into the celestial realm opens for me and for nobody else alive. It means Faelan isn’t using a door. He’s going through the wall, he’s most of the way through, and what every person in this room has been feeling for two days is him doing it.”
Dane doesn’t move. He needed a plan tonight and what I have is the truth. I start on the rest, softening the first sentence without catching myself doing it, because there’s a room full of people already bleeding in front of me.
“There are parts of this that will keep until we’ve all slept, so tonight the useful piece is knowing what the key opens and how long we have, which is...”
“Stop.”
Kaspian speaks from the middle of the room. I stop.
“Don’t do that,” he says. “Not tonight. Not in this room.”
“Kaspian.”
“You’ve done it my entire life.” He isn’t shouting, he’s worn through and it comes out of him anyway.
“You decide how much a person can hold, you hand them that much and carry the rest yourself. Most of the time you’re right, I’ve let you because you’re right.
You’re not right tonight. Look at them.”
I look. Nova with her hand on her wrist. Kari with hers shaking against her palm. Dane with both hands on a table that has nothing left to tell him. Evren by the door sweating in a cool room.
“They’re already hurt,” Kaspian says. “You don’t get to decide what this family can survive hearing. Not anymore.”
I’ve carried the heavier version of every hard thing since I was old enough to know there were two versions, I’ve always called that loving people. He’s right.
“All right,” I say. I give them the rest with nothing taken off it.
The angels knew what breaking the death-lock would open.
They did it anyway, picked Ben to pay for it because what they needed was love willing to break itself.
Leaving the truth buried would have taken something just as real out of every realm eventually.
Nobody has ever had a clean answer available, only two bad ones.
Then the last of it. The founders built their fourth point out of fear of exactly one thing, and I’m walking around being it.
I keep my voice steady the whole way through.
Dane goes quiet and stays that way. Nova’s grip closes tighter on her own wrist.
“Is mine going to keep getting worse?” Kari asks. Quiet, sharp, straight at me.
There are three answers I could give her, every one of them true, not one of them good enough. She’d know which kind she was being handed before I finished the sentence, because she’s Kari, and she has never let me get away with the clean version of anything.
“Yes,” I say.
Then the room pulls apart. Nobody raises a voice.
Nobody accuses anybody of anything. It’s smaller than that, worse.
Rafe stands beside Kari without touching her.
Nova turns her body a few degrees away from Dane.
Evren leaves. The warmth that has run under this pack since the first night I walked into it thins out until there’s almost nothing left of it in the room.
I go out to the porch. Valen is at the treeline.
I want him. Not later, after this is handled.
Now, with his arms around me, my face against his chest, in front of every one of them if that’s what it takes.
I’m off the steps and moving before I’ve decided anything.
I cross half the yard and stop a dozen feet short of him.
He watches me come and doesn’t move to meet me.
He’s got several days of stubble, his hair’s damp at the temples, pushed back off his forehead where he’s had a hand through it.
His eyes are gray, they’re on my face, they stay there.
That man tracks every corner of every room he stands in.
Him looking at one thing and nothing else is the loudest thing he’s ever said to me.
Nothing in his face gives me an opening. Neither of us says a word, he turns away and goes back toward the trees. I stand there a while before I go back to the lodge.
Behind me in the dark there’s a man who could put his arms around me and end most of what’s wrong with me by crossing twelve feet of grass, yet I’m the reason he won’t.
Tomorrow, I have to ask him to walk into the celestial realm with me.