Chapter 17
Fly woke to the taste of blood and the sound of his hollow bones ringing.
Stone pressed against his feathered cheek, hard and unforgiving, and the sharp, metallic scent of it filled his nose.
His wings were spread, one of them bent at an angle that jolted pain through him with every shallow breath.
He'd fallen. The flying assassin had taken him down.
Something was in his head, a bitter thing in a sacred space.
A voice uncoiled where the bond should be. Vertigo did its job. Now it’s time to do ours.
Fly pushed himself up, the world tilting around him.
The golden thread that tied him to his team, the one as much a part of him as his own thoughts, was corrupted.
Frayed wire sparking against his mind. Where Flash's steady presence should have been, there was only static.
Where North's grounding strength should have been, an icy whisper slithered in.
They left you. The connection was a chain, and they let it break. They're already gone.
He knew it was a lie. He could see the mechanism of it with the freezing clarity that was his gift, a precise and venomous logic built to dismantle him.
But seeing the trap didn't stop it from sinking in.
Severance didn't need him to believe the lie.
It only needed him to feel it long enough to hollow him out.
Behind the assassin, Null waited. The end of meaning.
A patient, absolute nothing, waiting for Severance to drain him of all purpose, all will, so Null could take his soul.
He reached for a pattern, a reason to stand, and it drained out of him into the cold. The void leaned in, and the world began to gray at the edges.
Then the mountain groaned.
This came from everywhere at once, a deep roll that shook dust from the chapel walls and went through the stone into his marrow. A sound older than the ruins. Older than the sky. Through the static and the despair, Fly turned his head.
They came over the rise in a brown juggernaut of living muscle and rolling thunder.
Thousands of them, a wall of horns and shaggy shoulders that swallowed the hillside, the ground gone under hooves that hit like a thousand hammers on the same beat.
At the center of it, or maybe as all of it, was North.
The buffalo hadn't called the herd. He had become it.
The flood hit Rupture. The assassin wrenched the mountain up into a fused wall of stone, a last stand, and it didn't matter.
The herd went through it. The breaker of foundations found it had no ground to stand on, and it came apart the way it had made everything else come apart, crushed to gravel and then to dust under the passage.
One moment it was there. The next, there was only thunder rolling on past the place it had been.
The herd swung toward Fly. Through the poisonous static and the draining chill, he felt the vast collective mind turn as a thousand eyes locked onto his broken shape on the stone, and at the head of it North charged, bruised and battered and bellowing his defiance.
Fly never loved him more than in that moment.
His friend. His brother. A bond built on blood, pain and years.
North reached him in three strides ahead of the soul-takers and put himself in the gap.
There was no time to argue, no time for Fly to get his damaged wings under him and move, no time for anything but North's great dark bulk swinging around to stand over him, between him and the double-teaming bastards.
Fly felt it through the bond before his eyes caught up.
North wasn't getting him clear. North was making himself the wall.
The same wall he'd always been, the steadfast thing that had stood through every loss and every failure, and now, at the end, the same unflinching love.
Null struck with the killing intent that cut a soul loose from its body. It had been meant for Fly. North took it.
Fly felt all of it, because they were connected on the same gold thread and what hit one of them rang through the rest. He felt North's soul tear loose from the great body the way a root rips out of the ground, the whole of him, the anchor, the immovable one.
In the half-second of the tearing, the bond came clean.
Severance's poison, the static, the cool whisper and the lie that the connection had killed him, all of it burned off the thread at once. North's voice came down the resurrected bond from somewhere already far away and going farther, and it was one unfinished word. Brother….
Then the thread where North had always been went quiet.
Fly had gotten to his knees in human form, his arm swollen and screaming, but he ignored it and caught North's heavy, slack body, folding down over him on the shattered stone.
He was warm. His chest still rose and fell.
His heart still beat under Fly's palm, steady and strong, but Than was gone.
