Chapter 22 #2
“What if what we’re seeing isn’t real?” I pressed on, looking around more carefully now.
The tree creatures were too still. Too perfect.
Too much like a nightmare given form. The more I looked at them, the more wrong they seemed.
Like a painting of trees made by someone who had only heard trees described to them.
“What if this is all a distraction? An illusion designed to make us attack so something can absorb our magic? What if they’re a lure? ”
Fizzle went very, very still. His feathers flattened against his body, and I saw something shift in his eyes. Recognition. Understanding. And beneath both of those things, fear.
“A jin,” he breathed. “Gods and monsters, it’s a jin.”
I blinked. “Like... a genie? In a bottle?”
Fizzle’s beak snapped at me, and I flinched back.
“No, you idiot. Like a creature that lures you into a living nightmare and then sucks your insides out while you’re trapped in your own fear.
A jin. They’re rare, ancient, supposedly extinct.
The last recorded sighting was three hundred years ago in the depths of the Autumn Court, and that one was barely a juvenile.
” His feathers ruffled with agitation. “If there’s a full-grown jin in this forest, we’re in even more trouble than I thought. ”
“Well, I’d like to RSVP no to that party,” I muttered, trying to mask my sudden, genuine terror with humor.
Fizzle glared at me with eyes that promised violence if I didn’t shut up, and I forced my lips closed.
Now was not the time for jokes. Now was not the time for the deflection I used to hide how scared I really was.
Now was the time to think. To plan. To figure out how the hell we were going to survive this.
“How do we find it?” Maddox asked, his fire still flickering around his arms. “There must be something that gives it away. If it needs to absorb our magic, it has to be close, right?”
Fizzle’s eyes darted around, scanning the ground, the trees, the sky above us. “It should be tethered to the illusion somehow. Connected to what it’s creating. If we can find the anchor point, we can find the jin.”
“How close would it need to be?” I asked.
“Not far. It would need to be able to see us. The illusion takes tremendous energy to maintain, and the jin needs to be close enough to feed on the magic we expend fighting it.”
“And the others? How far are they from us?”
Fizzle concentrated for a moment, his ancient eyes going distant. “They must be at a distance. I can feel a faint glimmer of Dean and Alyssa’s magic, but it’s far. If they were closer, the jin would have drawn them into the illusion as well. It can only maintain so much at once.”
Good. That meant Dean and Alyssa were outside this nightmare. Fighting their own battles, but not trapped in this particular hell. That meant if we could break free, if we could destroy the jin, we could find them again.
I pulled on my magic.
The electricity answered immediately, eager and fierce.
I drew it in from the air around me, from the static charge that built between the fog and the forest floor, from the storm that was always waiting just beneath the surface of my consciousness.
More and more, until I could feel the pressure building around me, until my hair stood on end and sparks crackled between my fingers.
“What are you doing?” Fizzle demanded.
“If this jin wants magic,” I said, feeling a grim smile spread across my face, “then I’m going to rain it down on him. With pain and fire.”
Maddox grinned, his flames burning brighter. “I like that idea.”
Fizzle looked between us, and then something shifted in his expression. The fear was still there, but it was joined by something else now. Something that might have been pride.
“I’d forgotten what it was like to be young,” he said softly. “This is what Nymeria needs. New blood. New ideas. And just enough carelessness to hopefully get away with it.”
I grinned at him. “Is that permission?”
“That’s a prayer,” he replied. “Now do it before I come to my senses and stop you.”
I let the lightning loose.
It crashed down around us in brilliant, blinding bolts.
Not aimed at the tree creatures, that would have been a waste of energy, feeding magic directly to the jin.
Instead, I sent it into the spaces between them.
Into the fog. Into the ground and the air and every gap in the illusion that I could find.
The lightning didn’t just strike and fade. It wrapped around the creatures, arcing from trunk to trunk, creating a living lattice of electricity that spread outward in every direction. The fog lit up like day, shadows thrown in stark relief, every detail of the forest suddenly visible.
