Chapter 27 Gracie
Gracie
“Lux mea, do you know her?” Ravik’s voice jolted me out of the hold Tashmin had on my attention. I could feel my mates bristling at her intense focus trained on me.
“No. Yes,” Tashmin answered for me, stepping fully into the room.“I know of her. I’ve heard her name whispered in bones. Many of The Eight speak through them.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about many of The Eight talking about me.
“Join us, Gracie.” She looked up. “I promise I won’t harm you or your mates. My power, siphoned from Yvelis, is not unlike Nyxarra’s flavor of power.” She was trying to comfort me, but it wasn’t entirely working.
“We will give you room.” Bishu stood, and Alpha Waylon joined her. Their priestess offered a nod of thanks as the two rulers made themselves comfortable in a nearby sitting area.
I moved toward the table, not loving the idea of Tashmin near my mates without me close. My wolf pressed against my chest, and I held back a growl that threatened to break out. I needed to take a breath. This woman didn’t mean us harm. Probably.
Slowly, settling into her seat, Tashmin looked toward Waylon and Bishu. “I am to understand that you want a reading to give assurance that the threat is real and not just on a mortal level?”
“Yes,” Waylon responded.
“I can tell you that it is, but this should allow me to see the scale,” Tashmin said, confirming my suspicions. She returned her gaze to me. “It will probably tell me much more than that. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Little flame, is this—”
I reached over and gave Thornar’s hand a squeeze. I caught the look passing between my mates, the calculation in weighing whether one of them should stay outside the vision to guard the rest of our group.
“Together,” I said, before any of them could offer it. My instincts were telling me that it was essential we did this together.
“If there is anyone we can trust,” I added quietly, “it’s those with a close connection to The Eight.”
Tashmin seemed to approve of my words and instructed the four of us to sit next to one another, hands flat on the table.
I watched as she put out black candles one by one, pulling them from a bag at her feet. Between the candles she laid out bones, small and delicate, covered in runes.
The air shifted with anticipation, and I realized this was the first time my mates would be purposefully stepping into the divine with me.
“As I light each candle, you’ll feel a pull of power. I encourage you to close your eyes and follow it.”
I sat at the end of the line and watched anxiously as she lit each one.
A deep hum came from her throat and her lips moved fast at the same time, sending an odd vibration through the air.
The pull of power was intense, and I felt my mates’ unease and apprehension melt into something closer to awe.
When she got to me, I let my eyes fall shut, giving into the instinct to trust Waylon and Bishu and their priestess alongside them.
This time, rather than falling into darkness, a door opened in front of me.
I inhaled, bolstering myself, and stepped through it into a crypt.
Four stories high, stone tombs covered the walls horizontally on each side, the walls embedded with bone.
My mates stood waiting for me, the silent tension between us making me worry they felt as overwhelmed as I had the first time.
“They can’t speak or move here.” Panic rose within me as Nyxarra’s voice brought forth her image, a shadow shifting into female form. “Not until we let them.”
“You don’t want them to talk?” I frowned, stepping protectively in front of my mates. I looked back to see they were, in fact, frozen.
I hated it.
Nyxarra eyed them before lowering her voice. “What I want isn’t important. I’m not running this show.” The venom at the end of that made my heart ache for her. More so, I could feel her magic being drained, her signature growing weaker each time we came across one another.
“I’m trying to fix this.” It was a promise she hadn’t expected. Her eyes closed, and I watched a single tear slip down her face before she disappeared in a wall of shadows that collapsed around her.
With what sounded like a crack of thunder, the air split open and Vaelithra dropped from above in a crouch, making the ground shake.
This time she arrived in a less intimidating form, joined by three ghostly wolves prowling the crypt behind her.
But it didn’t stop me from moving back to protect my mates better.
Her gaze met mine first, a smile crossing her face before she looked at my mates.
“You heard my call,” she said approvingly.
“I’m actually getting a reading from a high priestess, and when she opened the channel we dropped in here. So yes? Sort of.”
Her laugh was genuine as she looked around the crypt. “Yvelis, by the look of it. That’s wonderful. He’s…interesting.” Her presence was more relaxed this time, as though she felt we were on her time rather than borrowed.
“Oh, how could I forget.” She snapped her fingers, and suddenly my mates were vocal. Thornar groaned, shaking himself out, and Basir appeared at my side, an arm wrapping around me possessively. Ravik moved to stand next to me, angling slightly in front of my body.
“So these are the mates at your side.” Her gaze moved over them critically. “I’m beginning to understand Nyxarra’s confidence.”
I knew she was seeing their outward strength, and I felt a familiar prick of insecurity—of not being enough despite being chosen by gods. It didn’t make complete sense, but the feeling was there, building inside of me.
“What you were saying to Gracie before, about the bond scar,” Ravik prompted, not wasting a moment. “We need to know how to use it to defeat Ivan.”
Vaelithra snapped her fingers and one of the wolves prowling the crypt came to lay at her side.
She settled onto the floor next to it, and I moved to join her without being asked, somehow knowing that was what she would expect.
Once we had done that, the two remaining wolves positioned themselves around our circle, and I felt her power spark and move through the air like a phantom wind.
“We must speak quietly,” she said. “We are shielded here for now.”
