5 Reed #2
I summoned every ounce of bedrock strength left in my bones, pivoted on my heel, and hurled my sister’s body thirty feet backward across the bay—clear of the pillars, clear of the beacon, straight into the fireproof corridor where the ceiling collapse couldn’t touch a hair on her head.
“AVALINE!” I spun and caught Avaline by the waist with my good arm, hauling her flush against my chest, throwing my back to the center of the room. “DEL—GO! Move the flock!”
FIRE THE SEAL!
“Fire in the hole!” Del shouted.
The charges blew.
The concrete columns sheared with a sound that shook the mountain to its roots.
Tons of reinforced ceiling collapsed directly onto the Second Saint, and in the exact microsecond the debris hit the entity, miles away inside the transport, Maren’s circle slammed the spell home through Kenji’s anchor spike.
The atmospheric seal fired.
The bay turned inside out. The vacuum tore the air out of the room with a deafening, hollow roar.
The furnace had no fuel.
I felt the killing heat implode in on itself—the entity’s screech climbing into a register that made my ears bleed, then cutting out completely as the crushing weight of concrete and total oxygen starvation crushed the monster into ash. Scorched sugar. A dying wisp of burnt cinnamon.
Gone.
I took the falling rock and concrete rain across my back, wrapping my body completely around my mate. Under my palms, her chest heaved against mine, her breath hot and fast against my neck. Alive. Whole.
Ours, my wolf howled, burying his muzzle against the warmth of her spirit. She is alive. Hold her against the world.
Then the rest of the facility began to buckle.
“UP! Everybody up, move to the wash!” I hauled Avaline to her feet, and she came up instantly.
“Row Three, on me!” Avaline barked, shoving the terrified dormants toward the daylight. “Lynnea, take the front! Marisol, keep them moving—nobody stops!”
Through the settling dust at the far edge of the bay, a shadow shifted.
Mia rose out of the rubble.
Not a scratch on her. The parasite assessed the ruin with dead, flat eyes, weighing the odds of its host surviving another strike, and locked its gaze onto mine. A silent promise carved in black ice: I will come for what you love.
Then she stepped sideways into the shadows of the stairwell, and was gone.
I lost my sister into the dark a second time.
A sound tore out of my chest—a broken, ruined thing.
Avaline’s hand clamped down hard on my good arm.
She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. Her dark eyes bored into mine with that unyielding, still-water certainty, laying her thoughts bare: We will get her back.
She keeps her word, my wolf whispered.
“Come on,” I said, my voice raw as gravel. “Let’s get your people on the bird.”
We ran the wash beneath an ash-choked morning, dozens of dormants and a hotshot crew moving as one, bursting out into the dry riverbed where the Lodestone stealth transport sat waiting with its ramp down.
Maren’s chalk runes glowed faint violet along the composite hull, shielding our heat signature.
I did not breathe until the ramp sealed shut.
I stood at the base of the cargo hold and counted every soul aboard—my packmates, Maren’s witches, every single dormant we’d saved from Severance now wrapped in emergency blankets.
Avaline stood beside me, her lips moving silently as she checked off each face against her memory. Only when her count reached the right number did she let her shoulders drop.
The engines spooled up. The bird lifted into the morning mist, banking hard west toward Copperhead, leaving the burning desert and the sirens of the black site behind us.
The adrenaline began to drain, leaving only the dull, throb of my shoulder and the terrifying reality of the woman standing feet away from me.
I was forty-five years old, covered in blood and ash, looking at the only woman I’d ever loved—the woman I had mourned for two decades.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to bridge the silence, but I had to try.
“Avaline,” I started, my voice shaking with everything I’d held down. “I don’t... I have twenty years of apologies, and none of them are big enough.”
She turned to look at me.
And then the fight went out of her all at once.
Her knees buckled. Her hand clawed at the nearest aluminum stanchion, but her fingers slipped.
“Avaline!”
A sound cracked through the cabin—the sharp, crystalline snap of river ice breaking underfoot.
White, jagged crystals bloomed over the backs of her hands, raced up her wrists, and spider-webbed across her neck and jaw. Her breath billowed from her lips in thick, freezing clouds in the heated cargo bay.
Frost. Exploding across her skin.
“No,” I choked out, lunging across the deck. “No, no, no—”
Her eyes rolled back, lids fluttering shut.
She pitched forward. I caught her before her head hit the metal deck, gathering her shivering frame against my chest.
My hands touched flesh that was grave-cold. Frost poured off her skin so intensely it bit into the raw meat of my palms. Her spine arched in my arms, her teeth clattering.
Warm her! my wolf screamed, thrashing in blind panic against my ribs, throwing magma into my blood. Reed, burn it away! Give her our fire! Don’t let her freeze!
I’d broken through a mountain. I’d collapsed a fortress. I’d brought her out of the grave.
And she was freezing to death in my arms.
“MAREN!” The roar tore out of my throat, shaking the rivets of the aircraft. “Somebody get over here—she’s crashing! She’s freezing from the inside out—HELP ME!”
Her lips turned blue, her eyelashes frosted white, and I pressed my burning hands to her frozen face and begged the blazing moon for a miracle.