Chapter 22 #3
He threw his head back, screaming at the canopy, his brilliant brain spinning its wheels in the mud. "What am I missing? What am I missing?"
Flash couldn't answer him. He could barely breathe around the ghost of the wound in his side.
The modern warrior in him wanted to compartmentalize, but the soul of Francisco was still suffocating under a centuries-old tragedy.
They had dug up the worst night of their lives, bared their bleeding souls, and it still wasn't enough.
The sheer magnitude of the psychic trauma was venom, rapidly shutting down their nervous systems. A cold, heavy paralysis froze him in place and meant days, if not weeks, of recovery.
Recovery they didn't have time for. The apocalypse wasn't going to pause for them to heal. North’s body was dying, and they had maybe days left to retrieve his soul from the Veil.
"Get it together," Tex’s voice rasped from somewhere in the shadows, but the command was hollow, a dying echo. Tex didn't move. Like the rest of them, the team leader was pinned to the earth by the catastrophic backwash of the savage trauma.
Then, the air in the glade vibrated. A low, resonant hum rippled through the damp grass, lifting the suffocating weight off Flash’s chest just enough for him to turn his head.
Twister was standing.
He was human, his combat boots planted firmly in the mud, but the veil between worlds was tearing open around him.
A luminous, ethereal imprint of a massive swan ghosted over his physical frame, wings of pure, blinding white light unfurling from his broad shoulders, an elegant, arched neck cast in silver luminescence overlapping his own throat.
Twister closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let out a sound that shattered the gloom of the glade, a crystalline, melodic cry that pierced directly into their minds and bodies. The sound called across the glade, carrying a strange, intoxicating warmth.
Flash’s eyes widened as his eagle senses mapped the source of the magic.
Twister’s swan frequency was acting as a magnet, reaching deep into the soil of the glade and pulling up the latent, residual energy trapped there.
It was the raw, explosive power Lechuza and Flash had left behind when they had previously consummated their bodies and their souls in this very spot, a fragmentation of pure life force and eternal bond that had saturated the earth.
Twister’s song channeled that wild, bonding energy and refined it into a localized wave of absolute restoration.
The melody washed over Flash like a warm, rushing river.
The moment the frequency struck his skin, the mystical agony in his ribs dissolved into nothing.
The leaden paralysis in his muscles melted.
Beside him, Lechuza stopped sobbing, her chest rising and falling as the venerable grief was gently cradled and quieted by the swan's melody.
Across the clearing, Easy and Tex pushed themselves upright, their eyes clearing, their exhaustion completely wiped clean as their central nervous systems were forcefully recalibrated by the latent power of the bond.
The song faded into a soft, ringing silence.
The ethereal white feathers overlapping Twister's body dissolved back into the dark night air.
He stood there, breathing heavily, but his eyes were sharp.
They were all whole again. They were fully healed, their bodies humming with a vibrant, restless energy.
Yet, as Flash looked back at the font, the stone remained stubbornly solid. The physical magic had restored their bodies, but it hadn't solved the puzzle.
Tex stood up, his spine straight, his commanding aura instantly snapping back into place thanks to Twister's intervention.
His eyes swept over the fully revived team before locking onto Fly, who was staring at his own hands in absolute shock, his brain suddenly flooded with oxygen and a terrifying new clarity.
Tex didn't waste a second. "Now what, Fly?"
“I haven’t got a fucking clue. But I’m not giving up.”
Everything was secondary to the way he was processing the events of what happened, not only at this present font but at the one where, as Cisco, he had died by her hand.
He had no animosity toward her, no blame, no grudge.
All that came to him were the words he’d said to her as he was dying.
Those were the same words he’d said to her back in Herrera’s compound when he was losing blood.
The old wound had been resurrected then, and what he thought he’d learned from the jungle had been Cisco’s knowledge of the Quechua he’d learned so he could tell Quri how he felt about her.
Maybe he’d been riding like hell to that glade to get those words out before they both lost everything and went to black.
He scrambled toward her, wrapped his arms around her, and dragged her to him. “I learned your language,” he whispered. “I had to tell you. I was riding to tell you. We were doomed…both of us weren’t going to survive the night. I died loving you, and that is all that matters to me.”