Chapter 32
Wren
Sylvin emerges first with eyes blazing and snow clinging to his shoulders.
Torryn is right behind him, broad-shouldered and furious.
Riven appears a breath later, his black clothes stark against the glare of the portal, red gaze already hunting through the crowd.
Azyric is last, shadows dragging through the opening as his silver eyes flick over every threat with calculated ease.
A sob of relief rips from me, dragging their eyes down to where I’m cradling Ryoden’s body, scared to even check if he still has a pulse.
Torryn is suddenly there, dropping to a knee beside me, reaching for me. “Wren, sweetheart, we have to go,” he urges, voice low and urgent. “Now.”
Riven’s hand closes around my arm, warm and impossibly gentle amid the chaos.
“No!” The word rips out of me as I tighten my grip on Ryoden, one blood-slicked hand still pressed against his chest. “Not without them!”
The humans nearest us stumble back, some shouting and scrambling away. The General’s face goes pale with shock before smoothing into sharp fury.
Sylvin doesn’t give any of them a chance to react.
He lifts one hand and ice surges up from the floor just in front of Eli and down from the ceiling in a thick, opaque wall that slams into place between us and the rest of the ballroom.
Gunfire erupts immediately, bullets slamming into the ice with dull thuds, but the barrier holds.
For now.
“Move!” Sylvin snaps loudly. “We don’t have much time until they likely bring in a hell of a lot more firepower on their end.”
“We can’t stay,” Riven says, leaning close enough that his breath brushes my cheek. Gunshots hammer the other side of the ice in a steady, terrifying rhythm. “They’ll break through. We have to get you out.”
“Then take them first,” I snap, jerking my chin toward Ryoden and Eli. “I’m not leaving without them.”
Riven and Torryn’s fingers pause on me simultaneously just as Azyric looks up sharply.
“Wren,” Sylvin starts, voice cutting through the barrage. “We will always keep the promises we make to you, but we agreed to a ceasefire, not a rescue mission for every human you take pity on.”
Rage and terror spike together so hard I almost choke on them.
“They’re not every human,” I say, the words scraping my throat. “They are my humans. They protected me. They have tried to help me build something better. I will not walk through that portal and leave them here to die because it’s inconvenient for you.”
Another volley hits the ice and cracks spread across the surface in thin, white fractures. Each impact sends a tremor through the barrier that I feel all the way down my spine.
“Wren,” Azyric bites out, his silver gaze flashing with anger. “You are seconds away from being riddled with bullets. This kindness you cling to is going to get you killed.”
“Then let it,” I spit back, chest heaving. “I’m not abandoning them.”
“My ice won’t hold much longer,” Sylvin warns, voice clipped. “We either go now, or the only way we walk out of here is by demolishing this building and every human in it.”
“Eli and Ryoden go through with us or I’ll willingly die here alongside them,” I snap.
For a heartbeat, no one speaks until Azyric exhales and his shadows writhe around his boots, reacting to his frustration. “She’s going to be the end of us,” he says flatly.
“And yet,” Riven replies, voice softer as his fingers lightly squeeze my arm once more, “we are all still standing here.”
Torryn’s hand closes around my jaw, warm and firm, tilting my gaze toward his. His golden eyes burn, but his voice is steady.
“Listen to me,” he orders.
I do, because I always have. He’s always been the voice of reason, through it all, even when it wasn’t what he wanted.
“We’ll take him,” he says, letting his fingers fall away from my jaw. “But you have to let go of him so I can carry him. Do you understand? The longer we argue, the more he bleeds out and the less of a chance we have to help.”
I look down and notice Ryoden’s face has lost a tremendous amount of color. His chest rises in shallow, uneven jerks under my hand. Outside the thin bubble of my focus, gunfire, shouting, and alarms blend into a single relentless roar.
I have to trust the kings, more than ever.
My throat tightens, but I force myself to loosen my grip on Ryoden. “Okay.”
Torryn slips his arms beneath Ryoden’s back and knees with care, lifting his limp body as if he weighs nothing.
In front of us, Azyric’s shadows lash out, snapping up the back of Eli’s uniform like a living hand. Eli yelps as his feet skid backward, but he doesn’t fight it; he keeps his gun pointed toward the ice as he’s dragged in our direction.
The wall shudders again. A spray of ice shards explodes inward from a point of impact, peppering Sylvin’s shoulder and cheek with flecks of blood.
