25 Reed
I crossed the buckled stone with my hands open and my sister screaming on the end of Avaline’s leash.
The parasite whipped Mia’s ruined head toward me, and the dead chorus poured out of her mouth, but I wasn’t listening to it anymore.
I was watching the way her free hand clawed at the tether around her wrist, the way her feet skidded and gouged the bedrock.
I’d carried the picture of an empty crib and a broken window.
Now here she was, on her knees in the roots of the world, and something else was driving her bones.
I didn’t reach for a weapon. I hit her the only way I knew how—I dropped and wrapped both arms around her and pulled her body against my chest.
The cold went into me like a spike driven to the marrow.
“Hold her, Reed!” Avaline’s voice cracked across the cavern. “The tether won’t take the strain—she’s trying to shake the shell loose—”
Mia bucked in my arms hard enough to lift us both off the stone. The parasite had a dead god’s strength in it, and it threw her whole spine backward, tried to crack her skull into my face the way it had before. I turned my head and took it on the jaw, tasted blood, and did not let go.
“I’ve got her.” My voice came out low, the Founding rumble I never used because it moved things.
“Ava—I can hold the body. I can’t reach her.
There’s a lock. I can feel it—” A wall of psychic ice, centuries thick, sealed between my sister and the world.
My magma slid off it. “I can’t get through.
The necrotic frost is eating my nerves—fire won’t melt it! ”
“It won’t!” Avaline dragged herself a step closer on her knees, gray to the lips, the last white thread still cinched around Mia’s wrist and stretched taut between them.
Sweat stung her eyes as her gaze snapped to the glowing bedrock beneath us.
“The parasite is anchored to her marrow. Brute force won’t pry it loose. ”
Mia bucked in my arms hard enough to lift us both off the stone. The parasite had a dead god’s strength in it, and it threw her whole spine backward, trying to crack her skull into my face again.
“Then what?” I gritted through locked teeth. “Ava, talk to me! I’m losing her!”
“The stone, Reed!” Avaline’s voice rang out, both sure and unsure. “Look at where we are— the Revocation stripped the Conclave’s artificial wards—the Veil is worn to nothing! The First Altar is already awake. The Quorum bowed in the Dreamscape and gave their consent to the deep bedrock.”
“The Quorum?”
“You don’t fight it with heat—fight it with the Founding law!
” Avaline hauled on the tether with both hands, her gold-ringed eyes blazing.
“Channel the five bloodlines through our bond! Invoke the Moon Goddess at this Altar. Name her—command the mountain’s roots to revoke the parasite’s claim on her blood! ”
Mia’s nails raked four lines down my numb shoulder. Black aurum latens wept from her fingertips.
“Give me the words!” I roared.
“By the blood that bowed!” Avaline cried, her voice rising into the ancient cadence of the first Scribes. “By the mountain that remembers! Speak it, Reed—revoke the lie!”
I drove my soul down through the arm I had locked around my sister’s chest, into my nascent mate-bond, down into the blazing magma vein of the Altar.
“By the Sovereign ember!” I bellowed into the frozen dark of Mia’s skull.
“By the Enforcer’s iron and the Shadow! By the Regional soil and the sealed Treaty of the one!
I am Reed Vásquez, Founding Alpha of the Sixth Bloodline!
By the Moon Goddess and the living law of the First Altar, I revoke your claim! ”
Mia screeched—not the chorus, something under it, a single metallic tearing sound—and her hands flew off my shoulder to claw at her own temples.
“You’re not a god.” I got my hand up under Mia’s jaw, cradled the back of her skull, forced her drowned black eyes to mine.
“You have no bloodline. You have no name on this stone. You’ve been wearing my sister like a coat you stole off a line.
” The lock groaned. I felt it—a hairline crack running through the ice.
“Her name is Mia Vásquez. Founding Sixth. And she is my sister. Mine.”
The crack widened.
And through it, for one instant, I felt her. Small. Buried. A child screaming behind the frozen dark.
The parasite slammed everything it had against the breach—trying to burn the brain out before it lost the host. Mia’s spine arched to breaking. Foam and black sludge broke at the corners of her mouth.
“Now, Reed!” Avaline’s voice tore across the sanctuary. “The link is open—flood it! Give her something to come home to!”
I stopped metering my soul. I’d built a family one careful measured ounce at a time so I would never have that much to lose in one place again.
Now I tore the walls down.
I opened the pack-link and I poured everything I was into the frozen dark where my sister was drowning.
I gave her the empty crib and the penance.
I gave her Brann, Santos, Levi, Tommy, Finn—every wolf I’d chosen and raised and grieved and buried.
I gave her Beto’s laugh and Wade’s objections and the way the station tasted like dust with them gone.
I gave her the whole weight of a devotion I’d spent two decades pretending was only duty, and I aimed all of it—every ounce, no wall, no meter—straight into a thing that had never once been loved and had no idea what to do with it.
The parasite recoiled.
It came off her in a scream of a hundred dead throats, thrashing, and where my flooding heat met its cold the frost began to boil away.
