28 Avaline
Reed’s agony tore up the bond and folded me over my own knees on the transport bench.
It wasn’t sound. It was pressure—his ribs and mine were the same ribs for one horrible instant, and something enormous was closing on them, grinding the obsidian wolf down. My hand went flat to the warm steel wall of the transport and I couldn’t pull air past the weight of it.
Across the bench, Wren went rigid, both hands flying to the curve of her belly. Nell and Sloane doubled. Genny’s knuckles cracked white on the seat frame. Kaia made a sound like a struck animal.
“It’s the men.” I got the words out through my teeth, forcing my spine straight against the crushing thing in my chest. “Something’s got them. All of them. They’re going down.”
Maren didn’t look up from the footwell. She knelt there in her cardigan, wrist-deep in a canvas satchel of small clay jars, and her chapped hands never stopped moving—setting a jar, marking its lid in chalk, setting the next.
“Say what you feel, child.” Her voice was flat and low and did not hurry. “Exactly what you feel. Not what you fear.”
“Weight.”
Nadia had already dropped to her knees in the aisle, palms bare and spread over the ribbed floor, her rings catching the amber light through the slit windows.
Her clinical mask had gone hard as bone.
“It’s not a wound. It’s a suppression working.
Gravitational load coupled to a neuro-suppressive lattice.
” Her dark eyes cut to me. “Avaline. It’s the same architecture they tried to use on you. ”
Severance. My whole body knew the shape of it before she named it.
“He told me to stay in the truck.” My voice cracked down the center. Reed’s face against my forehead in the cab, please, give me this one thing. “He’s dying and he’s still telling me to stay in the truck.”
He is drowning, the White Wolf snarled, and her silver presence surged up hard against the inside of my skull, hackles raised, and you are sitting in a box.
That was when the first jar screamed.
A thin, glass-edged wail from the footwell—and then the second jar answered it, and the third, until the whole satchel was singing a note that made my back teeth ache. Maren’s hands went still.
Outside the slit windows, the falling ash changed color.
Gray went to a sick, luminous green. It came rolling across the plaza from the direction of the fortress, low to the frozen gravel, and where it touched the crushed rebar of the gate the steel didn’t burn—it withered, blackening and folding inward the way a leaf curls in a fire.
A stink came through the transport’s seals ahead of it: sleet and rot and something graveyard-sweet under it, the reek of a thing that had been dead a long time and had not stopped moving.
The steel wall went cold under my palm. Actively cold, the heat draining out of it into the green.
“Down!” Del’s voice, muffled, from the rear door. A flare gun cracked. “Cal—Cal! The ground’s coming apart, get off the—” His fist slammed the latch twice. “Everybody stay sealed, do not open this—”
Nadia’s head came up. “That’s a Culling curse.
” A diagnosis, delivered in the same voice she’d use to name a fracture.
“The High Arbiter’s flooded the whole perimeter with it.
Necrotic vacuum.” Her palms pressed flatter to the floor and she went gray.
“It’s a killing field. It will eat the courtyard from the walls inward. ”
“Then we run to the road and flank.” Genny, already reaching for the door.
“No.” Maren said. She lifted one clay jar out of the satchel and held it up to the green light bleeding through the window, and the chalk on its lid had turned to soot.
“Look at the working, not the fire.” She turned it slowly.
“A Culling spins from the rim toward the caster. It draws in. Everything on this plaza dies, and everything on the flank road, and everything in this truck. There is one place it cannot reach.”
I already knew.
“The center,” I said. “The eye. Where he’s standing.”
“The dais.” Maren set the ruined jar down without a sound.
Her chapped hands folded in her lap, done working, and that stillness frightened me more than the screaming glass had.
“Your men are already there, dying in the only safe place on this mountain.” She looked at me over her reading glasses, and there was no fear in it at all, only a lifetime of hiding people who could not be hidden any longer. “So you don’t hide. Not this time.”
The White Wolf rose all the way up behind my face and pressed forward like a hand against glass. There it is. Open the door.
“Everybody hold onto something,” I said, and got to my feet in the swaying transport, and pressed my bleeding palm flat against the sealed rear doors.
The root-language came up through me clean. Not a request. A verdict spoken to steel: open.
