Chapter 28 Saskia #2
“The king’s and queen’s crowns,” she says, smiling softly at my expression.
“The only family heirlooms we have left. Lucan’s father placed this one on my head the moment that Taika married us a few years after the Wall turned to stone.
” She nods at the slightly smaller, more delicate one. “And this one belongs to Lucan.”
I stare at the other crown, imagining Lucan taking his rightful throne and dipping his head for someone to place this on top, just like Gabriel and Kyra said he would.
A sharp, sad feeling twists in my stomach at the thought that we’re not just a werewolf and a vampire—two species meant to be enemies—but a king and… definitely not a queen.
Leave him rings through me. This pack and that entire city in there will be better off without a vampire in charge anyway.
Stella, however, picks up the queen’s crown and hands it out to me.
“I’d be honored to pass this on to you.”
My mouth falls open. I meant what I told Kyra—that I don’t want to be queen, a fact that clings to my heart and buries roots deep into my stomach. But Stella’s not just offering me a crown, I know. She’s offering me maternal love, acceptance, and a place in her family.
So the fact that I cannot accept this gift makes my stomach crumple with pain.
“Oh, come here.” Stella puts the crown back in the box and pulls me into another hug that feels so good and warm and right that tears actually swell in my eyes this time.
Over and over, I whisper a muffled thank you into her shoulder, and Stella just holds me, until finally I’m pulling back with a laugh, trying to compose myself.
“Sorry,” I say finally, eyeing the wet spot on her shoulder with a grimace.
She waves a hand with a scoff. “Are you kidding? I’m used to puppy slobber. A few vampire tears are nothing.”
“I didn’t realize Lucan slobbered,” I say with another laugh, “but now I’ll have to make fun of him for that.”
“I do no such thing.”
We both whip our heads around to find Lucan standing in the open doorway in human form, his dark, mottled hair pushed back. But he’s not alone. Standing next to him, leaning heavily on his cane, is Taika, with all the other werewolves gathered behind them in Stella’s garden.
There’s only one reason they could have all followed Lucan here. I glance down at the medical bag in Taika’s hand, and he nods at me as Stella squeezes my hand in her own.
The air around us becomes magnified, electric, heavy, as if the full weight of the world is finally crashing down.
“The antivenom is ready.”
By the time we make it to the right part of the Wall, the moon hangs like a sickle in the sky.
I’m glad it’s not a full blood moon tonight. According to the journal entries of Lucan’s father, I would need to feed if it was, but as of right now, I feel just as energized and powerful as I did this morning, Lucan’s blood still singing through my veins. Like I could fight in a war.
“You’re sure you want to do it here?” Taika asks, leaning his cane against the crooked edge of a nearby stump to grasp the handle of his medical bag in both hands.
I glance back at him and all the other members of Lucan’s pack behind us.
Vivian is practically bouncing on the balls of her feet in excitement, Merrick with his arm slung tight around her, and Soren rubbing his hands together in anticipation.
Gabriel and Kyra lurk in the back, arms folded with skepticism, but several of the others look openly hopeful.
Even Stella followed us here, watching from a distance in the shadows of the trees.
“This is where we first almost met,” Lucan tells Taika, tugging my eyesight forward.
“Just the Wall between us,” he whispers to me, and I think back to that day in the catacombs when I ran into the edge of the city, trapped, just on the other side.
Now, we’re both standing on the outside together, the forest floor dipping down to that same stone door that’s locked shut.
“I wanted so badly to claw every piece of it apart to get to you.”
I swallow the thickness in my throat and squeeze his hand. “Now we get to claw it apart together,” I tell him, and nerves squirm in my belly as I glance at the medical bag. “If this works.”
“It will, Saskia.”
I stare straight at the door, at the slowly-moving veins of venom writhing in the fossilized wood. “I wish I had your confidence.”
Lucan leans in close to murmur in my ear, his voice tickling against my hair, “That’s ironic, considering you’re the only thing I’m truly confident in.”
I close my eyes briefly before turning to Taika with a nod. He unclasps the medical bag, setting it on the crown of the stump and dipping his hand in to pull out one syringe, then another—then finally a vial filled with a bright, clear liquid.
Turning the vial upside down, he slides a needle through the top and extracts the liquid slowly, filling the syringe carefully as if he’s about to inject a living, breathing soul and not a Wall that we want to completely destroy.
