28. The Siege #2
"What the hell was that?" Jace said, looking at his own glowing hands with an expression that combined wonder, fear, and the exasperation of a man whose life has deviated so far from normal that even the deviations are developing deviations.
Canyon crossed the ruined floor. Took Jace's glowing hands in his own.
And his expression, the expression of a creature that had lived on this mountain for three decades and thought he understood its nature, was the expression of a man who has just been shown that the world is larger and stranger and more wonderful than anything he had imagined in three centuries of living in it.
Lucien stepped through the breach in the wall.
His golden hair was matted with revenant fluid, his clothes ruined, his body bearing wounds that were healing.
But his expression was not combat-aftermath weariness.
It was the complex combination of amazement and scientific fascination that characterized a creature encountering something genuinely unprecedented after five centuries of believing it had seen everything.
"Class-seven imprinting," Lucien said softly. "The Council's classification system doesn't go high enough for this. Whatever you are, Jace, whatever you're becoming, it's not in any protocol I've ever studied. And I have studied all of them."
The glow faded from Jace's hands as the mountain's energy receded, flowing back into the root system with the patient withdrawal of a tide that has demonstrated its power and is content to rest. The green left his eyes last, dimming from luminous to a faint shimmer and then to nothing, leaving behind ordinary human brown and the afterimage of something extraordinary.
Jace sat on the nearest intact chair. His legs were shaking.
The energy withdrawal left him feeling hollow, not the old, pre-Black Pine hollowness of an empty life, but the temporary hollowness of a vessel that has been full and is now adjusting to the absence of what filled it.
The mountain was still there, he could feel it beneath his feet, the connection intact, but the surge was over, and what remained was the post-adrenaline exhaustion of a body that has done something far beyond its design specifications and is now presenting the bill.
"The mountain left a mark," Lucien said from the breach. His voice was quiet. Respectful. "It does that. When it flows through a vessel with enough force, it leaves a trace. A permanent connection point. The green in his eyes, it's the mountain's signature. It's saying: this one is mine."
Jace looked at his hands. Ordinary hands.
Human hands. But different now in a way he could feel even if he couldn't see: the tingling in his palms, the warmth in his fingertips, the sense, new, unfamiliar, exciting in a way that bordered on terrifying, that the earth beneath his feet was not just ground but ally.
That the mountain was not just a location but a partner.
That the energy that had flowed through him was not borrowed but shared, the first installment of a connection that the blood exchange would, tomorrow night, make permanent.
The siege was over. The Collector's abduction had failed. The full blood exchange would have to wait—the ritual grid was ash, the perimeter in pieces—but midnight would not pass unmarked. Canyon had something else in mind.
But the exchange was no longer just about stabilizing a bond or securing a territory.
It was about completing a circuit the mountain had been building for eons—a circuit that required human blood and vampire blood and mountain energy flowing through a single point of connection, and that point was Jace Warren—empty man, hollow man, chosen man—the mountain's vessel.
He had been taken. He had been taken back.
And he had been changed—not by the blood exchange, which hadn't happened yet, but by something older and deeper: the mountain's own power flowing through a human body and finding there a resonance it had been seeking since before the first tree grew from the first seed.
Midnight was six hours away. The lodge needed rebuilding. The perimeter needed restoration. The group needed rest and planning and the practical logistics of preparing for a ritual that would change everything.
But first, Jace needed to sit in a chair and stare at his ordinary, glowing, mountain-marked hands and process the fact that he was no longer, had perhaps never been, merely a man who stumbled into a vampire's territory looking for something to feel.
He was the thing the mountain had been calling.
And the mountain's voice, now that he could hear it clearly, was not a song but a name—his name, spoken in a language that predated speech, carried through the root system to every corner of the territory, and received by every living thing connected to the mountain's nervous system as a single, declarative sentence:
He is ours. Protect him. He is ours.
The wolves howled. The trees creaked. And the mountain, beneath it all, hummed with the satisfied frequency of something that has been waiting a very long time and has finally gotten what it waited for.