24 Avaline
I stepped off the sacred stone and put myself between the dead god and the First Altar’s heart.
The Heat screamed at me for it. Every cell in my body wanted to sink back down onto that warm bedrock and let the fever finish what it was doing, and every cell was wrong.
So I did what I had done inside the walls whenever the panic clawed up my throat: I went cold.
I pulled the Scribe over me like a second skin, filed the fever behind glass, and made my spine into a straight clean line.
Behind me and to the left, Reed hit the wall of green-veined granite again—shoulder-first, magma-heat flaring off him in a sheet—and it did not give. Good. If he couldn’t reach me, he couldn’t reach her, and one of us needed to be thinking clearly.
The First Saint stopped six feet away and let Mia’s ruined head tilt at me like a bird’s.
The chorus of dead voices poured out of that too-wide mouth, delighted, grinding. “Do you know what they called you? A jar on a shelf. The vessel that held the future for the whole continent.” Mia’s black-drowned eyes crawled over me. “And you broke it.”
“Get out of her,” I said.
My voice came out flat. Cold. It did not shake, and that was its own small victory, because everything underneath it was a furnace.
“She’s still in here.” The parasite smiled, stretching Mia’s lips past what skin should allow. “Screaming. Would you like to hear—”
I lunged.
I dropped low, fangs snapping down through my gums as my partial shift broke the surface, and drove the blood-rite dagger in a vicious upward arc aimed straight at Mia’s shoulder.
The steel bit into necrotic cold—black frost boiling off the wound—and the parasite shrieked with a hundred throats, reeled back, and lashed out with frost-slick claws.
I didn’t wait to see if it recovered. I moved.
I circled left, off the axis Reed was trapped on, drawing the thing’s attention away from that granite slab, away from the man throwing himself against it.
My left hand came up. I traced a line of defensive Scribe warding glyphs I’d learned as a child across the buckled floor between us—the root-language for no farther—and the runes I marked hung burning in the air for half a breath before the Saint’s necrotic cold snuffed them.
But they held it. Half a breath. Long enough to reset my footing.
The parasite lunged and I met it with the flat of my blade and my bared forearms, flesh against bone, and the shock of the two forces slamming together rang up my arms to the teeth.
Cold poured off Mia’s body in a wave that smelled of sleet and rot and something graveyard-sweet, and it met the fever in my skin and hissed, and neither of us gave.
“You’re burning,” the chorus crooned through the strain.
Delighted again—it kept coming back to delight, this thing, like cruelty was the only fuel it knew.
“I can smell it on you, little vessel. The Heat. The Founding Alpha banked it in the Dreamscape and now it’s climbing back up, isn’t it?
You’re running out of blood. Run out here, in the dark, with the fire coming down, and I’ll drink what’s left. ”
The First Saint was right. That was the worst of it.
The fever spiked as if it had heard its own name, slick heat blooming down my spine, my knees threatening to fold.
The scent that broke off me under the fury was sharp and green and biting—I could smell my own rage burning through the vulnerability—and beneath it the coal in my blood glowed hotter, hungry, wrong.
I planted my boots and held the line.
Let me out.
She was right there. My White Wolf, the one I’d touched across the Drowned Canyon in the Dreamscape, the one who’d been a shadow behind poisoned glass—she slammed against the inside of my ribs like a battering ram, and the force of her nearly buckled me.
Let me OUT. I can end this. Give me the flesh and I will tear the dead thing off your mate’s sister’s bones—
“I can’t,” I gritted, out loud, to her, to myself. “I can’t.”
Because the First Altar and all the old stories I knew about this place had told me: the shift and the bond were one circuit.
The White Wolf could not take the world until the union fired the rite.
That was the law written into the mountain.
My wolf was an inch from the surface—closer than she had ever been, close enough that I could feel her fur under my own skin like a coat I couldn’t put on—and she was locked, and the only key was my mate currently behind a wall of granite and a firestorm and this.
The wanting of my wolf was its own agony. A whole self, right there, and I couldn’t have her. Not yet. Not until we reached the stone together and finished it.
Soon, I told her, and shoved her back down.
The First Saint felt the hesitation. Of course it did.
It surged, and I lost ground—two steps, three, my warding line shattering—and Mia’s black-frost hand closed around my wrist and the cold went into me like a spike driven to the bone. I gasped.
“There,” the chorus purred, dragging me closer, Mia’s drowned face inches from mine, “there it is, the crack in the—”
I stopped fighting the pull and used it.
