Chapter 44
ESME
Ican’t move. I can’t even seem to draw a full breath. I stare at Esther, my heart hammering against my ribs.
She looks back at me, her dark, void-like eyes unblinking.
“Take a seat, Esme, won’t you?” she finally says. Her voice is the same—crisp, authoritative, familiar—but she’s speaking out loud like someone inhabiting the mortal realm, not via any spiritual link.
Her tone carries a deeper quality than I’m used to.
“What the hell is this?” I don’t move toward the chair. I can’t. “Why do you look like… that?”
I gesture wildly at her face, at the way the shadows behind her irises swirl, resembling an Ide’s.
“Let’s discuss over brunch,” Esther says. She completely ignores Dayn, as if he’s nothing more than a piece of furniture. Her focus is laser-like, locked entirely on me. “You’ve had a long journey, and you look famished.”
I feel Dayn’s grip tighten, a silent question in the pressure of his fingers.
I glance toward the others already seated—Uncle Edwin, Aunt Maelis, and my cousins.
I scan their faces, looking for the telltale signs of Ide-possession.
They look pale, gripped by confusion, and they’re looking at Esther with the same unsettled expression as I am.
For now, it doesn’t look like they’re being piloted.
Reluctantly, I take a seat with Dayn, the table’s surface feeling cold beneath my palms. Dominic seats himself opposite us.
“How?” I demand, ignoring the steam rising from a plate of hash browns that I’m certain would taste like ash to me right now. “How is this possible?” And why?
Dominic clears his throat. “Esme, your grandmother has ascended to Idehood.”
“Ascended?” I snap. “What does that even mean? You can’t just… change your species of dead.”
“The initiation is not that difficult, provided one has the requisite will and a sufficiently powerful anchor,” Dominic explains, his dark eyes fixed on me.
“It is a matter of frequency. Most spirits settle into the grid because it is easy—a comfortable echo of their former lives. But an Ide is a spirit that refuses the echo. By drawing on the latent energy of the veil itself and refusing the ‘rest’ promised by the ancestral lines, a spirit can re-forge its essence. Esther chose to step out of the cycle. She reached into the void I opened and pulled herself into a higher state of being. That’s the high-level view, anyway.
I’d be glad to share the exact spell-work. ”
“I chose to be what my family needed,” Esther adds, her voice cold. “An ancestor is limited. An Ide can act.”
“And what exactly are you planning to act on?” I demand.
Before she can answer, a horn blasts from the eastern ramparts—a long, low note that signals a breach. I’m on my feet before the sound dies, but Esther remains seated, a strangely calm smile playing on her lips.
“The new world is arriving, Esme,” she whispers. “Try not to be late for it.”
The horn blast hasn’t even finished before I hear mechanical whining. It’s a high-pitched, abrasive sound and it’s coming from the eastern treeline.
I reach for the shadows, my fingers already curling into claws, but I freeze.
Bursting through the ancient yews is a phalanx of clearbloods.
They’re all clad in now-familiar, matte-black tactical gear.
Some wield long, sleek rifles that pulse with their sickening blue hybrid magic, with canisters emitting that awful sound strapped to their chests.
Others appear to carry no exterior weapons at all.
Knowing what some can do without any weapons now, I’m not sure which I fear most.
“Clearbloods,” Jax snarls, his eyes already bleeding into that obsidian depth that signals, I guess, Dad is taking the wheel.
“How?” Mom gasps, her hand flying to the suppression bracelet on her wrist. “There’s no way they could get in—”
“The perimeter is working perfectly well, Marie,” Esther says, her voice smooth. “Stay calm.”
Meanwhile, she hasn’t even stood up. She’s just watching, her dark eyes reflecting the bluish glow of the approaching weapons.
Nothing about this is adding up, and I really, really need it to start adding up.
The next thing I know, the clearbloods are unleashing arcs of their lethal, hybrid magic.
“Esme, get down!” Dayn growls.
He lunges forward, his skin already surging with the heat of the dragon, and drags me behind a tree, his body covering me like a shield.
At that same, exact moment, I catch a glimpse of an arc of liquid black magic shooting out, clashing with the clearbloods’ energy mid-air.
I realize that, slowly, Dominic’s standing up.
He pushes his chair back with a soft scrape that somehow cuts through the mechanical hum of the clearblood tech. He looks almost bored.
