Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Alyssa
Iwas exhausted in a way I’d never felt before.
Every muscle ached. Every breath was an effort.
The magic that usually hummed beneath my skin felt thin and frayed, like a rope that had been pulled too tight for too long.
I’d poured so much of myself into the fight, into the destruction of the fae hounds, that there was almost nothing left.
But I was alive. We were all alive.
The fog had fallen, and for the first time in what felt like hours, I could see clearly.
The forest around us was a testament to violence.
Bodies scattered across the ground, blood soaking into the earth, frozen trees standing like monuments to Dean’s power.
It should have been horrifying. Maybe later it would be.
But right now, all I could feel was relief.
I looked around at my mates, checking each of them in turn, needing to see with my own eyes that they’d survived. Needing to confirm what the bonds were telling me, because after so long with those bonds muffled by the fog, I didn’t entirely trust them yet.
Dean stood apart from the group, his body coated in a thin layer of frost that was only now beginning to melt.
His eyes were distant, troubled, and he kept looking down at his hands like he didn’t recognize them.
Whatever had happened to him in the fog, whatever power he’d called upon to create that frozen wasteland, it had shaken him in ways I didn’t yet understand.
He’d dived deep into the Winter magic, and I could tell he was struggling to pull back from it. To remember who he was beneath the ice.
Tank was limping. He tried to hide it, adjusting his gait to minimize the unevenness, but I saw the pinch of pain around his eyes. The careful way he held himself, protecting his left side. He’d taken a hit somewhere in the fog, and he was hurt more than he was letting on.
Ryder and Maddox both looked drained but whole. Whatever they’d faced, they’d come through it together. Fizzle was perched on Ryder’s shoulder, his feathers ruffled but his eyes bright with something that might have been pride.
And Damon.
Damon was still at my side, the sword I’d given him hanging loosely in his grip. His face was spattered with blood that wasn’t his own, and there was a wildness in his eyes that hadn’t quite faded. But when he looked at me, when our gazes met, I saw him. The real him. Still there. Still in control.
I wanted to collapse into his arms. I wanted to collapse into all of their arms. But there was no time for that. Not yet.
Because behind us, looming against the strange twilight sky of the forest, was the Fifth Court.
Or what was left of it.
My heart dropped into my stomach as I took in the sight.
Ancient walls, crumbled and broken. Arches that had once soared toward the sky, now collapsed into piles of rubble.
Towers that had been reduced to stumps of shattered stone.
The entire structure looked like it had been ravaged by war, or time, or both.
Centuries of decay compressed into a single, devastating image.
It was in ruins. Completely, utterly destroyed.
We’d come all this way for nothing.
I felt Damon take my hand, his fingers threading through mine and squeezing gently. I looked at him, and I knew my devastation was written across my face.
“Things are never what they look like in Nymeria,” he said quietly. “You should know that by now. Have hope.”
It was hard to have hope looking at the skeleton of what should have been our salvation. But I squeezed his hand back, drawing strength from the contact, from the bond that was coming to life between us.
Fizzle made an impatient sound and launched himself from Ryder’s shoulder. “Finally,” he huffed as he flew toward the ruins.And without waiting for any of us, he disappeared through a ruined archway into what remained of the court.
We all exchanged glances. A silent moment of connection, of reassurance, of making sure we were all okay before we moved on to whatever came next.
Tank moved to my side, and I saw him wince at the motion. “Don’t worry about me,” he said before I could speak. “I’m fine. We need to keep moving.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to make him sit down and let me look at his injuries. But I could feel the exhaustion pulling at me too, and I knew he was right. We couldn’t stop here, exposed in the middle of a forest amongst the things that had just tried very hard to kill us.
Dean was still pulled back from the group, still looking at his hands with that troubled expression. The fact that he was holding himself back from me concerned me even more.
“We should follow Fizzle,” Maddox said. “If there’s anything left standing in there, we might be able to find a defensible position. Somewhere we can rest for the night.”