Black sludge poured from Mia’s ears, her nose, the corners of her eyes—the poisoned aurum latens purging itself out of her flesh in ropes, hissing where it hit the hot bedrock.
The necrotic aura guttered. Her blue lips flushed toward pink.
I did not let go.
I held my sister’s convulsing body against my chest while the dead god drained out of her, and I did not loosen my arms by a fraction, and I kept pouring—you have a home, you have a name, you are not lost, come back, come back, come back—until the last black rope of it slithered out of her and smoked away to nothing on the stone.
Mia went limp.
The black drained out of her eyes like water out of a basin—the drowned dark receding, receding, until what looked up at me was brown. Just brown. My mother’s eyes in a face I had last seen in a bassinet.
The tether-fire winked out. Across the cavern, Avaline sagged forward onto her hands, spent.
And in my arms, my sister took a breath that was her own.
“R—” Her voice was a thread, raw, unused by anyone but the thing that had stolen it. “R-Reed?”
Something broke in my chest.
“I’m here.” It came out wrecked. I got my frostbitten hand against her cheek, smearing soot and black residue, and I couldn’t have cared less. “I’m here, Mia. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
She stared at me. Recognition surfacing slow, dredging up a face she’d only ever seen in whatever fragments the parasite hadn’t sealed away. Her mouth worked. Her hand came up—shaking, small—and pressed flat over my hammering heart, like she needed to feel it beat to believe it.
“You came,” she whispered. And then, breaking: “I heard you. Under the ice. All this time I heard you looking.”
Then she folded into my chest and sobbed, and I wrapped both arms around my sister and put my face in her filthy hair and wept like the boy who’d never been able to.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
I don’t know how long we knelt there. Not long. There wasn’t long left for anything.
A shadow fell over us—not a Shrieker. Finn. He’d come down the throat of the mountain with Tommy at his heels, both of them ash-streaked and reeking of Hex-fire smoke. I understood dimly that up above, the line had held. The fire was caught. The chimney had stopped raining green.
“Boss.” Finn’s rumble was low and steady, the voice he used on green recruits mid-panic. He crouched, taking in Mia, the black residue, the shattered ice, all of it, and asked no questions that could wait. “We’ve got her. Let us have her.”
Every instinct I owned locked my arms tighter. You don’t get to take her again.
But Finn only settled one big hand on my shoulder—the frostbitten one—and let its warmth soak into the dead nerve, and waited, the way he waited out the whole pack’s worst nights.
“She’s safe with us,” he said. “You know she is. You taught us how to be.”
Mia stirred against me. “Reed?”
“These are mine,” I told her, easing my grip, my voice still ruined.
“Pack. They’ll keep you. I have to—” My eyes went across the cavern, to Avaline, swaying on her hands and knees on the hot stone, white fire flickering weak and erratic off her sweat-soaked skin.
To the fever finally winning. “There’s something I have to finish. To keep everyone safe.”
Mia followed my look. And this stranger who was my sister, this drowned girl surfacing, looked at Avaline burning up alive—and understood something before I could explain it.
Finn gathered her up out of my arms like she weighed nothing, and Tommy got a shoulder under her other side, and they turned her toward the sealed throat of the mountain and the pack waiting above.
The cavern emptied of everything but the two of us and the glowing seam of magma under the First Altar.
I crossed to Avaline and dropped to my knees in front of her and caught her before she went face-down on the stone.
She was scalding. The banked coal I’d held in her blood four and a half hours ago had burned through the last of its margin—her skin sheeting sweat, her scent gone from furious green to the raw crushed-petal note of a body with nothing left to armor itself.
Her gold-ringed eyes found mine, unfocused, then focused.
“Mia?” she whispered.
“Safe. Because of you.” I pushed the wet hair off her burning face. “You saved her, Ava. You cracked it and I walked through.”
“Good.” Her head lolled against my hand. A shudder took her, deep, wrong—the fever cresting. “Reed. I’m out of road. The Altar—it’s pulling it up too fast. If we don’t—”
“I know.”
The trial was over. The fire was caught, the First Saint was gone, my sister was breathing.
Every barrier I’d been throwing my body against for hours had fallen, and behind the last of them stood the only thing left—the rough black slab of the First Altar, glowing over the magma vein that ran through the spine of the whole continent, waiting for the one act that would fire it.
And the one act was the one I’d spent a lifetime refusing to do.
The union only fires if the Alpha lays down the line he’s been holding and lets her lead.
I looked at the sacred stone, and the old cold terror crawled up my spine—not fear of the fire above, not the Saint, not the Order in their throne room over our heads.
Fear of the thing the mountain was going to ask of me.
To open my hands. To yield. To let someone matter that much, with no wall, and stop holding the line.
I gathered Avaline up against my chest—she weighed nothing, she weighed everything—and got to my feet, and carried the last living Scribe toward the Altar where the world was first written into balance.
“Come on, Ava,” I said, low. “There’s nothing left in the way. Just me.”