And that’s when I saw it.
A void. A dark shadow where the lightning seemed to disappear entirely. Not reflect, not arc around, just... vanish. Like there was a hole in reality itself, a place where light and energy went to die.
“There!” I shouted.
Maddox was already moving. In one smooth motion, he ripped his sword from its sheath and threw it. The blade spun through the air, end over end, and buried itself deep in the center of that darkness.
A shriek filled the air. High and terrible and nothing like any sound a living creature should make. The void writhed, the darkness convulsing around the blade that impaled it.
“Now!” Fizzle screamed.
Maddox sent his magic into the sword, fire racing down the blade and exploding outward in a burst of orange and gold. At the same moment, I hit the void with the biggest bolt of lightning I could summon, pouring every ounce of power I had left into a single, devastating strike.
The shriek cut off abruptly.
The fog fell. It didn’t dissipate slowly or drift away on the wind. It just... fell. Like a curtain dropping at the end of a play, revealing the stage behind it.
The tree creatures were gone. The illusion shattered, leaving nothing but the normal forest around us. And when I turned, gasping for breath, my magic depleted and my muscles aching with exhaustion, I saw what our pack had wrought.
Bodies. Dozens of them. Fae hounds and anastids scattered across the forest floor. Blood and ichor soaked into the earth. Trees frozen solid, their branches encased in ice that glittered in the strange twilight. Scorch marks where fire had torn through flesh. Wooden spears embedded in carcasses.
And in the middle of it all, standing back to back, Alyssa and Damon.
Covered in blood that wasn’t their own, weapons raised, magic still crackling around them like a living shield.
There was something different about them, something that hadn’t been there before.
A connection. A bond. Even from this distance, I could feel it through my own tie to Alyssa.
She and Damon were linked now. Truly linked. The fifth bond had formed.
They’d done this. While we were trapped in an illusion, fighting shadows, they’d been tearing apart an army. Together. As partners. As mates.
“Holy shit,” Maddox breathed beside me, his voice filled with awe.
Tank emerged from the trees to our left, limping slightly but alive.
His clothes were torn, and there was blood on his face that might have been his own, but his eyes were sharp and aware.
He found us first, then tracked to Alyssa and Damon, and I saw the relief flood through him.
The tension in his shoulders eased slightly, even as his gaze catalogued our injuries, assessed our conditions, began planning what came next.
Dean was further away, standing alone in a circle of frozen corpses.
Ice radiated out from where he stood, coating the trees, the ground and the bodies of the anastids he’d killed.
There was something different about him, something darker in the way he held himself.
He was looking down at his hands with an expression I couldn’t read from this distance.
But he was alive. That was what mattered.
We could deal with whatever had happened to him later.
Fizzle landed on a branch nearby, his feathers ruffled but his eyes bright with something that might have been satisfaction. “Well,” he said, “that could have gone worse.”
“That’s your idea of congratulations?” I asked.
“I’ve never been very good at that.” He ruffled his feathers, adjusting them back into place. “I’m better at telling people what they’re doing wrong. Which, in your case, was nothing. You figured out the jin. You found a way to kill it. You survived.”
“We all survived,” Maddox added, his voice rough. “Somehow.”
“Not somehow.” Fizzle’s eyes found mine, and there was approval in them. Actual approval, which was strange enough coming from him that I almost didn’t recognize it. “You used your heads. You worked together. You didn’t panic.”
I wanted to point out that I had definitely panicked, at least a little, but I kept my mouth shut.
We’d survived. All of us. Against impossible odds, against creatures that shouldn’t exist, against the full fury of the Wildling Forest.
“We might actually be able to do this,” I whispered, looking at the carnage around us, at my pack scattered but whole, at the woman I loved standing in the middle of it all like a queen of destruction.
And for the first time since we’d entered this forest, I actually believed it.