Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Alyssa
Our fragile moments of peace and naivety ended at dawn.
One moment I was asleep, curled between Dean’s cold stillness and Maddox’s warmth, the bond humming its steady five-note chord beneath my ribs.
The next, the earth bucked beneath me like a horse throwing its rider and every ward I’d woven into the Spring Court’s perimeter shattered at once.
The sensation was physical. Hooks ripped from my skin, threads of magic snapping back with enough force to leave welts on my consciousness.
I gasped, choking on the sudden absence of protection, and before I could draw a full breath, Tank’s roar split the pre-dawn quiet like a crack of thunder.
“UP! EVERYONE UP! WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!”
This shouldn’t be possible.
I was moving before my mind caught up with my body.
Muscle memory from a dozen fights and a hundred nightmares that had trained me to run before I could think.
Dean was already on his feet, ice crackling along his forearms, his eyes flat and focused.
Maddox had his fire in his palms, the orange glow painting harsh shadows across his face.
Somewhere to my left, Ryder’s voice was cutting through the chaos, barking orders at a cluster of fighters who were stumbling from their tents with their weapons half-drawn.
And Damon. I felt Damon through the bond before I saw him. Shadows surging outward from his position at the tree line, reaching through the dark like fingers, searching for the thing that had woken them.
“North,” Tank said, and his voice was nothing like the steady, measured tone I was used to. This voice was gravel and warning and the deep vibration of something ancient stirring beneath his skin. “Coming through the forest.”
I turned north and my stomach dropped.
The sky was wrong. Not the clean grey of almost-morning but something bruised and rotting, a canopy of poisoned purple that spread from the tree line toward us like spilled ink.
And beneath it, the forest was screaming.
I could hear the trees. Not figuratively, not poetically.
I could actually hear them because the Spring Court magic ran through every root and branch and leaf, and those roots and branches were being ripped apart by whatever was forcing its way through them.
“He’s here,” I breathed. “He brought his entire army here.”
This wasn’t a few Endless testing our strength, this was a full scale attack and I was a fool not to realise before that Aril had been testing us.
“The plan’s gone,” Dean said. Not a question. A statement. His wolf was in his eyes, silver bleeding into the grey, and the ice on his skin was spreading, crawling up his arms to his shoulders. “So we adapt.”
Adapt. As if it were that simple. As if days of carefully plotted strategy could be replaced in the sixty seconds between sleeping and dying.
But he was right. He was always right about this. Dean understood war the way I understood magic, instinctively and in his bones, and when everything fell apart, his clarity was the thing I reached for first.
“Get the fighters into formation,” I told him. “Rhidian too. They instinctively follow his command. Tank, the freed Endless who can fight, get them to Ezra. Ryder, we need storms. Maddox...” I turned to find him and the words died in my throat.
Maddox was staring north with his hands burning at his sides and an expression on his face that I’d only seen once before. At Ice Falls. When Rhidian had died in front of him and the Summer fire had erupted without permission, consuming everything it touched.
“Maddox.” I caught his arm. The heat of his skin was scalding but I didn’t let go. “Look at me.”
His eyes found mine. Brown and gold and full of something that scared me.
“This won’t be like last time,” I said. “This time we end him.”
He swallowed. Nodded. The fire in his palms dimmed from white-hot to a steadier amber. “This time we end him,” he repeated, and I heard the promise underneath the words.
“Damon.” I reached for him through the bond and felt his shadows answer, cold and certain. “Stay close. I’m going to need you before this is over.”
His response came not in words but in the sensation of shadows wrapping around my ankles like a loyal hound pressing close. Ready. Waiting.
Then we moved.
The first wave hit the northern perimeter before the camp was half-organised.
Not soldiers. Not Endless. Creatures.
They poured from the tree line in a tide of black and wrong.
Things that crawled on too many legs. Things that flew on wings of stretched membrane.
Things with eyes that glowed like embers in faces that didn’t belong to any species I’d catalogued in all my years in Nymeria.
The dark things. The creatures that lived in the deep places where even moonlight couldn’t reach, the twisted cousins of the beautiful beings that had bowed to me at the Fifth Court.
