Chapter 3
Jace
I wake up choking on ash.
My body jerks upright before my brain catches up—survival instinct, the one that’s kept me alive through worse than this. Though honestly, I’m not sure I’ve seen worse than this.
The courtyard looks like the end of the world.
Silver ash drifting down like snow. Bodies scattered across scorched earth. The air tastes like ozone and blood and something else—something that burns at the back of my throat and won’t go away.
I’m on my feet before I’ve finished processing any of it. Stopping means dying. Stopping means thinking. Neither of those is happening right now.
Bree.
She’s at the center of everything. I can see the others already converging—Thane and Stellan closest, Theo and Wes and Rhett stumbling toward her from the opposite direction.
But Gray—
Gray is twenty feet to my left, dragging himself across the ground with his arms. One leg bent at an angle that makes my stomach turn. Human form, which means he either can’t shift or won’t, and neither option is good.
He snarls when I drop beside him. Actually snarls, lips pulling back from teeth that look too sharp for his current shape.
“Shut up.” I loop his arm over my shoulders and haul him upright. He’s heavy as hell and fighting me the whole way, because of course he is. “If you want to get to her alive, you need me.”
The snarl dies. His weight settles against my side.
We move.
It’s not fast. It’s not pretty. But we make it—staggering across the blast radius until I can lower him next to the others. He collapses at Bree’s side, one hand reaching toward her before he catches himself.
Nobody’s touching her.
I file that away and turn back.
Seth.
He’s crumpled against the sanctuary wall, thirty feet away. Too still. Too pale. The Void energy that was flickering around him during the fight is gone—no black threads, no silver lacing, nothing.
I run.
My knees hit dirt beside him. I press two fingers to his throat, searching—
There.
Faint. Thready. But there.
“You’re not dying on me.” I hook my arms under his and drag. His body is dead weight, heavier than it should be, but I’ve carried worse. “Not after all the shit we went through to find you.”
Seth doesn’t respond. Doesn’t stir. But as I drag him across the battlefield, his body keeps trying to angle toward Bree—a slight pull, an unconscious lean, like something in him knows where she is even when he doesn’t.
I don’t have time to think about what that means.
I bring him to the circle and lower him gently on her left side. Gray is on her right. The others have gathered—Theo, Wes, Rhett, Thane, Stellan. All of them kneeling or crouching or hovering, none of them speaking.
None of them touching her.
The ground trembles.
I feel it through my knees—a shudder, a pulse, like the earth itself is gasping. The silver veins that thread through the stone beneath us flicker once.
Then they gutter.
Then they vanish.
Not fade. Not dim. Vanish—like ink sucked out of stone, like light pulled through a drain. One second they’re there, pulsing with Bree’s magic, and the next there’s just… nothing.
Empty channels where power used to live.
“What the hell—”
I look up.
And I see him.
At the edge of the blast radius, where the worst of the damage hit. A silhouette—horned, silver-lined, shadow given shape.
Ethos.
Or what’s left of him.
He’s staring at Bree. At the place where the veins used to be. At the empty channels that fed into her hands.
His mouth opens.
“What have you done?!”
The words rip out of him—not smooth, not controlled, not the velvet manipulation I remember from the Void. This is raw. Furious. Terrified.
He doesn’t get an answer.
He collapses inward.
It happens at the exact moment the last vein disappears—his form folding into itself like paper crumpling, like something vast being compressed into nothing. A final ripple of magic shudders through the air, pulls toward Bree, and then—
Gone.
I jerk in place. Look around.
No one else saw. They’re all focused on her—on her stillness, her silence, the way she’s not moving.
I open my mouth.
Close it.
I am not mentioning this. Not when everyone is barely standing.
Movement catches my eye. Stellan.
He’s staring at Bree’s hands—at the place where they’re still buried in the dirt. His whole body has gone rigid, that careful control he wears like armor locked down so tight I can see the strain in his shoulders.
I follow his gaze.
Faint wisps of silver drift upward from the empty channels—barely visible, like smoke in moonlight. They pull toward Bree. Sink into her skin. Gather where her palms press into the earth.
I don’t know what it means.
But Stellan does.
He goes very still. Not the controlled stillness I’m used to. Something else. Something that looks like horror wearing a mask of calm.
Why does he look like he just figured out something terrible?
I don’t ask.
I kneel instead.
Gray on her right, one hand hovering near her shoulder. Seth on her left, unconscious but still angled toward her. Wes and Theo and Rhett gathered close. Thane shattered in a way I’ve never seen him. Stellan frozen, watching the silver wisps sink into Bree’s skin.
And Bree.
Face down in the dirt. Hair covering her features. Hands limp in the earth.
Not moving.
The hollow pressure in the air makes it hard to breathe. The wrongness of her stillness makes it worse.
I place my hand on the ground near hers. Close, but not touching.
We all made it back to her.
Now she just has to come back to us.
A sound cuts through the silence. Weak. Wet. Wrong.
My head snaps up.
Riley.
She’s ten feet away, collapsed where the blast threw her. Black-silver magic still flickers around her fingers, but it’s guttering—dying. Her chest rises once. Barely. Then stutters.
She’s fading.
But her eyes are open. Fixed on Bree. On the silver pooling into her sister’s skin.
Her mouth moves.
“Touch her.” The words come out broken, barely a whisper. She drags in another breath—rattling, desperate. “Touch her, you idiots.”
Everyone freezes.
Riley’s hand claws at the dirt, trying to drag herself closer. Failing.
“Her bonds—” Blood flecks her lips. “She needs to—give it somewhere—or it burns her—”
Her voice dies.
Her hand goes still.
Her eyes stay open, fixed on Bree.
And she doesn’t breathe again.