XXXII
Branches ripped at my skin like chipped teeth as I crashed through the treeline, my lungs burning for air that wasn’t thick with ash.
Behind me, the hounds came hard—paws hammering the earth like falling stones.
I fumbled for my purse, my fingers numb.
I needed the salt.
The gun.
A miracle.
A shadow lunged from my periphery, not for my throat, but for my legs. An oily limb hooked my ankles. My feet shot out from under me, and I hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud, sliding through dirt and pine.
The purse strap snapped.
Everything inside scattered into the dark.
I scrambled on my hands and knees, clawing through leaves until my fingers brushed cold metal.
The pistol.
I yanked it free and spun toward the trees, arms locking, finger trembling on the trigger—
—and the breath died in my throat.
The hound didn’t lunge.
It sauntered into a patch of moonlight, an ink-black mass of muscle and smoke. Its head tilted with sickeningly human curiosity, obsidian needle-teeth bared in a silent snarl.
My hands shook so violently that the barrel danced.
I had never fired a gun. The mechanics were a foreign language.
The hound sensed my hesitation.
It pounced.
It hit me like a freight train, driving into my chest with enough force to send me flying backward. I slammed into a rock wall; the impact detonated up my spine. My head struck stone, pain blooming sharp and white at my temples as the air ripped from my lungs.
I slid down the rock, my vision swimming in gray and red.
The gun skidded into the shadows.
Lost.
The hound advanced, its oily weight pressing into the dirt. It leaned down and placed one massive black paw against the hollow of my throat.
I gasped, vocal cords straining. The limb felt like liquid ice, bruising me as it fastened me to the earth. My hands flew up, clawing uselessly at its smoky weight.
As the world dimmed, my gaze landed on my wrist.
The silver bracelet.
The runes weren’t just glowing.
They were screaming. They pulsed with a light that mirrored the thrash of my heart.
Use it.
I didn’t have the strength to push the beast off.
Just enough to lift my arm and smash my wrist into the hard-packed earth beside my head.
Click.
The world exploded.
A ring of gold light erupted from the bracelet, spiraling outward in razor-thin arcs that hissed through the dark. The hound let out a high, glitched whimper as it was thrown back and suspended midair inside a shimmering geometric lattice.
It twitched, like a fly trapped in molten glass, its form flickering between solid and static.
I staggered to my feet, one hand flying to my bruised throat. My breath came in ragged hitches.
A low warning hum vibrated from the bracelet.
The light flickered.
The runes were fading, struggling to hold the weight of the shadow. A hairline crack split the golden net.
I didn’t wait for the glass to break.
Behind me, the forest erupted in a fresh chorus of howls. The net shattered with a crystalline fracture, raining dying sparks through the dark.
I bolted.
Every breath was a mouthful of broken glass.
The ground pitched upward into a slick, treacherous incline. My legs burned, trembling, desperate to outrun the snarls gaining on my heels.
Then the slope vanished.
Loose shale slipped under my foot. My next step kicked uselessly at empty air.
Gravity seized me.
The world flipped. Dirt and stone slammed into my shoulder, my spine, my hips. I tumbled in a blur of pain and darkness until my momentum stopped.
Not against earth.
Against a tree.
The impact was a sickening crunch.
Air fled my lungs in a soundless scream as my body folded around the massive trunk of an ancient oak. I crumpled at its base, just feet from a sheer cliff edge.
A brutal blessing.
I rolled onto my side, cheek pressed to the freezing ground. Copper flooded my mouth. My vision distorted. Frost billowed from my lips in thin ribbons.
The shaking wasn’t the ground.
It was me.
I tried to lift my arm. The command died somewhere between my brain and my fingertips.
I was shattered.
This is it, a voice whispered.
This is how you die.
The snarling returned.
The hound didn’t run. It crawled down the slope in an unnatural descent, limbs bent at impossible angles, its oily body trailing behind it like a funeral shroud.
