12 Avaline
“There you are,” it said. “The whole family. At last.”
The cold came off the First Saint in a thick, suffocating tide—and the tide carried sound.
The snap of a perimeter ward blowing off its cedar stakes. My mother’s voice going up an octave before choking. The dull crack of a boot into a twenty-five year old Reed’s ribs, over and over, and a golden throat tearing open on a howl of pure animal agony.
The Sanctuary Farm. The monster was playing back the massacre on the grass.
Below our span, the pearl-white poison river churned in the canyon—its supply feeds severed by the detonations, but the pooled alchemical poison still filled the deep gorge beneath the bridge.
My white wolf strained against the silver mist of the Loom, dark eyes wild, reaching for my outstretched hand.
The one thousand dormant wolf spirits packed the silver pastures behind her, their eyes burning through the fog.
The animal instinct in my chest screamed to close the distance—to touch fur, to merge, to finally become whole after years in the dark.
I looked back instead.
On the opposite bank, kneeling in the black shale where the bridge had begun, was Reed.
His hands were charred from channeling magma into the bedrock.
His forearms were flayed to raw muscle from the caustic spray.
And his face had lost all color—the scarred man wiped away, leaving only the traumatized boy who had watched his little sister and mate carried away dead, past his broken body into the dark.
His eyes were fixed on Mia’s hollow pupils where she stood on the shale beside him.
His lips moved on her name, producing nothing but air.
He couldn’t fight. The parasite had come dressed in the one weapon on this continent capable of turning the Founding Alpha to stone.
If Reed struck, he struck his sister. He was going to kneel there in the shale, take the killing frost into his chest, and count it as the debt he owed since the grass.
I dropped my reaching hand.
I turned my back on my own wolf—on freedom, on the shift, on the merge—and sprinted across the cracking obsidian bridge, crossing the poisoned gorge back to the home bank.
My white wolf stayed on the far rim, unable to cross.
I hit the black shale in front of Reed and threw my own body between the god and my mate.
“You don’t get to look at him,” I said.
The screaming underneath Mia’s voice hitched.
“Look at him, little bird?” The dead mouth curved into a grotesque, lopsided smile. The screaming underneath it swelled. “Look at the boy who broke you. Twenty years he let you rot in a cellar, and now he’s here to watch you die a second time. Isn’t he devoted.”
“You came all this way for a family reunion.” My voice dropped into the low, lethal register I’d forged.
“You dressed up in his guilt and played me my dead mother to make him kneel. Clever. It’s the oldest trick in your book, and I memorized your whole catalogue a long time ago.
” I took a step forward onto the open rock, placing myself directly in the monster’s path.
“Look at me. He’s not on the menu tonight.
I’m the one you flew down out of a torn sky to kill.
Keep your eyes on the meal. I’m the High Arbiter’s vessel not yet merged with her wolf. ”
From the high rocks above the shale, a roar ripped through the astral sky.
Reed’s wolves struck. A massive ember wolf led the wedge, molten jaws snapping for Mia’s throat, while a massive silver-black wolf flashed at his flank to sever the hamstrings.
A dark umber wolf and a midnight-black beast hit from the left.
Two more from the right, and still more swept in to seal the kill.
Hope rose in my heart.
But Mia didn’t even shift her stance.
With a single, lazy flick of her left wrist, the First Saint unleashed a concussive wave of magic.
A ring of jagged, black frost exploded outward from her palm in a blinding shockwave.
The blast caught all ten wolves in mid-air.
The force cracked the astral bedrock, the cold magic tearing through spirit-flesh and coating dark and silver coats in thick black rime. The ember glow of Brann’s wolf died on impact. Another wolf’s colossal frame hit the shale with a sickening thud, skidding twenty feet through the gravel.
Before the wolves could scramble to their paws, the frost ate through their astral tethers. The shockwave severed their connection, their forms dissolving into thin air, ejected straight back down the links to their human counterparts.
In less than three seconds, we were alone.
Silence slammed down over the ledge.
Only Reed and I remained.
Mia laughed.
The sound was a dry rattle of dead bones.
Her joints snapped as the thing threw her borrowed head back—shoulder, collarbone, vertebrae popping in sickening succession.
The temperature plunged further, down into a suffocating freeze.
Frost bloomed across the black glass of the bridge, creeping up the canyon walls, biting into my bare soles like acid.
“The meal speaks,” it crooned, the ancient parasite speaking through stolen vocal cords.
Mia’s right hand rose, fingers unfolding with oily smoothness. Black ice condensed out of the air into her palm, sharpening into a jagged humming blade.
“I have consumed sovereigns. I have swallowed bloodlines older than your Conclave’s first lie.”
The blade angled—not at my heart, but past my shoulder. Across the poisoned canyon. Straight at the silver line tethering my chest to the white wolf watching from the far rim.
“I’ll sever the cord first,” the parasite whispered. “I like watching the light leave a beast. And then I will deliver the prepared vessel to its new owner.”
I stood my ground, but the panic clawed at my ribs.
Physical force was useless. Ten mated pack wolves had been swatted away like dust. This was the First Saint.
