Chapter 39
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Dean
The wolf and I agreed on very few things.
It wanted to run when I wanted to think. It wanted to fight when I wanted to plan. It operated on instinct where I operated on training, and most of the time our partnership felt less like cooperation and more like two men steering the same boat in different directions.
But when Alyssa said our name through the bond, the wolf and I became one thing. A single creature with a single purpose, cutting through the battlefield with an efficiency that left no room for hesitation or doubt.
Arik was ahead of us. I could feel him before I could see him, a cold pull in the centre of my chest where the ice magic lived.
The Winter Court power that had been crawling under my skin for weeks recognised its source and strained toward it like iron toward a lodestone.
Every step closer made the pull stronger, the ice harder to contain, until frost was crackling across the ground beneath my paws and the grass died in my wake.
The battle parted around me. Not because the creatures feared me, though some did. Because the wolf was moving at a speed that made everything else seem slow, and the ice that trailed behind us created a corridor of frozen earth that nothing wanted to cross.
I shifted as I ran. Ice coating my body like armour.
The change was fluid now, faster than it had been even days ago, the wolf releasing its hold on my body with a reluctance that bordered on protest. But this fight needed hands.
Needed a voice. The wolf could tear through flesh but it couldn’t look the man who’d trained us in the eye and make him answer for what he’d done.
I came out of the shift at a dead sprint, and slammed into the ring of dark creatures that surrounded Arik like a living wall.
They went down hard. Ice speared through the first, freezing it from the inside out until it shattered.
The second caught a fist wrapped in frost that caved in whatever passed for its skull.
The third I simply ran through, the cold radiating from my body enough to kill anything that got within arm’s reach.
And then I was through, and there he was.
Arik stood at the centre of a circle of dead grass, the magic he was pulling from the ground visible as currents of light streaming toward his outstretched hands.
He looked exactly as he had back when I’d believed he was a man of honour and integrity.
Tall, broad, composed. The face of General Holden, the man who had found four broken men and turned them into soldiers, worn like a mask that had been glued on so long it might as well have been skin.
He turned when I broke through his perimeter, and his expression was the thing that nearly undid me.
He smiled.
Not Arik’s smile, cold and cruel and ancient. Holden’s smile. The one I remembered from the training yard, from the briefings, from the night he’d put his hand on my shoulder after a mission gone bad and told me that what made a good soldier wasn’t never failing. It was getting back up.
“Dean.” His voice was Holden’s too. Warm with something that sounded like pride. “I was wondering which of you would reach me first.”
The ice on my arms flared, the armour sharpening at the edges from my fury, and I had to clamp down on the magic to keep it from detonating.
The wolf was howling inside my skull, not with rage but with something worse.
Confusion. Because the wolf didn’t understand betrayal.
The wolf understood pack and enemy and nothing in between, and the man standing in front of us still smelled like pack.
“Shut up,” I muttered, and I wasn’t sure if I was talking to the wolf or to him.
Arik’s smile widened. “You’ve grown since the Ice Falls.
The ice is stronger. More controlled. Almost ready for what it’s meant to be.
” He tilted his head, studying me the way he used to study tactical maps.
“You know what I’m going to offer, don’t you?
A seat at the table. A crown that was always meant to be yours.
The Winter Court needs a king, Dean. A real one.
Join me and rule this world like it deserves. With ice.”
“You’re not Holden.” I clung to the lie I so desperately wanted to believe because it was so much better than the truth.
“Of course I am.” He said it so simply. So reasonably. “I’m everything Holden ever was. Every mission, every training session, every late night going over strategy. That was all me. I didn’t pretend to care about your development, Dean. I genuinely did. You were magnificent raw material.”
Raw material.
The words hit like a blade between the ribs.
Not because they were cruel but because they were honest. I could hear the truth in them, the genuine admiration threaded through the calculated manipulation, and that was worse than a lie.
A lie I could have hated cleanly. This required me to hold two incompatible truths at the same time and keep fighting anyway.
“It was always you,” I said. My voice came out flat. Good. Flat was all I could manage without the ice taking over.
