23. Gracie
Gracie
Basir hit the stone, and for one long, terrible second, he didn’t move at all.
Agony tore through the bond so violently I nearly went to my knees. My mate. Broken on the ground because he’d thrown himself in front of a blow meant for me.
“Basir!” I lunged toward him in panic, Thornar’s arm snapping around me to hold me in place.
Basir forced himself up onto one arm. “I’m fine, glow,” he ground out. The sight of blood soaking dark through his shirt tore a terrified, panicked sound from my throat anyway. He got his feet under him slowly, breath ragged, one hand braced against his ribs.
But he stood. He stood, and his eyes found mine, fury and strength emitting from him despite the pain still radiating through our bond.
There was no time to say anything else. Ivan’s soldiers, who’d been holding position at the edges of the ritual circle, surged forward, closing in from every direction.
Ravik was already at Basir’s side, steadying him with a hand on his shoulder. “Thornar—”
“On it.” Thornar was already moving from my side and shifting, white fur exploding outward as he positioned himself between us and the tide, a deep snarl tearing loose from his throat.
The walls of the fight were closing in around us, and for one terrible second I didn’t know if there was going to be a way through it at all.
Then the sky itself shifted, darkening.
I looked up in time to see them: dragons, three of them, banking low over the arena. From their backs, soldiers dropped in controlled, practiced falls, hitting the ground ready to fight. Nightstar and Stark Flight reinforcements—thank The Eight.
Past the dragons, past the chaos of the drop, my gaze caught on the moon itself.
The altar stood exactly where it always had, exactly where I’d once been laid out to die.
Above it the moon hung heavy and swollen, deep red bleeding down from its edges like the sky itself had been wounded.
Between them, stretched taut from the moon’s surface down to the altar below, ran a single unbroken thread of light, thick as a rope, pulsing with the same rhythm as a heartbeat.
A conduit. That’s what it was. A direct line carrying the moon’s power straight down into the altar—into Ivan, who stood in proximity to it—feeding whatever Kaevorak was building through him.
The thread flared dramatically, and a pulse of power rolled outward from the altar in a single, silent exhale that washed over the crowd. People crumpled where they stood, and pale, glowing strands reached from their chests and streamed upward, joining the conduit. Feeding it, making it stronger.
It was a machine, and the thread connecting the moon to the altar was the thing keeping it running. If I could reach the altar and break that connection, I could stop this. I was sure of it.
I ran.
Behind me, gunfire cracked and Thornar’s primal growl tore through the noise. My stomach lurched, but I didn’t look back. I couldn’t.
A soldier broke from the chaos to my left, rifle swinging toward me. I dropped low and hit the ground rolling, before staggering forward, moving out of his line of sight.
I didn’t want to fight him. I just needed him to not be in my way.
Another came at me from the front, and I didn’t slow down to consider him either. I dodged past, close enough to feel the wind of his swing miss my shoulder, and kept running. The altar grew larger with every stride, every part of me narrowing down to that single unbroken thread of light.
The ground beneath it groaned.
It started as a sound too low to be the stone; something closer to the noise a mountain might make if it ever decided to move.
The altar began to split, cracks spreading from the rope of light, racing outward in jagged, spiderwebbing lines.
They pulsed faster than I could track, electrifying the air around them.
I kept running.
At the base of the altar, the cracks widened drastically, and through them came black smoke, bleeding up from somewhere deep beneath the arena floor.
The ground moved like it had a pulse, stone peeling away like bark stripped from a tree, revealing what had been hidden beneath Ivan’s construction this entire time.
Black stone and glass, fused as one and rising from molten green liquid, jutted out of the ground. Veins of shimmering silver ran through them, pulsing in time with the moon’s own heartbeat.
Symbols were carved into every surface of the structures, in no language I recognized, and yet something in me understood them anyway. This was old magic—hungry, dark magic—and my wolf howled in warning.
I kept running.
The altar rose, the connection from the base to the structure now above ground, stone and black glass twisting together into spires that ascended into the bleeding red sky.
The ground around it continued to buckle and split, chunks of earth tilting as the entire arena bowed toward the structure at its center.