It paused above me, needle-teeth gnashing in anticipation.
I watched it come, eyes wide and stinging. A sound scraped out of me—thin, broken, pathetic.
“Please—”
Darkness swallowed the plea whole.
The hound’s weight crashed onto my chest, its teeth snapping inches from my throat.
I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for the wet tear of flesh.
Instead, the pressure vanished.
The beast hadn’t been shoved away or thrown off.
It was just gone.
Air rushed back into my lungs in a painful, fiery surge. My eyes fluttered open.
Heaton stood over me.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the hound he held aloft by its throat with a single hand, its legs kicking uselessly in the air.
“One for the blood . . . ”
He twisted his wrist.
There was no crack of bone, only the sickening tear of fabric and shadow. The creature’s form dissolved into a cloud of inky tendrils that rained down around me, cold and smelling of decay.
Before the last tendril hit the ground, the second hound lunged.
Heaton didn’t turn.
He stepped into the shadow of the tree and simply ceased to exist.
A heartbeat later, he materialized behind the beast, his movements a blur of lethal geometry. He caught it by the scruff, swung it like a flail, and slammed it into the nearest tree.
The impact left a smear of ink across the bark.
“Two for the bone . . . ”
The third hound froze, pawing the ground.
Heaton finally looked at it.
A flicker of bored contempt crossed his face.
He didn’t move toward it. He lifted only his hand.
Cold blue fire erupted from his palm and struck the hound mid-leap. The creature didn’t have time to whimper. It ignited in a brilliant, silent flash of violet.
Then it was gone.
Not ash.
Not oil.
Just a void where it had been.
“And three for the shadow that sits on the throne.”
Silence.
Then the treeline writhed.
Four—no, five—more silhouettes detached themselves from the dark, oily forms creeping forward, testing the space between him and me.
Heaton turned his silver gaze on them.
His pupils widened until his eyes became twin voids.
“You’re out of turns.”
The lead hound growled low, its smoke-tail tucked as it scrambled back up the slope. The others followed, their shapes unraveling into the trees.
Heaton didn’t chase. He only growled after them—a feral, tectonic vibration that did not belong in a human throat.
The shadows peeled away like smoke in a gale and vanished.
The only sound left in the woods was the ragged, liquid mess of my breathing.
The rage in Heaton’s eyes didn’t fade. He stumbled, catching himself on the tree trunk as the blue fire at his fingertips sputtered and died. The void receded from his pupils, leaving behind a stormy, exhausted silver.
Then he saw me.
A broken bird in a shredded angel costume collapsed in the frozen dirt.
“Fuck.”
The word was raw.
He was suddenly beside me, dropping to his knees, his hands hovering over my body with a frantic energy I had never seen in him before. He looked as if he wanted to gather me up, but was terrified his touch would finish what the hounds had started.
“Hey. Hey, stay with me.” His voice shook once before he forced it steady. “Look at me, October.”
“I—can’t.”
The word splintered in my throat. Blood warmed my upper lip.
His gaze swept over me, cataloging the damage: the purple bloom at my throat, the blood at my temple, the shallow, uneven hitch of my chest.
“Damn it,” he breathed.
He looked at his own hands, then back at the treeline, a desperate, dark calculation moving behind his eyes.
“Okay,” he said too softly. “Listen to me.”
His hand hovered over my ribs, trembling once before he forced it still.
“I can stop the bleeding. I can keep your heart working long enough to get you out.”
His eyes found mine, silver and furious.
“But I’d have to bind us.”
I tried to answer. Blood moved hot and metallic over my lip instead.
He leaned closer, his forehead nearly touching mine.
“It’s a soul bond,” he said. “A tether. Permanent, unless someone strong enough knows how to cut it. A piece of you bound to me, and a piece of me bound to you. Risky. Dangerous. But I don’t see another way.”
My eyes fluttered. I didn’t truly understand. I couldn’t. But I understood the look in his eyes—the raw, bleeding fear that I was going to lose this fight.
