23. Gracie #2
It didn’t have a face. Just an impression of vastness, an eye too large to belong to anything that lived in a body. It was an ancient creature, moving and watching behind the thin membrane of reality Ivan’s ritual had stretched to its limit.
Kaevorak.
He wasn’t fully here, not yet. But he was close enough that I felt the weight of his attention settle over me like a physical thing, cold and assessing.
In that single suspended second, I understood. This wasn’t a ritual. It wasn’t a ceremony. This was the opening of a door that Ivan had spent a decade building wide enough for something primal and starving to finally step through.
“You see it now.” Ivan’s voice had gone strange, doubled, layered with something that wasn’t quite his own anymore. “Everything I’ve built. Everything he’s promised me.”
“I see it,” I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. “I see exactly what you are.”
Ivan’s smile didn’t falter this time. “Then you understand there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
“No.” I took a step closer, past the fear screaming at me to run. “I understand exactly what I have to do.”
Ivan Rivers had built a door out of stolen lives. He had dressed it up as a blessing, a gift to Nyxarra, when it had never been anything but a way to take and take to fuel Kaevorak’s insatiable hunger.
So I gave.
I ran the final steps and threw myself into the current of light.
Terror ripped through the bond a half-second later—Ravik, Thornar, Basir. All three of them at once, panic and understanding crashing into me as they felt what I’d just done. As they felt me disappear into something none of them could reach, a place none of them could follow.
Gracie!
The roar of my name echoed through the air and through the bond, raw and desperate. I couldn’t answer. The stream of light had already caught me.
It didn’t burn the way I expected. It felt like being pulled underwater by something with a current stronger than any ocean—cold at first, then unbearably hot, then neither, my body no longer certain which sensation was real.
Voices pressed in from every direction, thousands of fragments of fear, grief, and stolen hope tangled into a deafening pressure against the inside of my skull.
I understood, distantly, that I was inside the wound itself now. It wanted to absorb me, I could feel that, but…
I had something it had never accounted for.
Ravik’s steadiness, the way he’d looked past everything Ivan’s name was supposed to mean and had chosen me anyway, both the very first time we met and every day since. Insulating me in a level of unconditional love that I’d never experienced before.
Thornar’s warmth, impossible and unrelenting, wrapped me in a protectiveness fierce enough to burn anything that dared come near me.
Basir’s guilt turned into devotion, the darkness in him reshaped into something that surrounded me instead of consuming me, a shield built from every part of himself he used to hate.
And me. A girl who’d waited on the same altar once, waiting to die, and had clawed her way back here instead of hiding, choosing this time to fight.
In that second I reached—not with my hands—but with the bond. With the love I felt for my mates.
I pushed the bond outward, allowing it to merge with the current that had been built to carry stolen life up into Kaevorak. The threads of light, representing the essence of those below us—the bonds they formed, the love they felt—were now swirling with something else. Something from us.
I felt it reach the first thread, one single connection between two people in the crowd below. That thread should have carried more life in it. Instead it was being drained by Ivan, by Kaevorak.
I let the magic of the bond spread.
Because the threads were all connected to the same current, what happened to one happened to all of them, one after another, faster than I could track. Every thread that Kaevorak had been feeding from was suddenly filled with power and life from our connection.
A parent’s bond with a child, hollowed out for hours, filled back up.
The woman collapsed to her knees, sobbing, finally able to reach her child again.
A mated pair broke from their trance at the same instant, the thing holding them under overwhelmed by something stronger.
Every bond that reignited added its strength to the current.
The current continued to feed into Ivan, but instead of quenching his need for power, it was like drinking from a poisoned well.
That was what made him scream in agony.
Ivan’s body couldn’t hold what was surging through him now.
The fissures along his skin that had been leaking silver and crimson started pulling inward, the seams closing.
Above him, the shadow behind the moon thrashed, a primordial losing its grip on this world, being dragged back down into darkness.
Kaevorak’s vast, watching presence shuddered, the membrane of reality stretched thin around his half-formed shape rippling like something struck. I felt his fury even from here, a predator realizing too late that the meal it had been promised had turned to poison in its mouth.
Below me, the fight I’d left behind blurred into noise I could no longer separate into individual sounds. I reached through the bond for Ravik, for Thornar, for Basir, and found nothing. Tears burned in my eyes as the world spun with chaos, and I had no time to reach for them again.
Ivan’s body began to fail.
He was being crushed from the inside. His scream tangled with something deeper, something that didn’t belong to him at all, Kaevorak’s fury and Ivan’s agony merging into a single sound that shook the entire arena.
The structure that had allowed me to reach these heights, black glass and stone threaded with silver-veined light, shuddered under the weight of what was pouring back through it.
Cracks that had spread slowly and deliberately now tore wide open, stone crumbling to dust as the current grew larger and wider.
Ivan rose into the air.
The current pouring back through him had built up faster than his body could release it, and the pressure was lifting him—his body rigid, suspended in the air like something pinned in place.
The light seemed to pull backward, sucked inward, and beneath his skin, something darker writhed, screaming with a voice that wasn’t his own.
“NO.” The word tore out of him in a voice that shouldn’t have been able to exist, three registers grinding against each other at once. Ivan’s own fury was buried beneath something vaster, older, unable to process that it was losing. “This is MINE. I built this. I EARNED this.”
“You stole this,” I said. Still suspended in the current itself, my voice carried across the arena with the power of thousands of reawakened bonds, pushing my words further than my own lungs ever could. “Every thread of it. None of it was ever yours to keep.”
The moon’s crimson light flickered.
Above us, the shadow behind the moon thrashed once more. It was caught in the same current consuming Ivan, being dragged back through it right alongside him.
I felt the pressure of it against my skin. I felt it recoil as the conduit he had been using to open the door collapsed in on itself, taking everything it touched down with it.
All at once the light receded. The crimson bled backwards from the edges the same way it had bled in, the sky glowing silver once more.
Ivan’s body shrank, collapsing inward on himself.
The fissures met each other—crossing his chest, his throat, his face—sealing shut one by one as everything they’d been straining to contain finally found nowhere left to go.
For one final moment, he folded smaller and smaller like the space he occupied was being erased rather than destroyed.
It was something far more devastating than an explosion—it was a single point of light collapsing in on itself until there was nothing left.
Then Ivan Rivers was gone.
No body.
No proof he had ever existed at all.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard. Then, whatever had been holding me suspended let go.
I fell.
I didn’t fight it. I didn’t have anything left to fight it with. The ground rushed up—or maybe I rushed down to meet it—and somewhere in that falling, my bond glowed warmly in my chest.
It was over.