Not the fear. Not the grief.
The realization.
There is a magic capable of pulling someone back from the brink. A violent, ancient Shadeborne rite my father whispered about only once, mocking those who tried to use it. A magic born from sacrifice, from blood, from power no one should possess.
Ares has it.
“Ares,” I say, stepping forward despite Sebastian’s grip. “Can you save him?”
His attention cuts sharply to me. The blue in his irises flickers, gold for a heartbeat so quick I almost doubt I saw it. His jaw clenches. Something pained twists across his face.
“Tell me you want me to do it,” he murmurs, voice strained, “and I will.”
Sebastian bristles. “What’s the cost?”
Ares ignores him. His eyes move slowly, deliberately, from Liam to Theo to me. They linger longest on me. He looks at the way my body shakes, the way my breath breaks, the way Sebastian holds me as if I might disappear. His expression hardens, not cold, but resigned.
“I didn’t know it was him,” he says quietly. “If I had known-”
“I know.” My voice cracks. “So fix it.”
He flinches at the command, as if it strikes something deep inside him. His attention drops to the dying poacher, the unwilling vessel of whatever ritual he intends.
“I’ve already paid the cost,” he murmurs, turning back toward the man with a new, terrible focus.
And for the first time since Liam collapsed, hope curls like a dangerous spark inside my chest.
“Do it.”
The words leave Theo and me together, merging into a single jagged command that trembles through the clearing. His voice cracks under the weight of grief; mine breaks on the razor edge of fury. The two of us stand bracketed around Liam’s still body, our anger shaping the air into something sharp enough to cut. Ares doesn’t react immediately. He watches us both for a long, suspended heartbeat, a strange, unreadable expression tightening the line of his mouth, before turning toward the dying poacher sprawled in the dirt.
When he reaches for the man, he does it with a dreadful calm, closing his hand around the man’s throat with certainty rather than violence. The poacher isn’t even fully conscious, yet Ares drags him upright as though offering him to some unseen altar. He leans in close, his forehead nearly brushing the man’s, the proximity intimate in a way that makes my stomach turn. And then he begins to speak.
Not in the common tongue.
Not even in the Shadeborne dialect used in my childhood home.
This sound is older, thicker, an incantation so heavy it seems to bend the air around it.
“With your dying breath, you offer the sanctity of life. All your years never yours. All willed by my design. May your life bring on new ones. In my palm it now rests.”
The forest reacts to the words long before we do. The temperature drops first, subtly, like a breath pulled inward. Wind chokes into stillness. The leaves overhead hang rigid and suspended. Even the birds seem to vanish from the canopy, as though diving away from whatever curse has taken root in the soil.
The transformation is grotesque.
The man’s eyes sink inward as though collapsing under their own weight, darkening to bottomless pits. His skin shrivels and tightens, clinging to bone in an unnatural rush, years of aging happening in the space of a blink. Wrinkles carve valleys across his forehead. Liver spots bloom across his cheeks. His blond hair pales into brittle strands of silver before disintegrating between Ares’s fingers.
He never screams. He doesn’t even gasp. He simply folds inward, life peeling off him like a discarded husk.
When Ares releases him, the corpse drops soundlessly, light as paper, into the dirt.
For a moment no one breathes. No one dares to.
Ares turns toward Liam without wiping the blood from his hands. His face is tight with something I don’t recognize, not triumph, not annoyance, not the cruel composure he usually wears. This is sharper. Raw. Determined. He kneels beside Liam’s body and places both palms firmly against his chest as though grounding himself to the boy he is desperate to retrieve from the brink.
“I need your blood,” he says, but the words are meant for me alone.
Sebastian lunges forward, fear and fury twisting his features. “Harper...don’t-”
