Chapter 38 #2
Not from today. Not from this battle. The Spring Court had grown new grass over the massacre grounds, thick and green and alive. But the soil remembered. The roots remembered. And now, with the Spring magic singing through my veins, I remembered too. It all flashed in front of my eyes.
The bodies.
They were everywhere. Not real, not visible to anyone but me, but I could see them.
Overlaid on the current carnage like a transparency pressed over a painting.
Fae who had died here when Arik had destroyed the Spring Court the first time.
Men and women and children who had fallen on this exact ground, in this exact field, and whose blood had soaked into the soil that now fed the roots that spoke to me through the bond I shared with Tank.
I could hear them. The dying. The final breaths. The screams cut short. The moment of silence, when the massacre was finished and the only sound was the wind moving through the grass and the slow dripping of blood from the things that had killed them.
My magic stuttered.
The braided cord of power, the five-court river that had been roaring through me since the fight began, hitched. Sputtered. The flow disrupted by something more powerful than external force.
Fear.
Not the sharp, useful kind that sharpened reflexes and quickened the heart. The other kind. The paralyzing kind. The kind that reached into your chest and wrapped cold fingers around your lungs, squeezing until breathing became a conscious effort instead of an automatic function.
I wasn’t the queen of five courts. I wasn’t the woman who was becoming the Mother of Nymeria. I was the girl who had walked through a field of dead and hadn’t been able to save any of them. I was twenty years old and terrified, standing on the bones of people I’d cared about.
The magic faded. The bonds dimmed. The world narrowed to the red grass beneath my feet and the sound of screaming that came from then and now at the same time.
I couldn’t move.
My mates felt it.
I know they did because the bonds were still there, even diminished.
Five threads of connection pulling taut with alarm.
I felt Tank’s steadiness stagger. Felt Dean’s cold focus waver.
Maddox’s warmth flared with panic and Ryder’s defiance guttered like a candle in a hurricane.
Even Damon’s shadows reached for me, uncertain, afraid.
Our magic hesitated. The tide of battle shifted, just slightly, just enough. The creatures pressed harder. The Endless advanced.
Someone was calling my name. I couldn’t tell who. The voices from the soil were louder, the dead crying out with mouths full of earth, and I couldn’t distinguish the living from the buried.
Then the bonds spoke.
Not words. Not language. Something more primal than either. A pulse that came from five directions at once, flooding through the diminished connections with a force that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the men who wielded it.
Tank’s steadiness. The deep, unshakeable certainty that the ground would hold because he was standing on it.
Not the Spring Court magic, not the bear’s power.
Just Tank. The man who had held me together when I was nothing but broken pieces, who had looked at the fractures and said, quietly, without drama, I’m not going anywhere.
Dean’s cold clarity. The wolf’s focus, sharp as a blade, cutting through the fog of panic with surgical precision.
This is a battlefield. You are a fighter.
Fight. No warmth in it, no comfort. Just the raw, unyielding expectation that I was better than this, because Dean had never once doubted what I was capable of even when I doubted myself.
Maddox’s warmth. Not fire. Not magic. The warmth of someone who felt every terrible thing the world threw at him and chose to keep feeling anyway.
Who carried the dead like I was carrying them now but refused to let the weight of it turn him to stone.
I’m here. I feel it too. You’re not alone in this.
Ryder’s defiance. The absolute, bone-deep refusal to accept the narrative being written around us.
Arik wanted this. He wanted the massacre to break me the same way he’d broken the Spring Court.
And Ryder’s response to that, flooding through the bond like lightning, was the emotional equivalent of a middle finger. Not today. Not her. Not ever.
Damon’s shadows. They didn’t push. Didn’t pull.
They wrapped around me like armour, dark and cool and patient, and inside that darkness I felt something I hadn’t expected.
Understanding. Damon knew what it was like to be trapped inside your own body while horror unfolded around you.
He knew the paralysis. He knew the silence.
And he knew what it took to break free of it, because he had.
He’d fought his way out of the nightmare’s grip, out of years of imprisonment, out of the dark. If he can do it, so can you.
I clawed my way back.
Not all at once. Not in a dramatic surge of power that scattered the enemy and turned the tide. It was uglier than that. Slower. A grinding, tooth-by-tooth process of loosening the fear’s grip on my chest and forcing air into my lungs and making my hands unclench.
The dead were still there. I could still see them in the grass, still hear their echoes in the soil.
But they weren’t the only thing I could hear anymore.