There was no clean path to the top anymore.
I climbed anyway, hands finding purchase on ridges of fused stone still burning from whatever fire had forged it. My boots slipped against silver-veined rock slick with the same molten green ichor still weeping from the cracks below.
A soldier spotted me halfway up, climbing after me and screaming something I couldn’t make out over the roar of the altar’s quest for the sky. On pure survival instinct, I kicked out hard enough to send the man tumbling back down the incline without breaking my own momentum.
I risked one look back.
Ivan stood at the base of the structure, arms raised, his ruined face tilted up to the moon like he was conducting the whole horrific symphony himself.
He wasn’t watching me climb. He was feeding and growing larger, fissures of silver and crimson light pulsing brighter with every second that passed.
I kept climbing.
The bond screamed with every step. I felt Basir take a hit that stole the breath from my own lungs. I felt Ravik’s fury as he tore through whatever had caused it. Thornar was somewhere below and behind me, and what I felt from him was worse than either.
He’d been closing in on Ivan. I could feel his pure intent driving him forward from the second I broke away toward the altar.
But something had stopped him. I could feel threads of stolen light tear loose from the crowd, wrapping around him in thick, writhing vines, as if the ritual meant to claim him too.
My panic and his fury tangled in our bond, so sharp that it nearly knocked me from my perch.
I kept climbing.
Every second I spent watching them fight was a second the moon’s next pulse bloomed out, growing in intensity. I understood with brutal clarity that the only way to actually help any of them was to reach the top of this monstrous, growing thing before we couldn’t stop it.
The structure shuddered beneath me, groaning like it resented my weight. Like it knew exactly what I intended to do once I reached the summit and was trying, with every crack and shift, to throw me back down before I could.
It didn’t succeed.
I hauled myself over the final ridge, breathless and bleeding. My hands were raw against the fused black stone, and I found myself standing at the altar for the second time in my life.
This time, I wasn’t here to die.
Ivan turned the moment I crested the ridge, and I felt the shift in the wind before I fully understood why.
He was massive now, nothing like the man who’d stood at the base of the altar only minutes ago.
His frame stretched in an impossibly wrong way, easily twice the height he should have been, shoulders broad enough to blot out a portion of the bleeding sky behind him.
The fissures of light along his skin had widened into gaping seams, silver and crimson pouring out of him like he could no longer contain the power he was consuming.
His ruined face split into something that wanted to be a smile, though even that had changed—mouth stretched too wide, too many teeth catching the moon’s red light.
He raised a hand toward me almost lazily, like he was swatting away an insect. Even that small gesture displaced the air around us, creating a gust of wind strong enough to nearly knock me off balance before he’d even attacked.
Then the real force hit.
It wasn’t wind. It was pure violence distilled into a single point of force, and it slammed into my chest hard enough to throw me clean off my feet.
I didn’t hit the ground.
Something caught me, a pulse of energy that smelled like earth and starlight.
Something impossibly old, pushing back against Ivan’s power with a force that wasn’t mine alone.
My bond flared white-hot in my chest, and Ivan’s blast shattered against it, scattering into harmless sparks that rained down around me as I regained my balance.
Ivan’s smile faltered.
I kept moving forward, closing the distance between myself and the conduit, the single thread of light I still needed to reach.
My bond began to burn brighter than it ever had, and through it I could see the full architecture of the altar: a living network of theft with threads of pale, stolen light running from every single person in the crowd below.
Thousands of individual strands woven together into a single massive current that poured through the ground, up through Ivan’s cracked and glowing body, and up further still, into the thick, pulsing conduit connecting the altar to the moon. It was beautiful and horrifying.
The world split open.
As I watched, the stone and glass around that current began to crack and fall away, piece by piece, unable to contain what it had only ever been built to channel.
There was no altar left at all. Just light.
A single, blinding sphere of gold and white light, hovering where the sacrificial slab had once stood, pulsing in time with the moon.
The disrupted land underneath me trembled, nearly tossing me back toward the ground.
And behind the moon—behind the crimson light—something grew.