Chapter Thirty
Damon
The corridor was too quiet.
That was the thing I kept noticing. Not the stone under my feet or the faint glow of the veins in the walls or the way my shadow magic trailed behind me like smoke from a candle. The quiet. The beautiful, deafening quiet inside my own head.
For months, every silence had been a lie.
The nightmare would let me think I was alone, let me relax into a moment of peace, and then it would speak.
That mocking voice sliding through the dark like a blade.
Reminding me that I was never truly alone, that every thought I had was observed, catalogued, and stored for later use as ammunition.
Now the silence was real. I kept waiting for it to break. Kept bracing for the whisper, the laugh, the cruel observation that would prove it had all just been an illusion.
But it didn’t come.
The wolf stirred instead. A presence in my chest that I was still learning the shape of.
Not words, not exactly. More like instinct translated into feeling.
Right now it was restless, alert, aware of something ahead that it wanted to move toward.
I could feel its attention focused like a beam of light down the corridor, pulling at me the way a current pulls at a swimmer.
Alyssa.
I found her in one of the smaller chambers off the main hall.
She was standing by a window that looked out onto nothing I could name.
The Fifth Court existed in its own strange geography, and whatever lay beyond that glass was all silver light and shifting shadow.
She had her arms wrapped around herself, and the light beneath her skin pulsed faintly in time with her breathing.
She turned when she heard me. Something crossed her face that made the wolf push hard against my ribs. Not surprise. She’d known I was coming. I could feel it through the thread between us, that thin, bright line that hummed when I got close to her.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
We stood there. The space between us felt charged, the way air feels before lightning. The thread pulsed, and I watched her fingers tighten on her own arms, and I knew she felt it too.
“Rhidian sent you,” she said. Not a question.
“Is it that obvious?”
“He’s not subtle.” A small smile. “Perceptive, but not subtle.”
The silence settled again, but it was a different kind of quiet now. Expectant. Warm. The wolf pressed against my ribs and I pressed back, gently, the way you’d calm a dog that was pulling at its lead.
“Can I ask you something?” Alyssa said.
“Anything.”
She uncrossed her arms and turned to face me fully. The light in her veins brightened slightly, responding to something I couldn’t read. “How do you feel? And I mean honestly. Not the version you gave your brothers because you didn’t want them to worry.”
I almost laughed. Almost. Because of course she saw through that. Alyssa had always seen through everything, even when the nightmare had been driving my body and I’d been screaming behind my own eyes. She’d looked at the monster wearing my face and known I was still in there.
“Different,” I said. “Everything feels different.”
“Different how?”
I looked down at my hands. The shadow magic curled around my fingers, dark and fluid, responding to my mood in ways I hadn’t figured out yet.
It moved when I was calm, thickened when I was anxious, and right now it was doing something in between.
Reaching toward Alyssa in tendrils that I had to consciously pull back even though I wasn’t entirely sure how I was doing it.
“The silence,” I said. “That’s the biggest thing.
I keep waiting to hear it. The voice. And it’s just..
. not there.” I swallowed. “I know that sounds simple. But you can’t understand what it’s like to have something whispering in the back of your head every second of every day and then suddenly have it stop.
It’s like going deaf, except the thing you’ve stopped hearing was something that wanted you dead. ”
Alyssa moved closer. Not touching me, not yet, but close enough that I could feel the warmth of her. “Is it really gone, Damon? Not just hiding?”
I’d been asking myself the same question since I’d woken up on the floor of the throne room.
The nightmare had been old. Ancient, even.
A creature that had survived in the dark corners of the Winter Court for longer than anyone alive could remember.
Could something like that really be destroyed by a wolf that was barely an hour old and a surge of magic I didn’t understand?
“I think so,” I said. “The space where it lived... it’s not empty.
The shadow magic filled it. All of it. There’s nowhere for it to hide, even if some part of it survived.
” I hesitated. “But I’d be lying if I said I was certain.
Something that old, that entrenched... I don’t know if I’ll ever be completely sure it’s gone. ”
Alyssa nodded. She didn’t offer false comfort, didn’t tell me it was definitely gone, definitely over. I appreciated that more than I could say.