The bonds were singing, all five of them, a discordant, desperate harmony that changed we’re here, we’re here, we’re here, and the living voices were louder than the dead ones.
I breathed.
The magic didn’t come back the way it had been before.
It came back different. Harder. The girl who had walked through a field of the dead was still standing on bones, but she wasn’t helpless anymore.
She had five courts of magic in her veins and five men who would burn the world to ashes before they let her fall.
The current of magic surged back with enough force to make me stagger.
I felt it lock into place, all five bonds snapping tight, the river of magic finding its channel again and pouring through with a ferocity that stole my breath.
Stronger than before. Because the fracture had shown the bonds where the weak points were, and they reinforced themselves.
The way broken bones grow back denser than they were before the break.
I lifted my head.
The battlefield was worse than when I’d checked out.
The line had buckled in several places. Dark creatures had pushed through to the camp itself, and I could see fighters falling back toward the palace doors.
The Endless were closer, those blue shining eyes terrible in the grey morning light.
One of the guardians was down, a massive antlered stag lying on its side with black ichor matting its flank.
But the line hadn’t broken. Rhidian had pulled the infantry into a tight diamond formation that held its shape even as the pressure mounted.
Tank was a mountain at the northern point, immovable.
Dean’s wolf was a streak of white and red at the eastern flank, and I could hear Ryder’s thunder cracking somewhere above.
They’d held. While I was drowning in the past, they’d held.
I gathered the combined magic in my hands and pushed.
The wave rolled outward in all directions, a pulse of raw force that discriminated between targets because I willed it to.
Dark creatures were thrown back, tumbling through the air like leaves in a gale.
The Endless were untouched. The pulse passed over them, through them, around them, and even though they stumbled, they stayed standing because I wouldn’t hurt them. I wouldn’t. Not even to win.
A second pulse. A third. Each one wider, stronger, buying space. The dark creatures regrouped but slower now, confused by the sudden shift in pressure.
And through the chaos, through the screaming and the dying and the grinding horror of it all, I felt something else.
Coming from the north. From the heart of the bruised sky.
A presence that I recognised in my bones because I’d felt it once before, at Ice Falls, in the moment he’d looked at me through the eyes of one of his Endless and said one word that had upended everything I thought I knew.
Arik.
He wasn’t hiding behind his army. He was here. On the field. And the magic he was pulling from the air around him was staggering, a vortex of power that made the ground tremble and the wards burn until the very atmosphere tasted like iron.
I watched him through the chaos of the battle and saw what he was doing.
He wasn’t fighting to hold territory. He wasn’t trying to take the Spring Court or destroy our forces or capture strategic positions.
He was pulling magic from the ground. From the air.
From every living thing his power could reach.
Absorbing it the way a black hole absorbs light, dragging the magical energy of Nymeria itself into the void inside him.
The barrier. The wall between Nymeria and the human world, the ancient separation that kept the magic contained and the realms divided.
He was trying to absorb enough power to shatter it.
To tear down the wall and flood the human world with wild, uncontrolled magic.
To destroy everything, both realms at once, because that was who he was and what he’d always wanted.
If he can’t be loved, nothing will be.
The thought came unbidden and I shoved it away because this was not the time for understanding the enemy. This was the time for fighting him.
“Damon!” I shouted through the bond as much as through the air. “We need to free those Endless. Now. Before he pulls enough magic to finish what he started.”
Damon’s shadows surged around me, dark and hungry and ready. “Tell me when.”
Not yet. We needed the perimeter stable. We needed my mates close enough for me to channel through them. Which meant we needed Dean to stop Arik from absorbing more magic, or at least slow him down.
“Dean.” The bond carried his name like a thrown blade. “He’s pulling magic. Everything he can reach. You need to get to him. You need to stop him.”
I felt Dean’s response before I heard it. The wolf’s snarl, cold and absolute. The coiling of ice beneath skin. The single-minded focus of a predator locking onto its prey.
Then Dean was gone, a streak of white and silver cutting through the battle toward the bruised sky and the monster hiding inside it.
But as he moved Arik locked his eyes on the advancing wolf and then…
laughed. And as he laughed his face distorted, rearranging itself with subtle changes.
He turned to look at me. That same self assured smile on his lips that I’d seen so many times before and I found myself looking at a face I’d never thought I’d see in Nymeria, but one that made so much sense because of the betrayal he knew they’d feel.
This was right out of Arik’s playbook. He didn’t just kill people.
He played with your mind and enjoyed breaking you first. Except Dean didn’t break.
He didn’t falter. He just kept surging forward.
Toward Holden.