I let it drag me in, and as it did I turned my captured wrist and flooded the contact point with everything I had—not a blast, a binding.
The root-language I’d read off the stone walls, the first Scribes’ own tethering script, poured out of my palm and up the parasite’s arm in ropes of white fire, wrapping, cinching, biting down.
It was like trying to rope a drowning bull.
The First Saint thrashed, and every loop I threw it tore at, and I had to brace my whole body and haul, hands cramping around fire that scalded my own skin, teeth locked, sweat sheeting into my eyes.
The tethers were physical things and they fought me.
I got one around Mia’s wrist and it took everything in my shoulders to hold it.
I threw a second across her chest, hauling her down to her knees on the buckled bedrock.
“You cannot hold me,” the parasite raged, and for the first time the delight was gone from the dead voices. “For centuries! I have worn saints and kings—”
“I’m not holding you forever.” My arms were shaking. The fire ropes sank into the black veins under Mia’s skin and anchored, root-language finding root, and the First Saint’s thrashing slammed to a strained, furious halt. “Just long enough.”
I had it. Pinned—Mia’s body wrenched to her knees on the stone, wrapped in white tether-fire from wrist to throat, the parasite screaming inside a cage of the first Scribes’ own law.
And Scribe lore knew only one way to kill an immortal parasite once bound: sever the head from the vessel.
I reversed the grip on my blood-rite knife. I stepped in close, the edge of the blade catching the rune-light as I pressed the cold steel against Mia’s throat.
Cut the throat, my wolf snarled, pacing with blood-hot fury in my chest. Sever the vessel. End the parasite before it kills us all.
I tightened my hand on the hilt. One hard, clean slash. That was what the old scrolls demanded. That was the only sure way I had within my power to extinguish a Saint.
“Please. Avaline.”
The voice broke across the cavern. Not a commander. A gutted man.
Reed had reached the crest of the granite slab, blood sheeting his face, his obsidian eyes locking onto mine through the haze.
My breath caught. My hand froze, the steel trembling against Mia’s throat.
Do it! My wolf screamed. Kill the parasite or we die.
I looked from Mia’s wide, drowned black eyes to Reed—the man who had carried penance for an empty crib. If I cut Mia’s throat, I would save our lives. And I would destroy my mate’s soul forever.
I couldn’t do it. Even knowing it might be our doom, I could not bear to put that blade through his heart.
I hesitated—just one fractional heartbeat of mercy.
And that hesitation was all the First Saint needed.
The parasite felt the slack in my intent. A horrible, triumphant sneer cracked Mia’s lips. Its free hand, tearing partially through the fire rope, snapped out—not toward me.
Toward Reed.
A lance of black ice formed in her palm, condensing out of the graveyard cold in a single heartbeat, and it flew straight and true at the exact center of his chest, at the man dragging himself over the rubble to reach me, exposed, both hands full of stone, no way to stop it—
No.
In my panic, I dropped the main binding.
The fire that was holding the First Saint tore free of the tethers and hurled itself sideways in a defensive wall of white ward-light between the lance and Reed’s chest.
The ice hit my ward and shattered. Frozen shrapnel sprayed the cavern. Reed dropped flat behind the rubble, whole, alive, roaring my name.
And the parasite, released, exploded up off the stone.
The tethers I’d abandoned snapped like cut cables.
The First Saint reared to Mia’s full height, the white fire guttering off her shoulders, one loop still cinched around her wrist and the rest of my binding unraveling into smoke.
It had felt the opening the instant I made my choice and it had taken it, and now it stood free again over the buckled bedrock, centuries of malice pouring out of a dead girl’s mouth in a howl of triumph—
I threw the last of my strength into the one loop I still had.
The tether around Mia’s wrist held. Just that. One line of white fire, hooked into the black veins, and I hauled back on it with both hands and my whole failing body. It wrenched the Saint to a staggering halt at the very edge of the Altar’s light.
I couldn’t hold it. Not for more than a handful of breaths. My arms were on fire and the fever had my vision swimming and the White Wolf was howling behind the glass and there was nothing left in me.
“Reed!” My voice tore. “I can’t break it—it’s got her too deep—I can only hold it—”
He was already up, already vaulting the last of the rubble, ash and blood streaked across a face I would have known blind. His eyes went from me—swaying, gray, one white thread stretched taut in my scalding hands—to the thing wearing his sister thrashing on the end of it.
Reed crossed the last of the buckled stone toward Mia with his bleeding hands open and empty. “I’ve got you. I’ve got—”
The parasite whipped its head around, drowned eyes finding him.