Arik had brought the nightmare side of Nymeria with him. It was just like the last time the Spring Court had fallen.
Except this time we weren’t alone and it wasn’t just the Spring Court that answered.
From the forest behind us, from the meadows and the riverbanks and the ancient groves that had stood since before the courts were named, the guardians came.
Creatures of light and growing things, of root and thorn and flowering branch.
The wildlings that had helped us escape the Winter Court materialized from the undergrowth, their leaf-covered bodies now bristling with thorns as long as my forearm.
Enormous stags with antlers wreathed in spring blossoms lowered their heads and charged.
Foxes made of living flame darted between the dark creatures’ legs, igniting fur and membrane and chitin.
And at their head screeching out a call for battle was Fizzle.
Creature clashed against creature. Two halves of Nymeria’s nature, colliding on the grounds where the first massacre had once painted the soil red.
And between them, us.
I threw myself into the fight with the unified magic blazing through every nerve.
Five courts. Five bonds. A river of power so vast I could feel its current threatening to sweep me away.
I directed it outward in pulses, waves of force that knocked the dark creatures back from the camp’s boundaries, buying our fighters as much time as I could to organize themselves into the fighting force we needed to survive.
Tank was a wall at the northern line, the bear not quite unleashed but close, so close I could feel the strain of his control through the bond like a rope pulled taut to the point of fraying.
Dean had shifted, a blur of white fur and ice and snarling fury, his wolf cutting through the dark creatures with a precision that was almost surgical.
Ryder was above us. I didn’t know how else to describe it.
He’d called the wind and the wind had answered, lifting him to the top of the nearest rise where he stood with his arms spread and the sky obeying, storms forming at his fingertips and arcing down into the enemy’s ranks.
Rhidian had appeared at the front of the infantry, sword drawn, no magic in his veins and absolutely nothing resembling fear on his face.
He shouted orders that the freed Endless obeyed because his voice carried the certainty of a man who’d been made to be a king and, magic or no magic, had never stopped thinking like one.
Ezra fell in beside him, and whatever anger burned in the former Endless was channelled now, sharpened to a point and aimed at the things pouring out of the darkness.
For a moment, standing in the middle of it all with the magic of five courts roaring through me, I thought we could do this. I thought we could hold.
Then Arik’s Endless arrived.
They came from the east. Hundreds of them, marching in lines so perfect they looked rehearsed, their movements synchronised in that horrible, puppet-like way that I’d learned to recognise. Glowing blue light shone through their helm. Bodies that moved because something else was pulling the strings.
I couldn’t unleash everything I had because those bodies belonged to people. And I refused to be like him, I refused to see them as expendable. They had families. Lives. Names.
They were just people like Damon had been. People who were trapped behind their own eyes, screaming in silence while their limbs obeyed commands that weren’t their own. And they were people who would die if I tore through them with the kind of force I was using on the creatures.
Arik’s strategy crystallised in that moment with a clarity that made me sick.
He’d sent the creatures first to force us into full combat mode, to push us to the limits of our power.
And then he’d sent the Endless, knowing we’d have to pull back.
Knowing I’d fight with one hand tied behind my back rather than slaughter hundreds of enslaved innocents.
He was using people as shields. The way he’d always used people.
“Alyssa.” Damon’s voice cut through the noise, low and steady. He’d moved closer during the initial assault, his shadows forming a loose perimeter around me that the dark creatures instinctively avoided. “I can feel them. The chains.”
“Not yet.” I shook my head, tasting blood where I’d bitten my cheek. “We’ll only get one shot at this and I need to focus to channel it properly. I can’t do it in the middle of this.”
“Then what do we do?”
I didn’t have an answer. The Endless were advancing, filling the gaps between the dark creatures, and our fighters were pulling back because they couldn’t tell the difference between an enemy and a victim at close range.
The line was buckling. Rhidian was shouting for a retreat to tighter formation.
Ezra was screaming at his people to hold.
The ground beneath my feet was wet.
I looked down.
The grass was red.