Chapter Forty-Two
The first shadow beasts hit their shields like they wanted to break the world in half.
The impact shuddered through my arms and into my chest, rattling my teeth, and the air snapped with cold as the creature’s wings beat against the barrier. Its claws scraped along the magic like nails on glass, throwing sparks of pale light that fell and fizzled before they touched the ground.
Behind it, the valley erupted.
Orcs shouted in their rough, booming language, voices colliding and overlapping as they scrambled into a defensive line.
Mondo boar squealed and stamped, dragging crates sideways and nearly knocking into one another. Weapons came up, axes the size of small trees, blades dull with use but heavy with purpose, and the entire mass moved like a storm deciding where to land.
“Don’t strike first!” I called, but my voice barely carried over the noise.
Keegan was already with me. His hands were half raised as if he was physically holding himself back from shifting. I could feel the restraint in him, the way he was choosing control even though every instinct screamed for the opposite.
Caleb’s shifters moved along our flanks, not charging or provoking, but forming a living wall between us and the orcs, ready to absorb the first misunderstanding.
The vampires flowed into motion behind them, too fast to track fully, their coats and hair stirring in the wind that wasn’t wind, their eyes catching what little light remained.
Nova lifted her staff and traced a symbol in the air.
A ring of shimmering light spun outward around us, thin and precise, like a boundary drawn with certainty.
The shadow beast screeched again and recoiled, not wounded but frustrated, as if it hadn’t expected resistance that didn’t smell like aggression.
Then another creature dropped from the sky.
And another.
They came in a jagged wave, some diving toward the orcs to force their hands, others arcing wide to circle behind us. Every move felt calculated to create the same story from every angle: witches and vampires and shifters showing up at the exact moment danger fell from the sky.
The Priestess didn’t need the orcs to understand our language.
She only needed them to understand the threat.
The ground beneath my feet trembled again, but this time it wasn’t from marching.
It was the Hollows waking.
A low groan rolled through the valley, deep enough that my bones shook, and the air temperature dropped so suddenly my breath came out in a sharp white cloud. At the far edge of the valley, beyond where the orc line had halted, the earth cracked open with a sound like splitting stone.
Ice rose toward the sky.
It wasn’t in a gentle drift or a slow creep, but in jagged walls thrusting upward, translucent blue-white slabs that climbed toward the sky as if the land were throwing up barricades.
They didn’t form a neat perimeter. They stabbed up in uneven bursts, cutting off paths, redirecting movement, forcing both orcs and shadows into tighter, more frantic collisions.
The Northern Luminary had been cold. The Glacial Hollows were something else entirely. They knew how to protect their sacred grounds.
“What is that?” Stella snapped, her voice sharp with disbelief as she dodged a falling spray of frost that burst from a crack in the ground.
“The threshold,” Nova answered tightly. “We’re too close. It’s reacting.”
“To what?” I demanded, but the answer was already thrumming against my skin.
To power. To conflict. To masses moving with intent.
A mondo boar bellowed and reared as an ice wall surged up right in front of it, forcing it to skid sideways.
An orc stumbled, caught between boar and wall, then recovered with a furious roar, swinging his club at the ice as if he could beat the Hollows into submission.
The blow rang out like a bell, and the ice didn’t crack. It sang.
The sound made my birthmark flare so hot I nearly lost my breath. My grandmother liked what she saw.
I staggered a step, pressing my hand to my hip, and in that instant, one of the shadow creatures took its chance. It dove low, not at me, but at the edge of our formation, clawing at the ground and flinging a spray of dark residue across the grass.
The residue didn’t burn. It didn’t smoke.
It looked like spilled ink, and wherever it touched, the grass darkened as if bruised.
The orcs saw it.
A shout went up from their line, and heads turned sharply toward us. Their eyes locked onto the stain, onto our cluster, onto me standing at the front with my hands glowing.
They didn’t see the shadow creature deposit it.
They saw the darkness appear on the ground while we stood there with magic.
“Maeve,” Keegan warned, voice low.
“I know,” I whispered.
The orcs began to advance, not rushing, but moving with that heavy inevitability of bodies built for battle. The ones in the front were taller than the rest, their armor layered and scarred, their expressions hard. Their focus was no longer on the shadow beasts. It was on us.
On me.
The shadows had done their job.
My panic tried to rise again, but I forced it down, the way I’d learned to do since Stonewick cracked open and my life poured into magic. Panic was wasted energy. Anxiety led to bad choices. I didn’t have room for either.
I needed a choice that told the truth faster than words could.
“Nova,” I said, keeping my eyes on the orcs, “can you show them?”
Nova didn’t ask what I meant. She flicked her wrist and drove the tip of her staff into the ground.