After a prolonged moment of silence, she continued. “The bond scar doesn’t defeat Ivan—that is a mortal job. The bond scar is a living counter-ritual to what Ivan is trying to enact.”
My mates and I leaned forward, reaching for every piece of information we could.
Her voice stayed hushed and serious. “Ivan’s ritual severs and consumes the natural bond that each of my creations—my shifters—has to this earth.
It pulls from that connection and feeds Kaevorak through destruction and desecration. It erases any sense of shared growth.”
Was that why the Cold Moon Pack had been so bare? So desolate?
“The god scar is the rarest of bonds, especially when shared by multiples. Its very essence opposes what Ivan is trying to do—think of it as an antidote to a poison, rather than a weapon.”
“How can our bond of four compare to his ritual of thousands, though?” Basir asked.
“I hope you reach him before the ritual starts, but if not, not all hope is lost,” she said candidly.
“The bond, in all its forms, was one of my many gifts to shifters. It predates anything Ivan can possibly comprehend. When you pull on your bond, it will stir others—those with pack bonds, family bonds, or mating bonds—and they will fuel you further.”
“So the presence of so many will actually help us,” Thornar said, his voice tinged with something close to relief.
“Ivan is pushing against forces he doesn’t understand,” she answered. “I’ve stood by before, watching Kaevorak make mistakes, but what he plans to do if freed is not something we can risk. Even if it means sacrificing my own chance at freedom.”
Hadn’t we wondered exactly that? What she had to gain?
“You do this for the greater good?” Ravik asked, his skepticism barely veiled.
“I do this for the greater future,” she countered. “I hope that Nyxarra and the others can aid in my freedom once Ivan is dealt with, but I can’t allow that to cloud what we must do now.”
I took a slow breath, sitting with her words. The way she was putting it gave me real hope that we weren’t as far from a solution as we’d feared.
“So how do we use the bond when the time comes?” I asked.
“That requires a bit more…nuance. You first need to ensure it’s fully formed.
” Her gaze moved over the four of us and lingered on me.
“You need to be marked by each other. After that, it’s not as clear.
Bond magic manifests in ways even I can’t always predict.
” She paused, smiling. “Much like your wolf.”
“My wolf?”
“Didn’t you notice the change?” she mused. “That was all Nyxarra’s influence.”
Something about that made me sit straighter with pride—that the change in my wolf was truly a divine representation of my bond with a god. Our bond, actually.
Suddenly, a plume of smoke that smelled of ash and debris filled the crypt, faint but unmistakable, and the sensation of eyes on us began to make my skin crawl. Her wolves tensed before moving toward her and merging into her. Vaelithra went quiet.
“He searches for us.” Her words made my stomach clench, and each of my mates shifted into more defensive positions. Ravik’s hand tightened around mine, ready to move if needed.
“We must go.” Nyxarra’s voice drifted through the air, soft and distant.
Vaelithra rose, and we joined her. When she spoke again it was in a more guarded tone. “This won’t be the last time we speak. For now we must stop here, but remember what I said.”
The bond scar is a counter-ritual. But the bond itself needs to be fully formed.
We didn’t get a chance to say goodbye before the room faded at the edges and gave way to darkness. Something heavy and uncomfortable settled over me. After what felt like an eternity, or maybe just a few seconds, my eyes opened to find Tashmin staring at us with wide surprise.
Blood tracked from both her eyes in thin red lines down her hollow cheeks.
Not only her though. Waylon and Bishu looked equally shaken.
And when I looked at my mates, Thornar was looking over a split in the wood of the table where he’d white knuckled it so hard it had broken.
Ravik’s right ear was bleeding as he stared at me with worry, his hand moving to wipe away crimson from under my nose.
Basir was already standing, shifting and pacing, trying to shake the way his control had been ripped away from him.
“How?” My question was soft but pointed to Waylon and Bishu. I could feel that they had seen and experienced everything. Tashmin stepped back for a moment to collect herself as Bishu and Waylon joined us at the table.
“We have a connection to Tashmin—we can see many of her visions. Her entire family line has been connected to ours,” Bishu explained.
“And that was a particularly vivid one,” Waylon added.
Ravik spoke up, giving me a moment to breathe. “Do you see how important this is now? Do you understand what we’re dealing with?”
When the two leaders looked at one another, I could see it—the calculation of how much devastation this could cause. Tashmin looked between them and spoke plainly.
“If Ivan completes that ritual, we will all die.”
Her words hit hard. Bishu closed her eyes and Waylon’s jaw tightened, his expression less disagreement than barely contained anger.
“We have interacted with The Eight,” Waylon said. “But never have we dealt with the two unnamed, or spoken with any of them so openly. The bond you have, while I don’t fully understand it, is the clear answer to all of this.”
“We can try to explain the bond if that would help,” I offered.
Bishu shook her head. “By allowing us to do the reading, even allowing us to witness the vision—which you unintentionally gave us permission to do—you earned our trust. We understand the stakes.”
My eyes widened. “Does that mean we can count on your help?”
Waylon leaned forward, placing his hands on the table, and spoke in a reverent tone. “Knowing that The Eight have called you, placed their trust in you to face a far larger evil than Ivan Rivers, is more compelling than any strategic argument you could have made.
“You have our unconditional support.”