Finally, he hands a now-filled syringe to me, and I take it with a steady hand, my years as a healer overpowering the tremble that might otherwise fill my fingers.
Taika repeats his steps before he tries to hand the second syringe to Lucan. “Alpha,” he says with a proud dip of his head.
Lucan only stares at the needle pointed directly at him.
“I—I don’t think I can. It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t make it with you.”
All too aware of every pair of ears listening behind us, I lay my free hand on his wrist. “These are your antibodies, Lucan. Your fight. Every time you tried to climb this Wall, every time you tried to tear it down to save your people, to save me… it resulted in this.” I nod at the syringe still in Taika’s hand.
“This is literally your blood, sweat, and tears at work. So you can.”
The whistle of the wind though tree branches twirls around us. Somewhere in the distance, an owl hoots as Lucan stares and stares and stares at me.
Finally, an awed smile spreads across his face, and he outstretches his hand, his fingers closing around the barrel while his eyes never leave my face. “Look who’s confident now.”
I laugh and nudge him with my elbow. Then we both take a deep breath and turn back toward the Wall.
It looms so high above us that the air goes cold as we step into its shadow, descending down the needle-strewn ground, where Lucan’s old pawprints already scar the forest floor.
This close, I can also make out the faintest gouges in the door where he once clawed at it—and no doubt burst with pain upon contact.
Pain that we’ll now use against the Wall itself.
“Are you ready?” I breathe, eyeing a particularly thick vein in the doorway and placing the tip of my needle against it.
“I’ve been ready for a few hundred years,” Lucan murmurs, and he does the same. “All I do is push?”
I place my thumb against the tip of the plunger and nod. “Just one last push.”
So side by side, eyes locked on each other, we plunge the needles into the Wall.
And push.
For several minutes, nobody speaks.
I squint at the Wall, hardly daring to breathe, as if I can make those veins of venom dissolve just by concentrating hard enough. They undulate as slowly as ever, giving the stone a ripple effect that messes with my vision the harder I look.
Slowly, Lucan and I hand the empty syringes back to Taika, who puts them back into his medical bag before retrieving his cane from the stump and waiting.
And waiting.
And waiting.
“It can take more than thirty minutes for antivenom to work in human patients,” Taika finally says, breaking the silence shrouding us like a heavy cloak.
“What about in a Wall patient?” Soren asks out loud.
Everyone—even Stella—turns to shoot him an exasperated look, and Soren scrunches his nose.
“Right. You wouldn’t know, because you’ve never had a Wall patient before. I’ll shut up now.”
“That’s the smartest thing you’ve said all day,” Vivian murmurs.
Still, the exchange seems to have broken the spell of silence gripping us all by the throat, and soon murmurs rise among the werewolves at my back.
I stare straight ahead, gripping Lucan’s hand with enough force that in any other male, I might have squeezed his fingers off.
But Lucan squeezes me right back, anchoring me to him as my heart drops further and further down, the minutes dragging by with painstaking slowness.
By the time half an hour passes, the moon shifting in the sky above us, the Wall still hasn’t changed.
As much as I try to imagine it into existence, the stone isn’t melting back into wood.
It stands just as impenetrable as always, looming over us like a hulking monster rooted deep into the earth, refusing to budge.
“Maybe I should check—”
Lucan moves before I can hold him back, reaching out to brush his fingertips against the stone… and immediately jerks back with a curse.
A pit sinks so low into my stomach, I want to fall to my knees. Behind me, Gabriel speaks the words I can’t bear to say out loud.
“I’m not waiting around for this shit any longer. It didn’t work. It’s over.”
I can hear pine needles crunch underfoot as he turns to leave, and worse, the sound of several others turning to follow him. Taika passes me a sympathetic glance, and Lucan wraps his arm around my shoulder, pulling me in tight.
“It’s okay,” he whispers. “Remember, we try over and over again until the world caves.”
I shake my head, tears burning images of my mother as a statute into my retinas.
Images of Malcolm and Gaia, Eleni and Sylvia, all the people I have failed who might not live long enough for the world to cave.
For the first time since my mother was Chosen, there’s a gaping wound in the world that I can’t heal, that I can’t fix.
And I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know how to keep trying.
I don’t know what the point is.
“It’s over,” I repeat, the words like ash on my tongue.