We leave her door together. Skye's jaw is tight and his bonds are reaching toward the closed door even as we walk away, instinct pulling him toward someone who needs help whether she wants it or not.
"She's fighting," I tell him. "That's something."
"It's not enough."
"It's what we have."
In the courtyard, the sun is setting over a sanctuary that used to feel like home and now feels like something wearing home's face. We sit on the bench together and I let our shoulders touch. The warmth of his essence, threaded with my own cold, pulses against me and I lean into it.
"The entity is agitated," I say when he asks. "It knows what's down there and it wants us to act. Soon."
"We need the others."
"I know. Can we hold until they get here?"
I reach through the bonds, feeling for the four distant presences moving toward us from the south. They're alive and they're moving fast, but they're still days away.
"Dante and I can reinforce the wards. Your bonds can counteract the corruption's effect on the students, pull them back toward themselves instead of letting the darkness drag them under. Between the three of us, we can slow it down."
"But not stop it."
"Not without the full six."
Skye reaches for my hand. I take it, and the cold of my fingers against his warm ones feels different now, the threads of each other's essence humming where we touch.
"Two days," Skye says. "We hold for two days, and then the others will be here."
I just hope we can truly hold off the darkness for two days.
14
Jade
Skye'shandgoeslimpin the air where Harlow was holding it, and then both of them are gone. One second they're sitting in front of us, Harlow's grip tight around Skye's fingers, Skye's aura flaring bright enough to leave spots in my vision. The next second there's nothing but empty ground and the faint smell of something cold, like stone after rain. The bonds don't break, but they stretch so thin and so far that I have to press my fist against my chest to make sure I can still feel them. They're there, muffled and distant, but there.
Stellan's hand finds mine. His fire is already spiking, heat rolling off him in uncontrolled waves, and I squeeze his fingers hard enough to hurt because it gives us both something to focus on.
"They'll make it," he says.
"They'd better." My voice comes out rougher than I intend. "Because if they don't, I meant what I said about killing death itself."
Rumi stands with his wings half-spread, his head tilted like he's listening for something the rest of us can't hear. After a long moment he exhales and folds them back. "They're alive. I can feel Harlow at the very edge of my range. They're moving fast."
"Then we move too." Ambrose is already shouldering his pack. "The faster we travel, the sooner we reach them."
We cover more ground in two days than we managed in the previous five, driven by fear and the muted pulse of two bonds stretched to their limit. Nobody talks much. The silence where Skye and Harlow should be sits heavy between us, a gap in our formation that we keep adjusting around without acknowledging.
My hunger feeds on the anxiety whether I want it to or not. The fear and worry bleeding off my three remaining mates filters through me constantly, and I learn to use it instead of fighting it. I convert the raw emotion into alertness, keeping watch while the others rest, scanning the treeline for movement.
A small group of loyalists finds us on the first day. Six of them, barely trained, more desperate than dangerous. We handle it, but sloppily. Stellan's fire flares too wide without Skye there to calibrate the connections between us, and Rumi overcorrects to compensate, pulling his balance so far toward stability that he loses offensive power entirely. Ambrose's contracts hold, but he's burning through reserves faster than he should because he's covering gaps that Skye and Harlow would normally fill.
We function. We survive. But we're incomplete, and every fight makes that harder to ignore.
On the second night, I catch Ambrose before he hits the ground. One arm around his waist, his full weight sagging against my chest. His monitoring contracts have been running nonstop since Skye and Harlow left, tracking the sanctuary's deterioration, tracking our mates through the faintest echoes in the network, tracking loyalist movements across three territories. He hasn't slept more than an hour at a stretch since they disappeared.
"Put me down." His voice is barely audible. "I need to check the eastern feeds."
"You need to sleep."