My white Scribe fire ran the seam of both doors in a single bright stroke, and Wren caught my shoulder and poured the ember-gold weight of the Sovereign line in behind it. The reinforced doors of the transport blew off their hinges into the green.
Del was down on one knee in the gravel, coat smoking at the hem, and when the doors went he twisted around with the flare gun coming up—and then his mustache went slack, because six pregnant women and two witches were pouring out of the truck he’d sworn to keep sealed and there was not one thing in his orders that covered it.
“Reed’s gonna kill me,” he said.
“Reed’s dying.” I hauled him up by the collar and shoved him out of the tide. “Cover us. We’re going in.”
The plaza was a shrinking island. The green ate inward from every wall at a walking pace, patient and total, and we ran for the broken bronze doors across ground that blackened behind our heels.
Nadia scattered something from her pocket that hissed and bought us three clean steps.
Maren came last, unhurried even now, her cardigan snapping in the necrotic wind, and where her feet fell the curse seemed to forget she was there at all.
I went through first.
The cathedral was a slaughterhouse. My mate and his pack lay flattened across the marble—Reed at the foot of the dais, Brann broken to his knees at the center axis with his Pulaski slipping from numb fingers, Levi bowed almost double at the threshold with his teeth bared and his whole iron frame trembling against a weight I could see bending the air.
Santos was pinned flat, his shadow-veiling ripped away, fingers clawing uselessly at the stone.
Tommy lay driven to his knees. Finn folded over.
Above them all, risen at last from his throne, High Arbiter Gault held a scepter dripping his own black blood and drank their strength into the floor.
His smooth dead face turned toward us. The amusement guttered out of it.
“No,” Reed said. “You were in the truck. I put you in the truck.”
Everyone stops putting us where they want us, the White Wolf said, and I let her flood the room.
I didn’t throw fire. I didn’t have to. The six of us crossed the threshold together—six mates and six waking bloodlines—and the mate-bonds snapped taut all at once, six living tethers hooking into six drowning wolves. And the pups woke.
It came off us in a wave. A tide of pure life-force pouring down six bonds into six suppressed wolves, and where it met the High Arbiter’s crushing lattice the lattice buckled. The gravity broke.
Reed’s chest heaved off the marble. He dragged in a lungful of air and the obsidian wolf roared back up in him, magma flaring along his forearms. Across the cathedral five more wolves surged up off the floor as their mates’ proximity tore Gault’s working apart.
Reed found his feet and found me in the same second, and his face went from resurrection to terror in a single beat.
“Ava—” Blood streaked his split lip. “I told you to stay in the—you walked into—”
“The truck is dead.” I didn’t slow. I caught two fistfuls of his scorched coat and hauled his eyes down to mine, and I let the Scribe come flat and cold into my voice, the register that did not shake.
“Listen to me. He didn’t trap you in here.
He trapped us out there. The whole courtyard is a Culling field, Reed—it’s eating the plaza wall to center, and the only calm in the entire spell is the floor under his feet.
” I pointed past him, up the three tiers of basalt to where Gault stood.
“The dais is the eye of the storm. It’s the only place any of us survives. ”
I watched him do the math I’d already done. Watched the Superintendent read the fire behind the fear. His jaw worked once.
“Then we take the eye.” He turned his head and put command into words that carried the length of the ruined hall. “Wall on the mates. Move to the dais.”
They formed around us without a word spoken between them.
Brann took point at the center. Santos and Tommy locked the flanks.
Finn dropped in at the rear beside Levi, who had wrenched himself upright off the threshold and now put his iron bulk between six pregnant women and the entire seething gallery.
And Reed took the front of the wedge, my hand fisted in his, driving the point of it straight up the aisle toward the throne.
The Inner Circle came off the walls to stop us.
Reed channeled pure volcanic heat, the black marble ahead of our boots superheating into a searing shockwave that knocked charging guards sprawling.
On the left flank, Santos moved in a blinding rhythm, throwing off heat mirages that redirected a volley of thrown silver daggers harmlessly into the colonnade before whipping his blade across an alchemist’s casting arm.
On the right, Tommy drove his heel into the stone on every stride—every time the floor tried to buckle beneath our boots under Gault’s dark alchemy Tommy’s bedrock command seized the steps and locked them level.
The green light found the shattered doorway behind us and began to pour in.
“Faster,” Nadia gritted, one hand fisted in Maren’s belt. “It’s reached the room.”