“Hold the line!”Blade roars, his bear form bleeding from a dozen cuts but still standing.
Chrome’s is injured but he keeps fighting.
Scout’s wings shred as frozen air tears through gossamer, but he keeps hovering, keeps firing silver light at the aspect trying to reach Prophet.
Fury blazes hotter, hellfire fighting an impossible battle against primordial cold.
Rooster shrieks defiance as frost forms on his bronze feathers, but he keeps diving, keeps striking.
And Prophet keeps chanting, his voice hoarse and breaking, blood freezing on his lips, but never stopping.Nevergiving up.
The Khorvath turns its full attention on Tessa.
“If I cannot have you willingly, I will take you by force.”
Its hand closes around her, lifting her off her feet, and through the bond I feel ice invading her body.Not just cold, but something worse.Absence.The ending of all things.
She’s dying.
Right here in my arms, she’s dying, and I can’t—
No.
I reach through the bond, past the pain and the cold and the terror, and I find the core of who we are.Not vampire and human.Not monster and warden.Not death and life.
Us.
I pour everything I have into her.Five hundred years of survival instinct.Centuries of refusing to die.Every ounce of strength, speed, and stubborn determination that’s kept me alive through wars and plagues and the long, lonely centuries.
And she pours back.Her warmth.Her humanity.Her fierce, mortal love that burns brighter than any hellfire because it’sfinite, because it’schosen, because it matters precisely because it won’t last forever.
The bond explodes with power.
Light and darkness.Cold and warmth.Death and life.
Balance.
The Khorvath shrieks, dropping Tessa as the mark on her shoulder blazes white-hot instead of cold.Not destroying her, buttransformingher.Making her something new.Something the prophecy never accounted for.
A warden bound to a vampire, two forces never meant to touch, let alone intertwine.Mortality braided with immortality, the finite tethered to the infinite, ending fused with eternal dawn.Our bond hums with power older than language itself, a convergence of shadow and light that blurs the line between what lives and what lasts.
Together, we form exactly what Prophet needs, an anchor strong enough to hold open the veil between worlds, the final piece in a ritual whispered about in ancient texts and feared by anything that understands what balance truly means.
“Now!”Prophet screams.
And together, all of us, brothers, family and the pack we’ve chosen, we push.
The Khorvath fights, reality bending and breaking around it, but we don’t stop.Don’t falter.
We are the Kings of Anarchy and we rule Alaska.
And nobody—nobody—fucks with the Kings.
The creature begins to dissolve, pulled back toward the tear in reality Prophet has opened.Its screams shake the mountains, promising vengeance, promising return, promising this isn’t over.
But for now, for this moment, we’re winning.
