Chapter Twenty-Seven
Damon
The throne room felt different now.
I could feel Nymeria’s absence the way you feel a missing limb.
The air was thinner. The golden veins in the floor were dark, just stone now, just ordinary rock.
The throne still stood in the centre of the chamber, roots and crystal and ancient stone, but the presence that had filled this space was gone.
What remained was a hollowed out shell. It felt more like a room with just a chair rather than a throne room now.
Or maybe a room waiting to become something else.
I knew the feeling.
The others filed in behind me, and I was aware of each of them in ways I hadn’t been before.
Not through any bond. Not yet. Through something older, more basic.
The awareness of a man who had spent years watching the world through a window he couldn’t open, cataloguing every detail because details were all he had.
The worm was quiet. It had been quiet since the chamber, since Nymeria had touched my face and light had bloomed where her fingers met my skin.
Not gone. I could still feel it, curled in the dark corners of my mind like a snake in a hole.
Watching. Waiting. But quieter than it had been before, as if even the nightmare had been shaken by what it had witnessed.
Good. Let it be afraid. For once, let it know what that felt like.
“Centre of the room,” Alyssa said. She’d taken charge the moment we’d started walking, and the shift in her was something I noticed even through the fog that perpetually clouded my thoughts.
She stood straighter. Spoke with more certainty.
The magic of this place responded to her in ways I could see.
The air moved when she moved. The stone seemed warmer where she walked.
She wasn’t the woman who’d arrived at the Fifth Court yesterday.
She was becoming something else. Something this realm needed.
And she looked glorious in every single second of it.
I walked to the centre and stood where a god had unravelled herself to bring a dead man back to life. For me. Because I’d asked.
The weight of that settled onto my shoulders, and I let it. I’d carried worse.
“How does this work?” Alyssa asked. The question was directed at Tank, but she was looking at me.
Tank rubbed the back of his neck. His nervousness wasn’t exactly filling me with confidence.
“Teeth,” he said. “You have to shift enough to bring forth your fangs. The bite has to break skin. The wolf will know what to do. It’s mostly instinct.”
“If it makes you feel better, my wolf is more than confident that he can do this,” Dean told me. “It’s the man who’s worried.”
“Don’t be.” The words came out of me before I’d planned them. Dean’s eyes snapped to mine. “You won’t hurt me. Nothing you could do to me comes close to what’s already been done.”
Something flickered in his face. Pain. Guilt. The particular kind of anguish that came from being the protector who’d failed to protect. I knew that look. I’d worn it myself, every time the nightmare had used my hands to hurt someone.
“Besides,” I added. “If you mess this up, I’ll haunt you. And I’ll be much more annoying than the current thing living in my head.”
A startled laugh escaped Ryder. Dean’s mouth twitched.
“Shoulder or forearm,” Dean said, all business now. The wolf was close. I could see it in his eyes, that amber flicker at the edges of the blue. “Shoulder seems to be… traditional.”
“Shoulder then.”
I pulled my shirt over my head. The air in the chamber was cool against my skin, and I was aware of how different I looked from the man they remembered.
Thinner. Harder. The nightmare didn’t care about things like eating regularly or sleeping well.
My body bore the marks of months of possession like a landscape after a war.
Scars I didn’t remember getting. Bruises in varying shades of healing.
The physical evidence of a battle fought entirely inside my own skull.
Nobody commented. I was grateful for that.
Tank had positioned himself by the door.
The only exit. His arms were loose at his sides, but I recognised the stance.
He was ready to move. Ready to contain whatever needed containing.
The bear was close to the surface, held in check by the steady discipline that defined everything Tank seemed to do.
I didn’t know him well, but the parts that I did know I was grateful for.
Grateful to have at mine and my brothers side, grateful to have protecting Alyssa…
our mate. And that was the thought driving me through this.
It couldn’t go wrong. This had to work. It had to work because at the end of it I had her waiting for me and there was nothing in this world that was going to keep me from her.
Ryder had drifted to my left, his body language deliberately casual in a way that meant he was anything but. His eyes were sharp, tracking, calculating. People underestimated Ryder. That was their mistake.
