I saw the wound just above the back of his knee. The muscle had been torn open, and blood was pouring out in surges, pooling under him, soaking into the stone.
Finn grabbed at his own shirt, ripping it off in one motion trying to fashion it into a tourniquet, but the blood just soaked through, hot and fast.
Wrecker dropped next to Doc’s head, cupping his face. “Stay with me, man. You hear me? Stay with me.”
Doc managed a smile. “Wouldn’t dream of missing the afterparty.”
His words slurred, eyes drifting.
Aspen was already working her magic, muttering spells, hands glowing green as she tried to slow the bleeding. But it wasn’t enough. Nothing was.
“Where’s Archon?” I shouted, scanning the crowd. “He can heal—he has to—”
But Archon was still at the breach, holding it open. I saw his outline in the glow, huge and impossibly bright, arms upraised and wings spread wide, his whole body straining to keep the gate open.
“He can’t come!” Bronc yelled, voice tight. “Not until everyone’s out. It’s Dominion Law—he breaks the line, the rest are lost.”
I looked back at Doc. His pulse was fading under Finn’s fingers. His lips had turned blue.
I wanted to scream, but all I could do was stare.
“No, no,no!”
The world, which had seemed so bright and beautiful just minutes before, narrowed to the spot of blood growing larger and larger on the ground.
Aspen was crying now, her voice shaking as she whispered the spells. “Don’t you dare go. Don’t you fucking dare. We need you!”
Kazimir tried to help, but even his hands shook. “The artery is gone,” he muttered, voice flat. “He cannot last.”
Doc looked up at me, his eyes oddly clear for a second.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You made it. That’s what matters.”
And then he was gone—eyes rolling back, body going slack.
The silence that followed was the worst thing I’d ever heard.
Wrecker let out a howl, part wolf and part human, so full of grief it tore holes in the world.
Finn let go of the wound and wrapped me in his arms, but I barely felt it.
I just kept staring at Doc, at the blood, at the place where hope had been.
We’d made it out.
But not all of us would make it home.
Epilogue
Doc
The first thing I noticed was the cold. Not the stabbing, shocking kind you get from a chest tube or a February wind off the canyon, but the kind that starts in your feet and radiates up, hollowing you out from the inside until there’s nothing left to shiver with. I remembered reading once that when people freeze to death; they take off their clothes at the end. Paradoxical undressing. The body gets so desperate it tricks itself into feeling heat, and you strip down naked, lie down in the snow, and that’s it. Game over.
I wasn’t naked. Not unless someone decided to take my pants off in the interim, which would be both unprofessional and highly concerning. My last memory was being carried by Kazimir Kozlov, his hands cold even compared to my own, and then the ground coming up to meet me like a cold wet towel. Someone said my name, I think. Maybe it was Wrecker, or maybe it was Brie. The voices blurred. What I knew, with the crystalline certainty of a dying man, was that I was bleeding out. Bronc’s anguished voice had told me he knew. He knew I was gone. He had been my brother, and I had left him. I felt like crying, but I couldn’t make any tears.
The rest of the sounds bled together. It was a symphony of voices, but there wasn’t any harmony. Wails didn’t waste time trying to find resonance.They just came from the guts of the people who loved the dying. The people who loved me.
Wrecker’s curses tore through me like shrapnel—each word a raw, ragged thing that carried the weight of his helpless fury. I could feel Arsenal’s growl vibrating in my own bones, his pleas for me to “stop being a pussy” rough-edged but trembling with a fear he’d never admit aloud. Gunner’s voice shattered me worst of all; grief and guilt bled into every syllable, and I ached to tell him none of this was his fault. But how could words reach a soul drowning in blame when the true evil lay far beyond any of us? Beside me, Papa wept openly, his tears falling hot against my skin, while Bronc—no, Alpha now—commanded me to fight with a voice that cracked under the strain of command. Their voices, desperate and shattered, pinned me to that moment. I wanted to give them what they begged for… but the darkness was swallowing me whole. My brothers’ love became the last thing I felt—a crushing, beautiful weight—as I realized I had nothing left, not even breath, to fight with.