“I need your permission, Madeline. Say yes, or I can’t make it hold.”
I nodded.
A tiny, pathetic movement, but it was all I had left.
He exhaled a broken breath and slid one arm beneath my back, lifting me into his lap. My head fell against his shoulder, and the cold of him hit me in a violent rush, stealing what little air I had left.
His hand hovered over my sternum. Right over my failing heart.
“Madeline,” he said. “Look at me.”
I forced my eyes open.
His breath trembled against my skin.
“You have no idea what you are, do you?”
I wanted to ask.
I wanted to scream.
But the cold was dragging at my ribs, dimming the world to a single point of silver light in his eyes.
“Whatever you feel,” he whispered, fingers splaying over my skin, “whatever you see—you hold on to me. Understand?”
He looked away first.
“Don’t let go.”
Then he pushed.
The world didn’t just ignite.
It was atomized.
Raw power tore through my marrow, a violent current ripping up my spine and crackling across my skin like lightning over water. My vision shattered white. The forest, the dirt, the pain—all of it dissolved.
There was only him.
The moment his power struck mine, a force detonated between us.
Two rival currents fusing into one violent river.
Power erupted in my chest, pressurized heat ripping a scream from my throat.
Heaton gasped against my skin, a sound halfway between a sob and a prayer.
“Madeline . . . ”
Something very old stirred beneath my ribs—a molten gold rising to meet his silver frost.
A thread of light spilled from my sternum, weaving through his fingers, climbing his arm, and plunging straight into his chest.
No forest.
No monsters.
Just the two of us suspended inside a shimmering nexus, our atoms stitching together.
Heart to heart.
Soul to soul.
Fire flooded my veins, filling every frozen, broken place. The bond pulsed once.
Twice.
Then locked.
Heaton shuddered, pulling me closer until there was no space left between us. His lips brushed my temple as the bond flared.
For one perfect heartbeat, my warmth met his cold.
I balanced him. I met him spark for spark.
But I wasn’t ready for the sheer, infinite depth of him. His coldness surged back. Ancient and elemental. Unforgiving.
My warmth flickered, stuttered like a dying candle—then collapsed.
His expression broke open.
Raw terror surfaced in his eyes.
I had seen his rage.
His control.
But this—this absolute fear—was new.
“Don’t you dare,” he hissed, forehead pressing into mine as shadows swirled around us in a violent storm. “Breathe.”
My heart gave one last shallow kick.
He caught me as I went limp, his fingers digging into my waist with desperate, iron strength.
“I didn’t bind our souls so you could leave me with half of one.” His voice cracked. “Give me one more breath. I’ll do the rest.”
But the cold rushed in, a tidal wave of ice and shadow. My fingers curled into his shirt as darkness dragged me under.
He lifted me, gathering me against his chest.
I was a broken mess of lace and blood, but in his arms, the world finally stopped spinning. My head dropped into the crook of his neck, and the scent of woodsmoke and rain-drenched pine flooded my senses.
Behind us, snarls rose through the trees—a cacophony of hunger that vibrated through the shale. The pack had returned, a shifting sea of obsidian teeth closing around us.
Heaton didn’t flinch.
He turned toward the pitch-black abyss at the cliff’s edge.
The wind howled, tearing at the white lace of my costume.
“I told you, mutts.”
He looked back at the nightmares, his voice cutting through the night with terrifying clarity.
“Mine.”
He tightened his hold, one arm locked beneath my knees, the other at my waist, pulling me flush against the hard line of his chest.
“Heaton,” I rasped.
The dizzying height of the cliffs clawed at my throat. He looked down at me, and a soft, ruinous smile touched his mouth.
“Don’t worry, little skeptic.”
His voice was the last thing I could hold on to.
“I’ve got you.”
He didn’t hesitate.
He took one confident step backward—off the edge of the world.
And everything went black.