Maddox was to my right. Close enough to touch. His presence was a quiet, steady warmth, and the grief he’d been carrying for weeks had shifted into something else. Something that looked almost like hope.
And then there was Alyssa. The woman who had been nothing but a stranger to me before this terrible place, the woman who was the one shining light in this whole place.
She stood directly in front of me. Her hands were at her sides but her magic was awake.
I could feel it in the air, a hum of power that hadn’t been there an hour ago.
She’d said she was stronger in this room, more connected to the magic of this place, and I believed her.
The woman standing before me was a live wire.
If the nightmare surged, she would be ready.
And even if she wasn’t strong enough to kill it yet, I had faith that she could keep it in its place, but if she couldn’t. ..
“If something goes wrong...” I started.
“It won’t,” she said.
“If it does.”
Her eyes held mine. Steady. Fierce. “Then I will drag you back. I’ve already lost one person today. I’m not losing another.”
That shouldn’t have comforted me. It did.
Dean stepped up beside me. Close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, could almost feel the wolf pressing against his skin like something trying to break through.
His hand gripped my shoulder, and for a moment we just stood there.
Two brothers who’d been through hell separately and were about to walk through it together.
“Ready?” he asked.
I thought about the nightmare. About the months I’d spent trapped behind my own eyes, screaming into a void that didn’t care. About the things my hands had done while something else drove them.
And I thought about what Nymeria had said. You were always stronger than what lived inside you.
“Ready.”
Dean’s eyes went amber. Full amber, no blue left, the wolf surging to the surface with a completeness that should have been terrifying. His grip on my shoulder tightened, and I felt his body coil with that predatory tension that meant the animal was in charge.
Then his head dipped, his mouth found my shoulder, and he bit down.
Pain.
Not like a wound. Not like a blade or a fist or any of the hundred hurts the nightmare had inflicted over the years.
This was deeper. Hotter. It burned through my blood like someone had poured molten metal into my veins.
I felt it race down my spine, through my chest, into my fingers and toes.
Then something cold and sharp followed that pain, a wild, savage thing that tasted like pine and cold air and moonlight.
The wolf. His wolf, pushing into me, and for one blinding second every cell in my body screamed in protest.
Then Dean pulled back. Blood on his mouth. My blood. His eyes were still amber, and they were watching me with an intensity that made me think the wolf was looking for something. Waiting for something.
I stood there.
The burn faded. The magic settled. My blood hummed with something new, something foreign, a presence that hadn’t been there before. I could feel it, faint and distant, like hearing music through a wall.
And then... nothing.
No collapse. No coma. No dramatic surge of power or transformation. Just me, standing in the centre of a dead god’s throne room with a bite wound on my shoulder and the taste of copper in my mouth.
Silence stretched. One second. Five. Ten.
“Damon?” Alyssa’s voice, careful. Controlled. But I could hear the edge underneath.
“I’m fine.” I flexed my hands. Rolled my shoulders. The bite wound throbbed but the burning was gone. The foreign presence in my blood was still there, that distant music, but it wasn’t growing. It wasn’t changing. It was just... sitting there. “I feel fine.”
Dean looked at Maddox. Maddox looked at Ryder. Ryder looked at Tank. Tank looked at Alyssa.
Nobody said it. Nobody wanted to be the first to say it.
Ryder said it. “Should something have happened by now?”
“He should be unconscious,” Maddox said quietly. His face had gone pale.
“Maybe it’s different for him,” Ryder tried. “The nightmare could be...”
“Blocking it,” Dean finished. His voice was flat. Dangerous. The voice he used when he was trying very hard not to let the wolf take over. “The nightmare is blocking the wolf from settling.”
The worm stirred.
I felt it uncurl in the dark. Lazy. Almost amused. Like a cat that had been watching a mouse try to escape and had decided the game was getting boring.
Did you really think it would be that easy?
I clenched my jaw. Pushed back. The nightmare’s voice was a knife in the dark, and I’d learned long ago that responding only gave it more to work with.
“Something’s wrong,” I said. Calm. Keep it calm. Don’t let them see the worm moving. “The bite took. I can feel the wolf. But he’s distant. Like he can’t reach me.”