Riven is at my side in an instant, one hand at the small of my back, the other curling around my blood-slicked fingers. His touch is firm but gentle as he lifts me to my feet, ready to guide me toward the portal that still yawns open, spilling blue-white light and icy air into the ruined ballroom.
“Trust us,” he murmurs into my ear. “We will not let them touch you or your precious humans.”
Torryn follows a step behind us, Ryoden cradled against his chest, his head lolling against the shifter king’s collarbone.
Eli stumbles at Azyric’s side, shadows still clamped on his uniform, wide eyes flicking between the ice wall and the impossible tear in reality he’s about to be dragged through.
Sylvin brings up the rear, hand outstretched, power still pouring into the ice even as he backs toward his portal.
Bullets keep hammering against the barrier, the cracks spreading like spiderwebs over glass. Somewhere beyond the ice, someone is bellowing orders that will come too late as we all step into the portal and light swallows us whole.
The world squeezes around us as the dizzying sensation of being pulled through space greets me once more. For a breathless moment there’s no up, no down, only the pull of magic before we stumble out onto a solid floor.
The air is cold and dry, sharp with the scent of fresh snow and evergreens. Sylvin’s castle hall stretches around us, high-vaulted and echoing. Behind us, the portal snaps shut with a crack and for a heartbeat, everything is too quiet.
Then I remember how to breathe and pull from Riven’s light grasp and toward Torryn, breathless as panic grips me once more.
He’s already lowering Ryoden to the floor as gently as he can.
I drop to my knees beside them, the bloody skirt of my dress pooling around me, fingers immediately pressing back over the wound that still freely bleeds in his chest.
Without the roar of gunfire, all that’s left that matters is saving him. Everything else can wait.
“Ryoden,” I whisper frantically, leaning over him. “Ryoden, please. You have to wake up. You have to hold on. We’re safe now.”
His eyelids flutter, but they don’t open.
His breathing is so shallow I have to lean close to feel it brush my cheek.
My heart feels like it’s rattling against my ribs, trying to claw its way out.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to heal him and I’ve never heard of anyone’s magic throughout the factions that can.
Footsteps pound from the far end of the hall and I don’t look up until a familiar voice reaches me.
“Wren?”
Natasha.
I lift my head and there she is, hair braided back, skirts hitched in one fist as she runs toward me, eyes wide. She takes in the scene before her in a single sweeping glance—blood, kings, two humans—and then she’s moving again, dropping to her knees on my side.
“Oh, god,” she breathes. “What happened?”
“They shot him,” I choke out, hardly recognizing my own voice as it breaks. “He stood between me and them and—”
Words fail me as the images flash through me: the jerk of his body, the warmth spilling over my hands, the way he smiled at me even as he bled out.
Natasha leans over to press her fingers to his neck and her face tightens.
“We don’t have the power to heal him…” she trails off, swallowing hard. “We can try to slow the bleeding, but Wren, I don’t—”
“No.” The denial tears out of me. Tears spill hot and unstoppable down my face, landing on his chest and mixing with the blood. “No. You’re supposed to say there’s something. You’re supposed to say you can fix this.”
She reaches for me then, one arm wrapping around me tightly, as if she can hold me together. But the tender touch nearly undoes me.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers and I feel her eyes sweeping over me. “Are you hurt?”
The kindness in her voice—the concern for me, even now—is the final blow. I sag forward, pressing my forehead to Ryoden’s, my fingers knotting in the torn fabric at his chest.
“I’m not,” I say, the words coming out on a broken sob. “I’m not okay. This is all my fault. Every bit of this is my fault for asking too much of him.”
Natasha shifts closer, wrapping her free arm around my shoulders as she leans down to hold me once more. I openly sob beneath her touch as I uselessly press against Ryoden’s wound.
“I brought him into this,” I whisper, words tumbling out because there’s no containing them anymore. “I let him get close. I let him care and he—he kept choosing me, over and over, when he should have just thrown me out of his city the first day we met.”
My throat burns and my chest aches. Grief, guilt, and fury twist together until I can’t tell where one ends and the next begins.
“If I had just moved to another city, or left when the kings came to the wall,” I choke out brokenly, “he wouldn’t be lying here dying just because he believed me when I said I was trying to save the world.”
Natasha’s grip tightens. “Wren—”
“I can’t lose him,” I say, voice splintering as my body shakes. “I can’t—”
The rest dissolves into another gasping sob. I press my face into the curve of his neck, feeling the faint, slowing pulse.