It wasn’t supposed to be able to breach the Dreamscape, yet here it stood, crushing the astral air under a blanket of dead frost. I had no weapons.
I had no physical armor. I was an unmated dormant standing on a ledge of broken stone.
Think, I commanded myself. I searched the Dreamscape and my mind for a solution.
The Sacred Triad.
Moon, Fire, Stone.
The Moon governed instinct and the silver Loom of the Dreamscape. Fire governed trial and renewal—the magma Reed had poured into the chasm. Stone governed memory and permanence—the ancient bedrock under our feet.
Reed had given everything he had to lay the stone and pour the fire. His obsidian bridge groaned under a crust of black ice.
Across the canyon, my white wolf slammed her massive front paws onto the shale, her dark eyes locking onto mine with sudden, unyielding clarity.
Her voice tore through my mind, loud as thunder:
You are searching for steel in a realm of thought, the white wolf snarled, her primal authority rattling my bones.
He gave you the Stone. He gave you the Fire.
You are the Scribe—you carry the Memory!
Look at the Loom. Do not fight its ice with empty hands—seize the tethers of the one thousand. Make the parasite choke on the ledger.”
The truth struck me like lightning.
The Loom is made of spirit and memory. And I am the last living archive on this continent.
My shifter bloodline remembered—everything. My bloodline could access the memories of others too. Maybe even in the Dreamscape.
I dropped to one knee on the black shale.
The razor-sharp edges of the frosted obsidian bridgehead bit through the hem of my sky blue dress, slicing clean into my flesh. I didn’t flinch. I drove both bleeding palms flat against the stone, reaching straight through the bedrock into the silver mist hanging over the canyon floor.
Across the canyon, one thousand wolves threw their heads back and howled. The silver lines connecting their stolen spirits to the Loom flared incandescent under my touch. I hooked my fingers into their glow, hauling the full, unvarnished agony of captivity out of the dark.
“You want a vessel?” I snarled, hauling the silver lines upward with raw, furious strength. “First choke on these receipts!”
I whipped the tethers forward.
The astral air screamed. Blinding ribbons of silver fire—braided from the rage, the grief, and the unbroken will of one thousand captive souls—shot from my bleeding hands. They cracked across the black glass like living lightning, lashing violently into the First Saint’s stolen frame.
The monster shrieked.
Where the silver cords struck Mia’s body, the stolen spirits branded deep into the necrotic rot, hissing and cooking the flesh.
The parasite tried to swing its black ice blade, but the silver lines snapped around its wrists, wrenching its arms wide.
Another cord lashed its throat. Three more wrapped its torso, slamming it down to its knees on the shattered glass.
“Stop—” Two voices clashed in Mia’s throat, ancient and panicked. “The weight… too fast—”
I slammed my heel into the shale and twisted the lines, hauling the cage tight.
“One thousand names,” I gritted out through bared teeth. “One thousand lives you monsters bled dry in the dark. Every single one of them is here right now, parasite, and they all want their pound of flesh!”
The First Saint convulsed. The crushing pressure of so many wolf souls crushed its stolen limbs, forcing Mia’s spine into an agonizing arch—
Then the parasite’s grip broke free.
Mia’s human fingers, small and trembling, reached across her chest and sank her own nails deep into her right forearm. She clawed at her own skin, tearing at the blackened veins, fighting with every shred of her buried soul to hold the monster still.
Mia’s face broke through the necrotic mask—young, terrified, drowning.
“Reed...” Her human voice tore through the hissing steam, barely a whisper. “Reed, make it stop...”
My chest cracked open. She’s in there. She’s fighting.
“Mia!” I pitched my voice low and firm, driving it straight through the chaos into her mind. “Hold that wrist! We’re here! Your brother is right behind me—we are taking you home!”
I used the precious heartbeat her struggle bought me. I drove my bleeding hands deeper into the shale, braided three more tethers of dormant fury around her pinned frame, and locked the silver cage shut.
Absolute silence dropped over the canyon. The First Saint knelt bound and immobilized in a radiant web of silver retribution, trapped beneath the collective weight of the lives it had tried to erase.
Far behind me, Reed let out a ragged, trembling breath.
“I’ve got the monster locked,” I said, not turning, my knuckles white around the tethers. “Get ready.”
That’s when the First Saint opened Mia’s mouth.
A soundless shockwave exploded from Mia’s chest. Black oily smoke ruptured from her mouth, nose, and eyes in thick, boiling ropes as the entity burned her astral body like kindling, releasing a concussive blast.
The magic struck my silver lines.
The tethers—the unyielding cords of one thousand souls—shattered into a storm of blinding silver shrapnel.
The recoil slammed into my chest, flinging me onto my back across the shale.
The monster tore free.
It flickered sideways in a blur of speed, sprinting across the frosted obsidian bridge, and lunged jaws-first across the drop straight at the unprotected throat of my white wolf.
At the other half of me. At my soul.
“NO—”
But I had no answer to this.
There was only the god in the air and my soul under its teeth and the silver ruin of one thousand shattered tethers raining down into the dark.