Rest. The word sounded like heaven. My body was screaming for it, my magic depleted to levels I’d never experienced before. But I nodded, because he was right, and we all needed it more than we cared to admit.
We walked toward the ruined court together.
Damon stayed at my side, his presence steady and grounding.
The others fell in behind us, forming a protective wall at my back without anyone needing to say a word.
Even now, even exhausted and hurt and shaken, they were still my shields. Still my anchors.
I hesitated at the threshold.
The doorway loomed above me, cracked and crumbling but still standing. Beyond it, I could see Fizzle perched on a fallen pillar, watching me with those always knowing eyes. Waiting.
Something was wrong. I could feel it, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what.
When we’d first entered the forest, I’d felt something. A calling. A pull that drew me forward, guided me toward this place. Nymeria’s voice, Fizzle had said. My mother, reaching out to bring me home.
But that feeling was gone now. The thread I’d been following had vanished, leaving nothing but silence. If the court was truly in ruins, if hope really was lost, surely I wouldn’t have felt anything in the first place. Surely Nymeria wouldn’t have called me to a pile of rubble.
“Are you okay?” Tank’s hand came to my shoulder, warm and steady.
“I’m confused,” I admitted. “Something doesn’t seem right. I felt something before, leading me here. But now it’s just... gone.”
“Are we still in the illusion?” Ryder asked, looking around warily.
Maddox reached over and pinched him.
“Ow! What the fuck?” Ryder swatted at his hand, rubbing his arm in outrage. “What was that for?”
“Checking if we’re still in the illusion,” Maddox said with a shrug.
“It hurt the last time too,” Tank pointed out. “Whatever that jin was throwing at us, it was real enough. The pain was real.”
Maddox looked slightly embarrassed, but then Ryder pinched him back in retaliation, and before they could start bickering like children, I laughed.
I couldn’t help it. The sound bubbled up out of me, unexpected and bright, cutting through the tension and the exhaustion and the fear.
Here we were, standing at the threshold of a ruined court after fighting our way through an army of monsters, and my mates were pinching each other like siblings on a long car ride.
Still laughing, I stepped through the doorway.
And everything changed.
Something latched onto what remained of my magic.
It happened so fast I didn’t have time to fight it, didn’t have time to do anything but gasp as I felt the connection slam into place.
It flowed through me, following the paths of my bonds, reaching through those golden threads to touch each of my mates in turn.
I felt it brush against Tank and Dean and Maddox and Ryder and Damon, felt it test each of them, learn them, catalog them.
Panic surged through me. Another trap. Another creature trying to drain us, to use us, to…
But then I realized what it actually was.
It wasn’t trying to drain me. It wasn’t trying to harm us. The touch was desperate, yes, but not hungry. Not predatory. It felt like a hand reaching out from deep water, grasping for anything that might pull it back to the surface. A plea for help, not an attack.
Rather than shake it off, I grabbed hold of it.
Warmth flooded through me. Golden light that felt like sunshine on my skin after a long winter. The connection between me and this place, this court, this seat of power that had been waiting for so long, solidified into something real. Something permanent.
The ground began to shake.
I heard my mates cry out in alarm, heard them rush through the doorway to stand beside me, but I couldn’t focus on them.
All my attention was on the magic flowing through me, on the desperate pull of something ancient and powerful finally finding what it had been looking for.
It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before.
A connection so deep, so fundamental, that I couldn’t tell where I ended and the court began.
Then the fallen stones began to move. They lifted from the ground, rising through the air with a grace that belied their massive weight.
Hundreds of stones, thousands of them, all hovering in the air around us like a constellation of rubble.
They almost moved with purpose as they began to fit themselves back together, slot into place like puzzle pieces, recreating walls that had stood for millennia.
Cracks sealed themselves. Broken pieces fused back together. Pillars rose from the ground, straightening, reforming, becoming whole again. And slowly, impossibly, the walls began to rebuild themselves around us. What had been ruins became structures. What had been decay became renewed.
The court was coming back to life.