“And the wolf?” she asked. “What’s that like?”
That one made me pause. Because the truth was, it was strange. Wonderful and strange and a little bit terrifying all at once.
“He’s young,” I said. “I can feel that. Like he’s still figuring out what he is. He’s not... he doesn’t talk to me the way Dean’s wolf talks to Dean. It’s more like emotions. Impulses. He wants things, and I can feel what those things are, but it’s not a conversation yet.”
“What does he want right now?”
I looked at her. The wolf surged forward with an answer that was so clear it was almost a word.
“You,” I said. “He wants to be closer to you.”
Alyssa’s breath caught. Just slightly. Just enough for me to hear it.
“That’s the bond,” she said.
“I know.”
“Does it scare you?”
I thought about it. Really thought about it, because Alyssa deserved honesty and I was tired of being anything other than honest. “Not the way I expected. I thought... when I used to think about what would happen after the nightmare, if there was an after, I assumed I’d be broken.
Hollowed out. I thought freedom would feel like an empty room.
” I looked at the shadows curling around my hand.
“It doesn’t. It feels like being handed a second chance and having no idea what to do with it. ”
“And the magic?”
I flexed my fingers and the shadows responded, flowing and rippling like dark water.
“That’s the part I can’t wrap my head around.
I’ve never had magic. It wasn’t something that’s even a possibility where I come from.
The nightmare was a parasite, not a gift.
And now I’ve got this... this thing... and it’s part of me in a way the nightmare never was.
The nightmare was an invasion. This feels like something that was always supposed to be there and just hadn’t arrived yet. ”
“What can you do with it?”
“I have no idea. I guess I’m still figuring it out.
” The admission came with a breathless laugh that surprised me.
When was the last time I’d laughed? Months ago, at least. Before the nightmare had tightened its grip enough to take even that from me.
“It responds to what I’m feeling. When I’m calm, it drifts.
When I’m angry or scared, it thickens, gets darker.
And sometimes it just moves on its own, like it’s exploring.
Like it’s curious about the world and using me to look at it. ”
The shadows chose that moment to demonstrate, a tendril reaching toward Alyssa of its own accord. I pulled it back, heat rising in my face.
“It keeps doing that,” I muttered.
“I noticed.” Her voice was soft. Amused. But underneath the amusement there was something else, something that made the wolf pace inside my chest. “Maybe you should let it.”
The air shifted.
I looked at her. She looked back. And the thread between us, that thin bright line that had been humming since I walked through the door, pulled tight.
“Alyssa.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I feel it too.”
“The bond, it’s barely anything yet. I don’t even know if I’m doing this right.
I’ve never...” I stopped myself before I could spiral.
The nightmare was gone but the habits it had carved into me were still there.
The second-guessing. The assumption that anything I wanted was a weakness to be exploited. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Then let me show you.”
She closed the distance between us and put her hands on my face.
Her palms were warm. The light beneath her skin pulsed against my jaw, and where it met the shadow magic that had crept up my neck, the two didn’t clash.
They wove together. Light threading through dark, dark threading through light, and the sensation was so overwhelming that my eyes fell shut.
“You don’t have to figure everything out tonight,” she said. “The magic, the wolf, what you’re capable of. All of that can wait. Right now, I just want you here. With me. Is that something you want?”
I opened my eyes. She was so close. Her breath on my lips, her hands on my skin, and the bond between us singing with a need that was making it hard to think about anything else.
“Yes,” I said. “More than I’ve ever wanted anything.”
She kissed me.
Soft at first. Careful. The way you’d touch something you were afraid of breaking. I let her set the pace, let her find me, because this was my first kiss after becoming a free man again and I wanted to feel every second of it without the nightmare’s voice poisoning it.
Then her tongue touched mine and something snapped.
Not the bond. Something in me. A wall I’d built so long ago I’d forgotten it was there. The part that said I wasn’t allowed to have this. That wanting was dangerous. That opening up only gave something new a way in.
The wall came down, and the wolf howled.