And when I saw that, the Winter mantle surged up within me. It didn’t know about family or love or sacrifice—but it knew all about fear. All about how to respond to weakness. And this demon, hungry and mad as it might have been, wasweak.
The cold that rose in me was something else entirely. Not the emptiness of nothing, but the savage cold of a world at war with the night. The cold of January. Where if chill winds sucked the warmth from the marrow, it was because elsewhere in the world was sunshine and light giving them energy. Where living waters, kissed by the life-giving sun, rose into the air to come slashing back down as crystalline snow. Where creatures lived in hunger and terror knowing full well that they had prepared themselves for this time, and had every intention of surviving it, of seeing life return to the world, of feeling the heat of summer upon their skin and seeing their offspring gamboling through green days.
Winter wasn’t Empty Night.
It was the war against it.
The wisdom and the will required to fight it.
The strength to stand fast, even when all was dark and seemed hopeless, holding to the truth that ahead were better days.
My physical body slammed my staff down onto the green crystal floor of the chamber, and the earth itself shook around me. The lightning-blasted oak of the tree from Demonreach connected me to the island, tothe life within it, in the earth, rising to the waters surrounding it and to the spring sun shining down. I drew upon that warmth, upon the power flowing through the island, and when the walls of the summoning chamber began to glow with sunlight, the Hunger howled in sudden terror and confusion, tearing its hands from me, lifting them to shield its mirrored eyes from the light.
And my spiritual body drove forward, planting a shoulder in the thing’s gut, half lifting it from the floor and slamming it down firmly into the other half of the infinity symbol. Fury and wild exultation filled me with strength, with the tingling exhilaration of hot blood flowing against the cold of night.
This fight was about more than me and my pain. It was about more than me and my fear. It was even about more than my brother and his life.
It was about denying death. Denying despair. Denying the Empty Night.
Maybe, on a long enough scale, that cold and darkness was inevitable. Maybe no matter what any of us did, one day the universe would settle into unbroken silence, eternal darkness, endless nothing.
But not today.
“Not today!” I bellowed, and slammed my staff on the floor again, and far above me from a clear blue sky, a bolt of lightning as big around as a tree trunk slammed into the stones around the entrance, coursed down through the earth, leaving a streak of green-gold glowing runes carved into the stones by the same man who had built the island and the castle alike, old Merlin’s craft and will, and blazed through the crystalline walls with the sheer, fiery power of the living world.
That was power enough to have incinerated my physical form. But my spiritual body was more than up to handling it. I gathered it up, heat and fire and pure spinning energy whirling through uncounted trillions of wandering ions, by very definition a tide of positive energy, and sent it coruscating up through the crystal, up through the spirit-body of the Hunger, whirling through it and around it in a matrix, savage and vital and scalding and nourishing all at once. The thing fell to its knees, covering its head with its arms, curling down in agony.
I was dimly aware of Lara falling away from me, shielding her eyes from the light. Mab remained standing where she had been, wild light playing across her face, her eyes wide as any axe murderer’s, her smile spreading out more than should have been possible as she watched me at the center of a veritable thunderstorm of energy, as she watched me contend with my foe.
I could have killed it then. I could have destroyed the demon, the Outsider, utterly. I could have freed my brother from its foul touch forever.
But in the Sight of my physical body, I could still see the blurring connection it had to Thomas. I could see the blur in the air between the Hunger and my brother, could see his faltering breaths, the utter exhaustion of his body. To tear asunder that connection would be to leave his spirit torn and ragged, like separating conjoined twins with two teams of wild horses. The kind of skill required to do that and leave his mind and spirit intact and ready to survive was beyond me. The Winter mantle howled for me to do exactly that, to send my enemy screaming back into the void whence it came.
But I fought against that savagery and mastered it. Because at the end of the day, the demon had been right. At Thomas’s will, it had fought beside me, time after time. And if it was mad with the need to devour, it was because it had also labored to keep my brother alive when he had been so savagely beaten.
Whether the Hunger realized it or not, we were fighting side by side again.
I couldn’t kill it simply for the sense of satisfaction it would give me.
Both my forms lifted my right hands and began to feed the wild, vital magic of life to the demon.
The thing let out a sudden quavering paean of raw need, spreading its arms wide in supplication and embrace at once, and as it did, its mirrorlike eyes, still panicked, flickered over to my brother’s still—utterly still—form.
“Oh, no, you don’t, you meathead,” I panted. “I haven’t walked through the wastes of war and death and my own soul to lose you now.”
And with a flick of my hand, I redirected a fraction of the energy Iwas sending into the demon and hit Thomas with a miniature lightning bolt.
Thunder rumbled through the crystalline chamber, making the walls ring like an enormous bell.
My brother’s body arched up into a bow—and the Hunger let out a desperate shriek, arching in time with him.
“Thomas!” I screamed. “Wake up!”
Mab’s voice rose in a wild cackle like ten times ten thousand violins shrieking in dissonance all at once.
“Demonreach!” she shrieked, raising bare white arms as the sleeves of her green robe slid down from them. “Bring forth my gifts!”
My head whipped around toward her.
