Chapter 43
The Inevitable
The door slams shut behind me and the sound disappears into everything waiting outside.
The women move quickly, one dragging the bolt into place while the other presses her hand flat against the wood, her voice low as something unseen tightens across the frame.
I feel it faintly, a ward pulled into place too quickly, too thin for what is coming.
Another impact hits the door, hard enough to shake it.
I turn toward the window before the thought finishes forming.
Colsar is still outside.
Frost spreads across the glass, but there is still enough to see through, enough to understand what we have stepped into.
What had been scattered moments ago has become something else entirely, bodies forcing their way up through the snow and dragging themselves forward in numbers that build too fast to make sense.
Some collapse as Colsar reaches them, torn apart with force, but it changes nothing.
More take their place. More rise. More push forward, and behind them more still.
The horizon shifts with the sheer weight of what is out there, an endless dark mass moving through the storm toward a single point.
Toward him.
Fire comes in controlled bursts, sweeping low and catching several at once, bodies collapsing where they stand, but the line does not thin.
It cannot thin. There are too many, far too many for one person regardless of what that person is capable of, and the understanding of that settles into me like cold water finding every crack it can.
He is out there alone.
I keep my eyes on the window, on the way the mass beyond it continues to grow, and the understanding comes quickly and without resistance.
This is too much. I reach for Syle without thinking, pushing outward with my mind the way I have before, trying to find him, to force anything through the distance between us.
Nothing answers. The effort breaks apart almost immediately, weak and unfocused, slipping before it can take hold of anything real, and another wave of pain washes over my abdomen.
I let it go.
"They should not be gathering like this," one of the women says behind me, her voice strained despite the control she tries to hold. "The outer wards should have kept them scattered."
The other woman studies me more closely. "It is not just that," she says quietly, and then after a moment, "something here is drawing them."
My hand goes to my belly.
Another impact hits the door, the wood groaning deeper this time, and from outside comes the sound that I will not be able to unhear, low and layered and vast, the collective noise of something that does not tire, does not feel, does not stop.
Thousands of them pressing through the storm with the patience of things that have nowhere else to be and nothing left to lose.
And only Colsar between them and this door.
Fear moves through me, sharp and immediate, the kind that does not respond to reason.
"We cannot hold them here," the older woman says. "There is a lower level. Narrow, easier to ward. You will be safer below." She moves toward the back wall and pulls aside a shelf to reveal a narrow door set into the stone behind it, a steep stair dropping down into darkness.
Before I can answer, the window explodes inward.
Glass scatters across the floor as a body forces its way through, hitting the ground hard and lunging straight for me. I react on instinct, light surging up immediate and controlled as I drive it forward.
Pain tears across my abdomen.
It hits hard and low, dragging through my pelvis with enough force to break my focus completely.
The light collapses before it can form and my body folds around the pain as the thing reaches me, crashing into me and driving me backward, its hands clawing for purchase, its hollow pit eyes fixed on nothing and everything at once.
Something rips into my side, low along my ribs.
Colsar comes through the window in the next instant, tearing it off me and throwing it aside before it can latch on again. He ends it quickly and turns as the door shudders under another blow.
"They will break through," he says.
"I know."
I push myself up and the pain returns the moment I do, stronger than before, forcing me to stop halfway through the motion. I brace against the table, my breath tightening as I try to hold myself upright.
My hand goes to my side and warmth spreads beneath the fabric. When I pull it away there is blood.
Colsar sees it. "Asharin."
"I am fine," I say, though the words come thinner than I intend.
He is already beside me. "What happened?"
"I was hit," I say.
The older woman steps closer, her expression tightening. "You were bitten."
"No," Colsar says.
My hand finds the vial without searching for it.
He sees it immediately. "No," he says again, already moving.
I pull it free and drink it before he reaches me, the burn spreading outward at once, leaving no room for hesitation.
"Asharin—"
"Take care of them for me," I say.
The words come clean, carried through the pain without wavering. His face shifts immediately, something breaking open beneath the surface of everything he has been holding since we left the chambers.
"We knew this could happen," I continue, forcing the words through the tightening already building again. "If I was bitten, it could harm them. This was always the plan."
His hand closes around my arm. "Not like this. Not here."
From outside the sound rises again, that vast low groan rolling beneath the wind, and I feel the fear return with it, sharper this time, because he will go back out into that and there is nothing I can do about it and we both know it.
Another wave tears across my abdomen, stronger than the last, dragging through my pelvis and pulling the breath from me.
"The only way to save them is to bring them now," I say.
One of the women steps closer. "She was going to deliver anyway. I saw it the moment she came through the door. Her body had already begun. This only forced it faster."
Another wave pulls through me and this time I cannot stop the sound that follows.
"She is in labor," the older woman says. "If she delivers here she may not survive it, but there is no going back now."
Above us something cracks, wood splintering under the weight of what is pressing against it, and the groan outside swells in response, hundreds of voices that are no longer voices at all rising together as though the storm itself has learned to speak.
Colsar does not move immediately. He looks at me, and then he steps closer, one hand coming up to my face and holding me there through the pain that keeps trying to pull me under.
"You do not die here," he says quietly, and it is not a plea.
I look at him and I think about what is waiting for him on the other side of that door, the sheer impossible number of them, the storm, the dark, and him alone in the middle of all of it, and the fear does not leave. It does not ease. I hold it anyway.
Another impact shakes the house. He lowers his hand and pulls away before he can hesitate, crossing the room quickly and taking what he can carry without slowing himself.
Food, water, blankets from the chest near the corner, everything that might matter if we are forced below longer than expected.
He brings it back and presses it into their hands.
"Take her down," he says.
They move at once, guiding me toward the narrow stair as another wave tears through me and forces me forward. I grip the table, then the wall, then them, anything that keeps me upright.
At the top of the stair I turn back. He is already moving toward the door and does not look back again.
And then he is gone.