Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
Tank
Ididn’t need Alyssa to tell me it was time, that was pretty obvious from the chaos that erupted across the battlefield as every Endless soldier dropped in a wave of anguish. It was heartbreaking to watch, but there was no time to mourn with these people who still needed our help.
Even so, I felt Alyssa reach for us all through the bond.
A pulse of certainty that cut through the chaos like a blade through water.
The Endless were freed. Damon was on his knees, spent but alive, the shadows settling around him like exhausted hounds.
Arik’s dark creatures were still fighting but there was a desperation about it now.
That last flailing snarl of a cornered animal knowing it was outmatched. But it wasn’t over yet.
Arik was cornered at the northern edge of the field.
His forces stripped. His shields gone. But all that power had returned to him and joined with whatever he’d been pulling from the realm.
He was still dangerous. More dangerous than anything I had ever faced.
A cornered god-child with nothing left to lose.
But Alyssa was ready. I could see it in the determined set of her face, even if it did make me sick to my stomach to see. It shouldn’t all be down to her. It was asking too much. Risking too much. There had to be a better way.
“I need to get to Arik and end this,” she said, and her voice was steady in a way that made the bear go very still. “I know what I need to do, but I’m going to need to concentrate to do it.”
She didn’t explain. She didn’t need to. I could feel it through the bond, the shape of what she was about to attempt.
Not killing Arik. Something deeper. Something that required her to leave her body standing on a battlefield, unprotected, while her consciousness went somewhere that none of us could follow.
“You’ll be vulnerable,” I said.
“Completely.”
The bear surged. Not against my control but with it. For the first time in my life, the bear and I wanted the exact same thing with the exact same ferocity, and the alignment of those two wills felt like tectonic plates locking into place.
“Nothing touches you,” I told her. “I’ve got you.”
She looked up at me. Small and fierce and burning with the light of five courts, the woman who had taken me on as a bear shifter that just needed a place in the human realm all those months ago and changed the trajectory of everything.
Her hand found mine. Her fingers were warm against my skin and the bond between us hummed with something that wasn’t entirely magic.
Just love. The simple, stubborn kind that held two people together when everything else was trying to tear them apart.
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m asking you.”
Alyssa squeezed my hand once with an almost sad look on her face before she let go, stepped forward, and closed her eyes.
Then the power of an entire realm blazed outward from her body like the birth of a star.
I staggered back a single step just from the sheer shock of the sight of it, but then I held my ground.
Alyssa’s hair rose in an otherworldly breeze, lifting around her in a golden halo. She took a deep breath, loosely holding her arms out to the side, as she started to raise in the air.
Her other mates had formed a perimeter around her without being told.
We looked to each other and a message passed wordlessly between us.
This would be the fight of our lives, and we all stood here, in a moment of silence on the battleword, making the same silent pledge.
Nothing got past us. No matter what it took.
Every single one of us would die right here, right now, if it would save the woman that held us all captivated.
We had fought together long enough that no words were needed. We all took position, tearing our gaze away from Alyssa and turning outward, ready to take on whatever Arik threw at us. Whatever he threw at her in an attempt to stop his inevitable end.
Dean took the south, ice spreading outward from his position in a frozen web that slowed anything that crossed it.
Ryder held the east, his storms concentrated into a tight, devastating curtain of wind and lightning.
Maddox took the west, fire burning in his hands with the steady, controlled heat that he had earned through grief and purpose.
Damon’s shadows filled the gaps, dark tendrils woven between the other positions, dragging down anything that tried to slip through.
He was exhausted, and yet to get back to his feet, but still he fed whatever he had left into the shadows to help as much as he could.
And that was where I came in.
I stood at the north. Between Alyssa and Arik.
I wasn’t afraid of getting hurt, I wasn’t afraid of losing myself to the bear anymore. This was what we’d been created for. And after all those years of sideways glances and standing on the outside, I’d finally found my purpose.
The bear pressed against the walls of my control and I let it come closer.
Not all the way. Not yet. But closer than I had allowed in years, the beast’s presence expanded through my body until I could feel the Spring Court magic responding.
The land beneath my feet hummed with recognition.
The roots reached up. The soil shifted, compacting around my boots as if the earth itself was anchoring me in place.
Alyssa’s body went still behind me. Her eyes were open but seeing nothing. Whatever she had planned, it was about to start.
Her body stood on the battlefield like an empty house with the lights on.
Completely. Vulnerable.
And that was when the first wave of Arik’s desperate attempt to stay alive crashed into us.
The dark creatures hit us first. Arik’s remaining forces, the twisted things that had survived up until now, threw themselves at our perimeter with the mindless desperation of insects drawn to flame.
They weren’t coordinated anymore. Whatever intelligence had been directing them was fractured, Arik’s attention consumed by whatever Alyssa was doing.
But they were still dangerous. They outnumbered us to the point of insanity and through it all they were still driven by a primal hunger fixated on one thing. Alyssa. My mate.
Dean’s ice caught the first wave. The frozen web slowed them, trapped them, and Dean’s wolf tore through the ones that got stuck. Ryder’s storms hammered the second wave, lightning arcing from creature to creature in a chain of electrical death, whilst Maddox’s fire consumed those that remained.
But the waves just kept coming.
I sent my magic into the ground, feeling the Spring Court eager to heed my call. Roots and brambles shot from the earth, wrapping around limbs and insectoid bodies. Gauging and tearing. I sliced through any that dared to set foot in this place.
But at a certain point, magic wasn’t enough. And whilst we were thinning out there numbers, some were slipping through our barriers, creeping closer and closer.
There was only one choice.
The bear was right there, pressed against the inside of my skin, and the Spring magic poured through the contact like water through a broken dam.
It was time to unleash the berserker.
The bear tore out of me with a roar. One moment I was a man, and the next I was the beast. Every emotion felt a thousand times concentrated when the berserker inside him was set free from the chains I’d wrapped around my mind.
All I could feel right now was an overwhelming need to protect that burned white hot next to the rage that fully encapsulated the berserkers view of the world.
The creatures in front of me fell back a step in shock. They knew a predator when they saw one. It was the last mistake they’d make. They should have run while they still had the chance.
My claws slashed through the nearest creature like it was nothing more than tissue paper. The Spring Court magic made the earth beneath the creatures’ legs soft, swallowing them to the knees, holding them in place while I tore them apart.
The bear was thorough in his brutality, but this was a lesson for the creatures we face. A demonstration of what would happen to them if they didn’t turn back now.
The bear wanted more. It wanted to be free. For those last few chains to be broken and his full rage to descend onto the battlefield. He was ready to become the thing that every predator in Nymeria had learned to fear the wrong being. The berserker intended to correct their mistake.
Not yet, I told it. Not yet.
This was a delicate moment in the fight we faced.
We needed their fear, their hesitation. Because at the end of the day, we were vastly outnumbered and the rest of our forces were too busy trying to ensure the safety of the Endless who had been freed.
There was no one coming to reinforce our circle of protection around our mate.
We were it. Her only defence. And we need these creatures to withdraw, to decide the risk was too great, that the battle was already lost and flee.
The last thing we needed was them to realise they had a chance if they overwhelmed us all at once.
“What are they waiting for?” Damon grumbled from somewhere behind me.
I couldn’t answer him with anything more than a snarl of frustration. Because as much as I knew how significant this moment was, there was also a part of me that wanted them to come. That wanted to feel the blood dripping from my claws and see the terror in their eyes.
The strike came from nowhere.