“Gentlemen,” Dominic says, his voice carrying effortlessly around the clearing. “You’ve interrupted our breakfast.”
“Fire!” the clearblood commander yells.
Blue light erupts from twenty barrels at once. A concentrated blast of energy that would have turned any darkblood into a pile of ash and atoms.
Dominic doesn’t flinch. The violent energy pools around him as if it’s water hitting a pane of glass, sliding harmlessly off some kind of invisible barrier.
He reaches out a hand and catches one of the bolts in mid-air.
He somehow holds the jagged energy between his thumb and forefinger, examining it like a curious insect.
“Impressive engineering,” he muses. “But you’ve forgotten the first rule of the void.”
He closes his hand. The energy turns black.
The black energy surges out from Dominic’s fist, twisting and expanding into a writhing mass that engulfs the clearbloods’ next volley mid-air.
It devours, pulling their blue energy into itself, growing denser, hungrier.
The air crackles with an unnatural chill, and I feel the pull of it in my bones, a void that seems to tug at every magical thread around us.
Dominic raises his other hand, casual as if swatting a fly, and the shadow erupts forward. It slams into the clearblood ranks like a tidal wave of night. Screams erupt as the darkness wraps their limbs, and the next thing I know, they, themselves, are little more than a pile of ash.
It’s simply… annihilation.
Dominic steps forward, still unhurried, and the shadows obey him like extensions of his will. A few try to run, but the darkness chases them, tendrils snaking out to drag them back, their cries cut short.
The Ide power radiates from him, raw and absolute, making the air thick, the ground actually tremble faintly underfoot. I’ve never seen anything like it—control so complete it’s almost intoxicating to watch, but absolutely and utterly terrifying.
In seconds, the graveyard falls quiet again, littered with ashen remnants. Dominic stands there, untouched, not even breathing hard, as if he’s just finished a light stroll.
Then he vanishes into the woods, moving with that same unnatural grace, shadows trailing him like a cloak. The rest of us are left staring, my family exchanging wide-eyed looks while Esther watches with a serene smile, like this is exactly what she expected.
Minutes tick by, maybe three, before Dominic reappears, stepping back into the clearing as calmly as he left. The air around him hums with residual power.
“Every last clearblood has been eliminated,” he says, his voice even, almost conversational.
He takes his seat again like nothing happened.
“A few Darkbirch spies played double agent, liaised with them, and let them inside.” His gaze locks on mine, dark and intense.
“I wanted to demonstrate the importance—and power—of this alliance to you. The alliance between darkbloods and Ides... There’s little we won’t be able to accomplish together, no matter what advancements the other parties make. ”
He says it like it’s meant for me, his words wrapping around my thoughts with a weight that’s unnerving. Yet I can’t tear my eyes away. My mind’s reeling.
The sheer dominance of what he just did—a single Ide obliterating an entire squad equipped with their most advanced weapons, without breaking a sweat—leaves me stunned, my pulse still thundering in my ears.
It’s power on a scale I didn’t think possible, not even from an Ide.
And part of me is horrified at how easily he wielded it.
Esther’s smile widens, her void-like eyes gleaming with an excitement that’s almost feverish.
This is her vision, I realize—the next evolution for the darkbloods.
She didn’t just support the Ides; she became one herself, stepping into this new form without telling me, without warning.
I never imagined she’d go this far, actually becoming. .. this. Whatever “this” is.
“The alliance is just as important as it was a few weeks ago,” Esther adds. “We’ve received intelligence that dragons and clearbloods have actually begun to collude, to an extent, in an attempt to react to our developing warpower.”
“You can’t be serious,” Nyv says. “Dragons and clearbloods? Colluding?”
Esther nods. “Tactical necessity does, occasionally, overcome enmity.”
I glance at Dayn and find his expression already darkening, which tells me he doesn’t think it’s impossible.
After all, based on history he previously recounted to me, dragons and clearbloods have colluded before.
And he already warned me that the Ides were unlikely to be the end of problems. Just the beginning of new ones.
Then again, it’s hard to see what the dragons and clearbloods could come up with to counteract this kind of defense.
Not that I want to rely fully on the Ides.
Because something in my bones just tells me I absolutely don’t.
I don’t want to be beholden to any particular power.
A single point of dependence—or failure—is never a good idea.