22 Avaline #2
I doubled over the Altar, a broken sound tearing out of me.
The fever went from ember to blaze in the space of a heartbeat.
Slick heat bloomed between my thighs. Sweat sprang cold on my spine.
The crushed-petal scent of my own vulnerability billowed up into the cavern before I could clamp down on it.
Let it burn, my wolf cried out, pressing against my ribs with frantic, ravenous heat. The Altar is calling our fire home. Give our body to our mate—let his fangs bite down and break the last lock!
He’s right here, I panted through the haze, sweat blinding my eyes. Reed...
“Avaline.” Reed’s bleeding hand closed over my shoulder, and the contact made it worse, the coal roaring toward him. “Talk to me.”
I forced the words through my teeth, gripping the stone.
“It’s speeding it up. The Altar—it wants the rite, Reed, it’s pulling the Heat up to meet it—” A shudder wracked me.
The clock I’d been counting down from since the truck had just lost hours in a breath.
“It’s the one place that can save me and it’s burning me faster. ”
His jaw worked. I watched the war in him release and he reached for me. “It’s time, Avaline. In this sacred place, I will—”
The mountain screamed and tore open.
High above us, where my wolf-sight couldn’t reach, the ceiling of the sanctuary ripped open along a wound of sick green light.
A wave of energy punched down through hundreds of feet of holy granite as if the mountain’s own flesh had gone rotten.
The blessed cold of the sanctuary curdled.
A stench rolled down the fissure ahead of it: graveyard-sweet, the reek of rot flash-frozen, sleet and ash and something under it that had been dead a very long time and had not stopped moving.
The runes on the walls guttered where the green light touched them, like candles in a wind.
Shapes poured down through the tear.
Shadow-wolves—dozens of them, coalescing out of the necrotic light, black on black, wrong-jointed, spilling down the sheer walls of the fissure with the green Hex-fire glow of the surface bleeding in behind them.
Made-dogs with brass coin eyes and oilcloth hides, ticking with an artificial, hitching gait.
They hit the cavern floor and did not land so much as smear into being, low and silent, ringing the far edge of the Altar’s light.
My wolf snarled, her ears pinned flat, teeth baring in the dark of my mind. The made-beasts from the old scrolls.
“Shriekers. Fuck,” Reed said, stepping forward.
And down through the center of the wound, borne on the wave of corruption, a single figure fell—and landed on the bedrock with a grace that no living body should own.
She rose out of her crouch by unspooling, joint by joint, like something remembering how limbs were supposed to work. The skin of her face was pale and threaded beneath with pulsing black veins. But the bones—
The bones were unmistakable. Dark hair. High cheekbones. A jaw I had seen in Reed’s.
Beside me, Reed made a sound. Low. Gutted.
Mia.
The thing wearing his sister tilted its head at us, and its drowned black eyes found the two of us standing bloodied at the waking Altar, the pearl-white runes throwing our shadows huge against the walls.
When it smiled, Mia’s lips stretched too far.
When it spoke, her throat produced not one voice but a grinding chorus of them—dozens, hundreds, dead and layered and speaking as one.
“Founding Alpha.” The dead voices scraped the sanctuary air. “You crawled all the way down into the dark to hide. Did you truly believe the First Saint would not follow you into the roots of the world?”
Reed said nothing. His whole body had gone to stone beside me.
He cannot strike her, my wolf growled, the eager joy turning to deadly, protective iron. Look at him. His heart is breaking in his chest—he will let the parasite tear his throat out before he harms her flesh.
I know, I thought, fighting the crushing fever in my limbs. He can’t kill his own blood. Not again.
Then we must. The wolf’s voice dropped into lethal stillness. We ready our claws. We ready our blade. We cut the sister down for him.
“Look at you.” The parasite let Mia’s ruined face survey the Altar, the runes, the blood on the stone.
“Priming the old toy. How quaint. And far too late.” The chorus rose, delighted.
“The High Arbiter and the entire Inner Circle waits in the throne room above your heads, wolf. Every name on the ledger you thought you stole. They gathered here to watch the last of the six bloodlines die at the very stone where it began.”
The shadow-wolves pressed inward, their brass eyes catching the dying rune-light, high keening whines rising from their stitched throats.
Above, through the torn ceiling, the green firelight throbbed brighter—the surface world burning, the Hex-fire crowning, the whole mountain going up to flush us out.
Everything was armed. The Altar taut and ready under my bleeding hand, the continent strung tight beneath us, the Heat climbing toward a cliff’s edge. Every circuit of the weapon closed but one.
And between us and the only act that could fire it stood a dead god wearing Reed’s sister, and an army of shadow, and a firestorm eating the sky.
Reed moved.
He stepped in front of me, one arm sweeping back to shove me behind the wall of his body, his blood-slick hand splayed to hold me at the Altar’s heart. The magma-heat rolled off him in a wave that met the parasite’s graveyard cold in the air between us and hissed.
“They’re Shriekers—Order constructs, shadow-wolves stitched together with necrotic dead-magic,” Reed barked low, his eyes tracking the perimeter.
“They’ll try to deafen our senses with their keen.
Ava, if one gets past me, don’t try to pierce the hide.
Tear the jaw off the hinge. Break the mandible or crush the cervical spine.
The thing behind the brass coins is blind without its throat. ”
He planted his boots against the bedrock.
“Stay behind me, Scribe,” he said, and there was no fear left in it—only twenty years of held line, coming due at last. “Whatever it does. You do not leave that stone.”
The First Saint raised one frost-slick hand.