But I’m not looking at them.
I’m looking at her.
Bree lifts her head slightly, green eyes finding mine across the devastation. There’s pain there, confusion, the terrible weight of believing herself monstrous. But underneath—deeper, where she doesn’t recognize it yet—there’s something else.
Power that knows its own name.
I don’t reach for her. Don’t offer empty comfort or meaningless reassurance. I simply stand closer than anyone else dares, letting her feel my presence without intrusion.
Let her see that while the others recoil, I remain.
The shadow-fox appears again, just for a moment, padding silently across the obsidian glass to pause at her feet. It looks up at her with eyes like starlight before fading back into the cracks.
She doesn’t notice. But I do.
In that moment, I understand exactly what she’s becoming—and that sooner or later, she’ll have to follow the shadows home.
Chapter 25
Thane
The silence stretches like a held breath, thick with fear and the metallic taste of raw power. I catalog the aftermath with practiced ease—cracked stone webbing outward from where she kneels, obsidian glass that doesn’t belong here, flowers blooming impossibly from devastation. The sanctuary walls hum with awakened magic, and the crowd presses against them like they’re the only thing standing between civilization and chaos.
Hundreds of Feeders and others hang back in various stages of terror. I can taste their panic on the air, sharp and acidic. They came here seeking salvation and witnessed what they believe is annihilation.
And at the center of it all, she kneels. Silver and black mist curls around her, power still crackling beneath her skin even as she whispers apologies to the cracked stone.
Stellan moves through the devastation with grace, stepping closer to her than anyone else dares. The others maintain their careful distance—Gray torn and bloodied from his earlier transformation, Rhett trembling despite the heat radiating from his skin, Wes pale and hollow-eyed. Even they fear what she’s become.
What she’s becoming.
Stellan pauses beside me, close enough that his voice carries only to my ears. When he speaks, each word lands like a blade between my ribs.
“You see a weapon. I see a queen.”
The words hit something raw and furious in my chest. My jaw clenches, fangs pressing against my lower lip as I fight the urge to snarl at him. Queens don’t leave scorch marks where their subjects used to stand. Queens don’t thread void-touched darkness through their power like infection through silver light.
But even as the rage builds, Stellan’s observation forces a crack in my certainty. Because he’s not wrong about the way she commands the space around her, the way the ancient sanctuary responds to her presence like it’s been waiting centuries for her return.
The way even the void-born creatures showed themselves bowed before dissolving back into shadow.
Their kind hasn’t been seen in so long they were thought to be myth.
My mind races through calculations, probabilities, damage control. The community is fracturing. Feeders and others who came seeking hope now taste corruption in the air and whisper of curses. My people—the ones I’ve spent decades representing, protecting, keeping alive in a world that barely tolerates our existence.
But there’s something else. Something that’s been clawing at the edges of my control since we returned from that place of endless dark. The memory of her voice in the void, the way something else answered when she called out. The black threads that weren’t part of her Ether but bled into it anyway, staining silver light with hungry shadows.
I felt it then. The presence that circled us like a predator, whispering things I couldn’t quite hear but knew were poison. It touched her. Claimed pieces of her. Left its mark woven through her power like a signature of ownership.
That’s what I’m really afraid of. Not her strength, but what’s using it.
The crowd’s whispers turn sharp, cutting through my thoughts like broken glass.
“She killed him.”
“The void took him.”
“She’s cursed.”
