Chapter 2
Theo
The world comes back in pieces.
Sound first—a ringing like glass shattering inside my skull. Then pressure. Weight across my chest, my ribs, my lungs struggling to expand.
I open my eyes.
White. Silver. Shapes that don’t hold still.
My Seer vision strobes—silver threads cutting through shadow, flashes of possible futures burning into my retinas faster than I can process.
Then it clears.
Wes.
He’s draped over me, arm flung across my chest, face pressed into the dirt beside my shoulder. Shielding me. Even unconscious, even blasted twenty feet from where we were—he put himself between me and the explosion.
“Wes.” My voice comes out scraped raw. “Wes, wake up.”
He groans. Shifts. His eyes open slowly, unfocused at first, then sharpening with something like panic.
“Bree—”
“I know.” I push up, and he rolls off me, both of us struggling to our knees. “I know.”
Movement to my left. Rhett coughs, rolls onto his side, fire sputtering weakly from his fingertips like a candle guttering in wind. He looks like hell—blood at his temple, ash in his hair, one arm hanging wrong.
But his voice is steady when he speaks.
“Get up.” He forces himself to his feet. Sways. Stays upright. “Bree needs us.”
I grab Wes’s arm. He grabs mine. Rhett reaches down and hauls us both upright, and for a moment we’re just three broken men holding each other together.
Then I see it.
The enemy army.
Five hundred soldiers who should still be charging. Who should be organizing, regrouping, pressing the advantage while we’re scattered and broken.
They’re not.
They’re standing still.
Some look around wildly, weapons lowered, faces blank with confusion. Others are backing away—slow, uncertain steps like they’ve forgotten why they came. A cluster near the treeline has dropped to their knees, hands clutching their heads, mouths open in silent screams.
And the Feeders—the ones who marched with the Council, the ones bound by compulsion and threat—
They’re blinking.
Hard. Rapid. Like waking from a nightmare they didn’t know they were having.
“Why aren’t they moving?” Rhett’s voice is rough.
Wes stares at them. His hunger should be spiking—I can usually feel it radiating off him after a fight. But there’s something steadier in him now. Something in his aura has shifted—purposeful, calm, as if whatever Bree did reached straight through the hunger and rewired it.
“It broke them,” he whispers. “Her magic broke them.”
Not killed.
Freed.
Even if only for a moment.
A voice cuts through the silence.
“Bree!”
Thane.
I’ve never heard him sound like that—raw, ragged, stripped of every layer of control he’s spent centuries building. The name tears out of him like something breaking.
Rhett’s head snaps toward the sound. His whole body goes rigid.
“Go.” He shoves us forward. “Now.”
We run.
Or something like running—stumbling, limping, dragging ourselves across scorched ground. Ahead, I can see Thane and Stellan already tearing toward the center of the blast, shadows against the silver ash.
My Sight tries to open again, but all I get is static—white, broken, useless.
The Council is scattered. Some fled—I catch glimpses of figures disappearing into the treeline. Others have fallen, motionless in the wreckage. A few stand frozen, staring at the place where Bree knelt like they’ve forgotten how to move.
The thing she was fighting—gone. Vanished.
Gray is dragging himself across the ground to my right—still in human form, one leg bent wrong, but moving. Pulling himself toward her with his hands, his elbows, whatever still works.
Zira stands over a Council enforcer, blood on her hands, eyes glowing. She doesn’t look at us. Doesn’t move. Just breathes.
Then I see Seth.
He’s crumpled against the sanctuary wall, thirty feet from where Bree knelt. The Void energy that flickered around him is gone—no black threads, no silver lacing. But I think I see his chest move. Or maybe that’s wishful thinking.
My chest seizes.
Is he—
I can’t stop. Can’t go to him. Bree first. Bree first.
We keep running.
The veins beneath our feet are dimming. I watch it happen—the silver light bleeding out of them step by step, fading from molten bright to dull gray. Like a heartbeat slowing. Like something vital draining away.
“The veins,” Wes gasps. “They’re going out.”
“I see it.”
We reach her.
Thane is already there, on his knees in the dirt. Stellan beside him. Stellan’s hand trembles once—barely noticeable, gone in an instant—but I see it.
Neither of them is touching her. They’re hovering—hands raised, frozen.
I skid to a stop. Drop to my knees across from them.
Bree is collapsed forward, face in the dirt. Hair covering her features. Hands still buried in the earth, but limp now. The silver mist that poured from her is gone.
She’s not moving.
The air where she fell feels wrong—thin, hollow, like the world forgot how to breathe without her.
“Is she—” The question catches in my throat.
Thane’s jaw works. His eyes are fixed on her, silver bleeding to gray. His hands shake. I’ve never seen Thane’s hands shake.
“I don’t know.” The words come out broken, raw—nothing like the voice I’ve heard command armies and silence Council members. “I don’t—”
He doesn’t finish.
None of us touch her.
We just kneel there in the ash, in the silence, in the space where her magic used to be.
Waiting.
Hoping.
Terrified of what happens if we reach for her and find nothing.