A cavern. Hollow and dead.
“Come on,” I whisper, pawing at his chest as if noise might wake him. “Liam… please.” My fingers search for his hand, desperate to feel him curl his fingers around mine like he always did when the nightmares were bad. But my hand closes only on torn flesh and shredded fabric. His stomach is a ruin beneath my touch.
Harper’s voice breaks in waves behind me, raw, unraveling, repeating his name through screams that don’t sound human anymore. Her grief fractures the air itself.
None of it reaches me.
My entire world is the dead quiet inside Liam’s chest.
“I can’t hear you…” The confession tears out of me with a shaking that feels like dying. “Why can’t I hear you? Liam...wake up.” My voice shatters on the last word. I push harder against his body, as if pressure could force breath into him, force his heart to remember its rhythm, force him to stay.
Nothing.
Ares kneels beside me. The storm raging around us seems to fall away until only his voice remains, low and grim and unbearably gentle.
“He’s dead.”
The words are a guillotine.
And the world goes impossibly silent.
37
HARPER
My hands won’t stop shaking. They tremble so violently that my vision blurs every few seconds, wavering between the forest, the mangled bodies, and the sickening stillness of Liam’s chest. Theo is folded over him like someone trying to shield a flame that has already gone out. The rise and fall that should be there is gone. His pupils don’t track movement. His lips are an unnatural blue that mocks every memory I have of him laughing.
Ares had tried, long after any logical person would have stopped, he kept pressing down on Liam’s chest, each compression more frantic than the last. It took both of Poppy’s shaking hands on his shoulder to finally force him still. Now she’s kneeling in the dirt, sobbing into her sleeves, her entire frame convulsing with helplessness. Sebastian drapes himself over me in a frantic attempt to anchor me, but his voice is buried beneath the white noise filling my skull. He keeps calling my name, keeps trying to force my face toward his, but all I can do is stare at my brother.
My brother, who followed me into this forest. My brother, who tried to talk to me. My brother, who died on ground I led him into.
“Sebastian, don’t touch me right now.” The words scrape out of my throat, barely audible. His grip tightens anyway, either from panic or heartbreak or both, and when his fingers brush my wound I shove him so hard his breath catches in surprise. Air tears into my lungsin jagged, uneven pulls. I’m losing control of my own breathing, my own pulse. The forest is shrinking around me, one claustrophobic heartbeat at a time.
The moment I raise my hand to signal distance, Sebastian freezes. Poppy wipes her eyes and looks at me like she’s afraid I might crumble into dust. Theo’s sobs fracture the air, splintering something deep inside my chest each time his breath breaks. And Ares...Ares stands several paces away, not touching anyone, not speaking, but his expression flickers between sorrow and something darker, harder. His jaw is locked so tightly that a tremor moves through the muscles of his cheek.
“Harwood, get over here and help me!” Ares snaps, trying to pry Theo away from the corpse he refuses to let go of.
Sebastian hesitates, torn between me and Theo’s unraveling grief. But eventually, he moves. Ares needs help to pull Theo back from whatever edge he’s dangling over. And I...
I don’t move at all.
I stare at the blood on my robes. At the dirt under Liam’s fingernails. At the way his head tilts unnaturally to the side. And then something inside me breaks. My knees buckle, dropping me to the earth. A sensation like drowning takes root behind my ribs, a blanket of hopelessness so thick I’m half-convinced the forest is swallowing me.
A blade presses against my hip from inside my belt. For a moment, I feel its call. One quick thrust. Silence. Escape. If Liam couldn’t survive what follows me, why should I?
A flicker of movement in my peripheral vision rips me out of the spiral. A straggling poacher, still alive, stands hunched over with a handful of dead animals dripping from his grasp. His eyes are hollow, feral, locked directly onto me. Before I can even lift my wand, his leg snaps backward with a crack that echoes through the clearing. He screams as he collapses, and I follow the line of motion.
Ares.
He stands with one hand extended, fingers flexed, the air around him bending as if gravity itself is kneeling. His wand glows faintly, but the power radiating from him is not spell work. It is older. Crueler. Forbidden.
Shadeborne blood magic.
The straggler is dragged across the forest floor in a single jerking motion, gravel tearing his skin apart. He claws at the dirt, sobbing, but he doesn’t get far, not with Ares pulling him like a hound on an invisible leash. The closer Ares draws him, the more the air thickens with heat and static. His eyes darken. The veins in his neck rise. His breathing deepens into something almost primal.
Sebastian steps behind me, resting a hand on my hip to keep me steady. But even his touch feels distant. My attention is fixed on Ares, the unnatural glow humming under his skin, the hunger in his magic as it reaches out.
And then it hits me.
