Cathal’s wolf’s eyes turn white, swallowed whole by that familiar, empty nothingness. He folds almost immediately,faster than the rest, terror dragging him under with ruthless precision. His body staggers on four paws as he retreats from Rennick. Even though Cathal’s eyes are no longer truly seeing anything in front of him, including my mate, he still backs away like he’s staring down one of the greatest evils to exist. The irony isn’t lost on me.
Whatever nightmare has its grip on him is real in every way that matters.
Rennick stills.
His massive head tilts just enough to betray the confusion moving through him, subtle but impossible to miss. All around him, enemies unravel into screaming knots of terror on the ground, bodies curling inward as the fight fractures and then halts altogether.
The rest of the Fallamhain wolves watch on, just as puzzled.
Then I feel it. The mental walls he’s been holding between us while facing Cathal collapse all at once.
He reaches for me through the bond, the connection humming with warmth and familiarity, with a sense of safety I want to sink into until I disappear. I want to give in. I don’t. Not yet. Not until this is finished.
Noa? Sweet one?
His voice brushes my mind, worn rough by exertion and threaded with something like awe. Not only does it nearly break my focus, making me want to reach for him when I can’t, but it almost pulls apart my fragile resolve. I brace against it, afraid that if I lean into him and his steadiness now, I won’t be able to pull myself back together until he finds me.
I will myself to hold on a little while longer.
End it, Ren,I tell him, the command quiet and unwavering as the phantom wind begins to pull me back.
Rennick’s wolf turns back to Cathal with an air of absolute finality about him. He lunges. His jaws close around Cathal’sthroat as his claws rip across the other pack Alpha’s exposed belly. There is no mercy in it, only the inevitability that this was always Cathal McNamara’s fate.
I don’t linger to witness the last breath, the final beat of his black heart. I don’t need the proof. I trust Rennick to end the threat that has hovered over us like a blade for far too long. Watching his canines sink home is enough.
Cathal’s thread was the last one and now that it’s been dealt with, there’s nothing holding me here. I drew all the pain and hurt into myself to reach this magic. I release the white-knuckle grip I’ve been holding on the pain—the only thing sustaining me in this place.
Like the snapping of a rubber band, the recoil is violent. One moment I’m everywhere, the next I’m shoved back into my body, my stomach rioting as a deep, pounding pulse thuds inside my skull. I feel it behind my eyes, in my teeth.
Around me, the shimmering threads that were woven through the air and along the ground wink out as abruptly as they appeared.
I’m panting when my eyes finally open, lungs dragging in cold air that doesn’t go down easy. The muddy dark back road comes back into focus around me, and the green glow that once swathed everything has faded. There’s only the snow, churned and bloodied, bodies in the positions they took their last breaths in, and the stench of fear.
I can smell fear now? Shifter senses are wild.
Every Tanith witch and McNamara wolf who survived the fight is now broken in the slushy mud, balled up tight and clutching their heads, imprisoned in whatever nightmare I left them in.
My vision wavers again. I blink hard until it steadies—and then Amara is there.
She kneels across from me. There’s a gnarly, jagged cut along her jaw, her signature black shawl torn and scorched. She watches me closely, her eyes more assessing than usual, waiting for me to collapse. When I remain upright, she reaches across Rhosyn’s body and cradles my face, her soot coated thumb wiping at tears I didn’t know were falling.
The gesture is unbearably maternal. Grief has something cracking open in my chest, and a sound snags in my throat as I lean into her touch, craving it in a way that feels painfully fragile.
“You are extraordinary, Noa Fallamhain,” she murmurs for my ears only.
I shake my head, denial already forming. It’s my mother’s magic. I’m just the conduit. I’m only?—
A high-pitched screech tears through the air behind her.
Pain. Terror. Desperation in its purest form.
Amara flicks a glance over her shoulder, the reaction flat and unimpressed, then shifts aside without urgency so I can see past her.
Talis is sprawled on her back on the ground where her stolen vehicle had been, thrashing in dirty snow and mud, sobbing like she’s being disemboweled. She jerks and bucks, locked in a fight against demons only she can see. Ones I made real for her.
I look at Rhosyn again, at the stillness of her body in the bloodstained snow and the deliberate quiet that seems to just surround her in a protective bubble, as if the world has gone solemn in recognition of what has been taken from us. My mind reaches for her without permission, a final search for life even though I already know what waits for me. Or what doesn’t, in this case.
There is only silence, and beneath it, is something that was earned at a cost I don’t know how to measure. Peace. I can’t tell if it’s real or simply my subconscious stepping in to protect me. I made the decision to take it as truth and let it be enough.