A wave of light rippled outward, low and wide, like sunlight sliding across water. It rolled over the ink-stain, over our boots, over the patch where the shadow creature had landed. For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
But after a few beats of time, the light caught.
It outlined the shadow residue not as my magic, not as Keegan’s, not as vampire or shifter, something else entirely.
The stain lifted into the air in shimmering strands, and for one bright moment, it revealed the shape of the creature’s claws, the direction of its movement, the smear of intent left behind.
A few of the orcs in front slowed, their brows furrowing, their nostrils flaring as if they could smell the difference.
But the shadows weren’t done.
Two beasts dove together, one aimed at our group, one aimed at the orc line, their screeches rising into the cold air as the Hollows answered with another groan. More ice surged upward at the valley’s edge, forcing the two sides closer again, making it harder to tell friend from enemy.
The battlefield became a tangle of shifting fronts.
Vampires moved like dark lightning, intercepting creatures mid-dive, forcing them away without tearing them apart.
Shifters held their ground, shoulders locked, refusing to charge even as orcs advanced.
Twobble shouted something about teamwork and not dying today, then yelped when Skonk hauled him off the bramblemule’s back before a shadow beast could swoop down and snatch him like a snack.
“I had a plan!” Twobble protested as Skonk dragged him behind a ridge of ice.
“I plan to keep you alive,” Skonk snapped.
A shadow beast clipped the edge of my shield again, and the force drove me back half a step. My arms burned from holding the barrier, and the Hollows’ cold pressed in hard enough that my fingertips began to numb.
The orcs were close now.
I could see the whites of their eyes. The frost was collecting in their lashes. The way their attention kept darting between the shadow beasts and my glowing hands.
One of their leaders, with broad, tusk-like teeth visible when he snarled, pointed directly at me and barked something that sounded like a demand.
He didn’t care about the explanation Nova had revealed.
He cared about timing.
He cared that we had arrived at the exact moment danger rained from the sky, and ice rose from the earth.
He knew that the world felt like it was closing in, and we stood in the middle of it with shadows, an illusion.
My birthmark burned again, a hot pulse of attention that felt like laughter without sound.
She wanted this.
She wanted the orcs’ fear aimed at me.
And as the Hollows shook and the ice walls climbed higher, hemming all of us in tighter, the orcs’ gaze fixed harder on our group, on our numbers, on our magic, on the vampires and shifters at my sides.
I realized we were seconds away from the moment when confusion turned into a single, irreversible decision.
Either they believed we were here to help or they decided we were the threat.
The first shadow struck an orc square in the shoulder, and the world tipped.
It didn’t claw or tear the way the others had. It simply fell—a slick, heavy drop of darkness that splashed across armor and skin like oil. The orc roared, stumbling back, swiping at himself as if something were crawling beneath his flesh. The shadow slid away from him and vanished into the ground.
Then another dropped.
And another.
They fell straight down from the air, no wings, no shrieks this time.
Just sudden impacts of dark magic slamming into bodies, weapons, and the frozen ground.
The orcs shouted in fury and confusion, their formation breaking as they turned inward, trying to understand where the attack was coming from.
From us.
I saw it in their eyes before they raised their weapons.
The timing was too perfect. The shadows fell while we stood glowing with magic. At the same time, vampires moved like living night. At the same time, shifters braced as if ready to charge. From the orcs’ perspective, it didn’t matter that the shadows didn’t feel like our magic.
It looked like it.
“No,” I breathed. “She’s pinning it on us.”
An orc bellowed and hurled his axe, not at the shadows, but toward our line. It struck an ice wall and shattered into fragments, but the message landed cleanly.
Accusation.
Fear twisted into rage with terrifying speed.
More shadows dropped, faster now, splattering across the orc ranks like black rain. One hit the ground and burst outward in a wave that knocked three orcs off their feet. Another latched onto a mondo boar’s flank, sending the massive creature into a panicked charge that nearly crushed its handlers.
“They think we’re doing this!” Keegan shouted over the chaos.
“I know!” My voice cracked, the heat at my hip flaring so hot it felt like my skin might split. I forced my hands higher, letting my shield expand, not outward in aggression, but upward—visible, undeniable. “Stop! This isn’t—”
A roar drowned me out.
The orcs surged forward, not in a full charge, but in a defensive rush meant to eliminate the perceived threat before it could strike again. Their eyes burned with certainty now. Certainty was easier than fear.
Shadows continued to fall, always just close enough to our group to frame us as the source.
The Hollows answered with another violent shudder, ice walls surging higher, sealing escape routes and forcing the battlefield inward. The space between us and the orcs shrank until I could see individual scars, clenched jaws, the whites of their eyes.
I locked my gaze on the orc leader at the front, raising my hands again, my voice tearing free of my chest.
“We are not your enemy!”
Another shadow dropped and struck the ground between us.
The orcs raised their weapons as one.