The grief was a physical weight, crushing his chest, stealing his breath.
Fly held his head in his lap and he made the same sounds that had torn out of him only one other time, a raw, ragged thing that was half sob and half denial.
Fuck, Than! Why did you do that? What were you thinking? But Fly knew what Than was thinking, exactly what Fly would have been thinking if the roles were reversed. Save his brother. That was it.
Now he had to carry this in a head that never forgot a fucking thing, a heart that was full of a friendship that had grown into a foundation he wasn't sure he could do without.
"Goddamn you," he whispered to Than's frozen expression, his open, vacant brown eyes, his own gut sinking like a stone.
He wasn't sure who he was cursing. Maybe he'd never know.
He'd never seen death up close, and it ripped into him with cruel claws.
Those eyes, so like Bear's. How was he going to face Than’s brother?
His mom? Ayla and Grandfather Ray. Oh, God.
His throat tightened into a knot of dread, his jaw clenching. Shamrock and Bolt would be devastated.
He had to live with the fact that North had died for him. It should have been him lying there, his soul ripped out. But he was the Visionary, and he had to survive or all of it came apart. His resolve tightened. Just like Mei, Than's death would mean something. He would carry it to his dying day.
Their anchor was gone. The solid foundation under all of them, the man who always knew where they were, ripped out of the world in a single breath.
Fly reached through the bond on instinct, the way he'd reached a thousand times and always found North waiting.
This time he got the others. A wave of it slammed back into him.
Anger. Sorrow, and under both, hot and rising, the need for retribution.
Above them, Lechuza screamed.
She screamed the pain Fly couldn't, the howl trapped in his own chest with nowhere to go. She let it out for all of them.
She plummeted from the sky with the sound tearing out of her, the white owl falling like an avenging blade, all her grief turned to a single descending point.
She hit Severance where it stood, gloating over its work.
Her great, razor-sharp talons extended, sank into the vile assassin, and she screamed in short bursts against the contemptible lie he was.
Flash dropped in beside her a heartbeat later.
The eagle took one side, and the owl took the other.
The two halves of the union that Severance had tried so hard to break viciously tore the bond-breaker apart between them, and the pieces of it were nothing before they reached the ground.
Null was still there. Null was always going to be there, the patient absence, waiting to take what it could now that the wall was down.
Then all of them felt Twister change.
Fly felt it start before he saw it, felt it come down the thread like the temperature dropping.
The medic in him had reached for North's body the way he reached for every wound, and there was no wound to close, no pulse to chase, nothing to do for a man whose soul was already gone, and the helplessness of it broke something loose.
His feathers inked over from the chest outward, the place the grief had struck hardest, the pure white going to a deep, predatory black, and the whole team felt the warrior come up where the healer had been.
It was the grief of a man who'd held life in his hands his whole career and got there too late this time.
He opened his beak, a low, crushing and final lament, the whole weight of a life and a death inside it, and he drove it into Null.
He filled the void. Made it choke. Suffocated it with the abundance of what North had just done, the undeniable fact of a man who had spent his life for his brother.
Fly felt the killing-song pour through the bond and into the nothing, and he felt Null learn what an ending actually was.
It collapsed inward under the weight of North, and it was gone.
The same breath that killed Null reached down and closed over North's hollow body.
Fly felt the song change in his chest, the crushing finality gentling at the edge, and where North's soul had been torn out, Twister sealed the opening, sealed it against anything that would prey on an empty shell.
A desperate, loving act. A medic's last impossible intervention.
The body in Fly's arms went still in a different way, the breathing slowing, the warmth banking down to something held and waiting for Than to come back to it.
Twister had killed the void with one-half of his song and saved what was left of North with the other.
The black bled back to white, and by the time the swan sank to the cracked stone with nothing left in him to stand on, he was a man again.
The loose feathers made a mournful, swishing sound as the wind carried them off.
Twister doubled over, covered his face, and wept.