He dropped to all fours, breathing hard, blood and shadow-residue dripping from his muzzle. The ice beneath him was cracked, scorched, wrong.
Maren's shadows retracted slowly, pulling back to their mistress. She lay exactly where he'd left her, barely conscious, bleeding into snow.
Tristan shifted back to human. Crawled to her side. His hands found her face, tilting it toward him.
"Still here," she managed. Smiled despite everything. "Told you I could hold on."
"The locket," he said. "Where exactly?"
"North shore. Twenty feet from the boat dock." Her eyes closed. "Hurry. It'll reform. Stronger next time."
Tristan looked toward the shore. Twenty feet from the dock. Under three feet of ice.
He looked back at Maren. Dying. Bleeding. Waiting.
The bond pulled tight.
31
MAREN
The ice beneath Maren cracked.
Not the surface fractures from their fight. This came from deeper, something massive shifting below the frozen surface, pressing upward with deliberate force that made the entire lake groan in protest.
Light bloomed underneath the ice. Silver-white and cold, pulsing with a rhythm that matched her failing heartbeat. Each pulse sent fresh pain through her ribs where the doppelgänger had torn flesh.
"No," she breathed.
Tristan's head snapped toward the glow, his body going perfectly still in the way predators did when sensing danger. "What is that?"
"The locket." Maren tried to push herself upright, managed to get her elbows under her before her arms gave out. She collapsed back against ice that had gone from freezing to warm, heated by whatever was rising beneath it. "It's waking up."
The light intensified, spreading outward in veins that followed the lake's natural currents. The ice groaned again, a deep sound that vibrated through Maren's bones. Fracturesspider-webbed outward from a point twenty feet north of where they lay, exactly where her mother's echo had whispered about. Where the water stayed liquid even in winter's deepest grip, fed by underground springs that never froze.
The doppelgänger's scattered smoke began flowing toward the light. Not drifting randomly like normal shadow would. This moved with purpose, drawn by connection that went deeper than blood or shadow, pulled by the source that had given it form and hunger and terrible awareness.
"It's going back," Maren said, watching the smoke stream across ice like water finding its way downhill. "Merging with the source."
"Then we destroy it before it can reform." Tristan was already moving toward the glowing spot, his steps careful on ice that cracked with every shift of weight.
The ice buckled violently, heaving upward like something breathing beneath it. Water surged through new cracks, pooling dark and cold around the light source.
Maren's vision blurred at the edges, gray creeping in from blood loss and exhaustion and magic drained to nothing. But she saw it clearly enough through the distortion. The crescent shape rising through ice that shouldn't break, shouldn't melt, shouldn't let anything pass through its frozen barrier.
The Nightwell Locket.
Silver tarnished to black by centuries of burial and dark magic. Stones set in its surface pulsed with stolen light, each one holding a fragment of shadow-essence her ancestor had bound there. It hung suspended in water that glowed with unnatural luminescence, visible through the ice but still impossibly deep. Still untouchable.
The doppelgänger's smoke poured into it like water into a drain. The construct was reconstituting, healing the damageTristan's attack had inflicted, growing stronger with every wisp of shadow that returned to its source.
"Tristan," Maren's words came out slurred, her tongue thick and clumsy. "It's feeding. Getting solid again. If it reforms completely while still connected to the locket, we won't be able to fight it."
He was already calculating, she could see it in how he positioned himself at the edge of the glowing patch, in how his muscles coiled beneath his skin. Testing angles. Measuring depth. Preparing to do something stupid and brave and probably fatal.
"Don't," she said, forcing strength into her voice that she didn't feel. "The water's freezing. You won't last two minutes, even with your shifter metabolism."
"Don't need two minutes." He tested the ice with one boot, watching how it flexed under his weight. "Just need long enough to grab it and get back to the surface."