Something shifted in his expression. The smile didn’t disappear but it changed shape, becoming less Holden and more Arik. The mask slipping.
“I’ve been everywhere, Dean. For a very long time.”
“You sent Damon to Nymeria. You knew what would happen to him.”
“It was time for the game to begin.”
The ice cracked along the frozen ground beneath my feet. “You used my brother as bait. You used my love for him to put me in her path. You engineered the whole thing.”
Arik’s eyes were old. Ancient. Full of a patience that no human face should have been able to hold.
“I put you in position. What happened after that was between you and fate.” A pause that was almost gentle.
“The bond is real, Dean. I didn’t create it.
I couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted to. I just made sure you were standing in the right place when it found you. ”
I attacked.
The fight was everything I’d trained for and nothing I’d prepared for.
Arik was faster than me. Stronger. His magic dwarfed mine the way an ocean dwarfed a river, and every blow I landed was absorbed into a depth of power that seemed to have no bottom.
I hit him with ice. He melted it. I drove a frozen blade at his throat.
He caught it barehanded and it shattered.
I threw everything the wolf had into a lunging strike and he sidestepped with the casual efficiency of a man avoiding a puddle.
But he wasn’t trying to kill me.
That was the part that made me want to scream.
He could have ended me six times in the first thirty seconds.
Instead he deflected, redirected, let my momentum carry me past him while he turned to track me with those ancient, patient eyes.
He was playing. Letting me exhaust myself against his defences the way a father lets a child swing at him with a wooden sword.
Because that was what I was to him. A child. A creation. A piece of raw material that he’d shaped into something useful and was now reluctant to destroy.
“You’re better than this,” he said, and the worst part was that he sounded like he meant it. “Stop fighting like a soldier. You’re not that anymore.”
“You made me a soldier.”
“I made you a weapon. You limited yourself to being just a man.” He blocked a strike that should have taken his arm off and pushed me back with a pulse of magic that sent me skidding across the frozen ground. “There’s a difference. I wish you could see it.”
I came at him again. Harder. Faster. The ice was singing in my veins now, the Winter Court magic that had been waiting for a true king for its throne responding to the proximity of the one who currently sat on it.
It wanted to be released. It wanted to flow into the vessel it recognised as its master.
I had tried to deny it, but I couldn’t any more. The ice was mine. Not his. Not the court’s. Mine. Whatever I became, whatever throne I claimed or rejected, the cold in my blood belonged to me and no one else. It had been with me for far longer than any magic had.
Arik caught my fist. Held it. The ice on my knuckles hissed against his palm and for the first time since the fight began, I saw something other than composed patience in his expression. Pain. The ice had burned him.
“Interesting,” he said, and let go.
I pressed the advantage. Two strikes, fast, exploiting the half-second of surprise. The first he blocked. The second found its mark, my frozen fist connecting with his jaw with a crack that sent a shockwave through the frozen air.
His head snapped to the side.
Silence. Or what passed for it on a battlefield. The creatures still fought. The armies still clashed. But in the small circle of dead grass where a boy confronted the monster who’d tried to change him, time seemed to hold its breath.
Arik touched his jaw. His fingers came away bloody.
He stared at the blood on his hand with an expression I couldn’t read. Surprise, maybe. Or something older than surprise. Something that looked almost like recognition. As if he’d forgotten that he could bleed and was having to relearn it in real time.
“Good,” he said quietly. And for a heartbeat, he sounded exactly like Holden praising a difficult technique executed well.
Then the mask resettled and his eyes went cold.
Arik stopped playing.
The shift was instantaneous. One moment he was deflecting my attacks with that infuriating patience. The next, the air between us compressed with enough force to crack the frozen ground and I was flying backward, skidding across the battlefield with ice shearing off my arms in sheets.
I hit something. A pile of fallen creatures, their bodies frozen where my magic had killed them. The impact drove the air from my lungs and the wolf howled in protest, scrabbling for control, wanting to shift and run and fight on four legs where two had failed.
Not yet.