The sound of a low groan pulls both our eyes to Ares. Hishand shoots upward, grasping blindly for something solid as another wave of agony tears through him. The table shudders beneath his grip. His veins pulse with darkened poison, crawling farther toward his spine. Every part of me goes cold.
“I don’t understand any of this,” I whisper, but confusion feels like a luxury I’m not allowed right now. My hand lifts on instinct, sliding into his hair the way I’ve watched him do when he tries to calm himself. It’s soft. Softer than it should be for someone who bleeds violence as easily as he breathes. His head turns faintly toward me, his eyelids fluttering in a silent plea.
Althea doesn’t slow. She reaches for a new set of supplies, her hands moving with practiced urgency. “Now is not the time for clarity, Harper,” she says, her attention darting between Ares’s back and the vials at her workstation. “We deal with what we can control. Tell me, is Liam still alive?”
It takes me a second to process the shift. “My brother? Yes, of course he is.” Her shoulders drop minutely, as though she has been holding that answer inside her lungs.
“Good,” she says, already reaching for a small metal tray. “How fast can he get here if we send him a raven?”
My heart kicks. Liam. Theo. Sebastian. Poppy. Anyone, all of them, they would come without question. “A few hours, maybe. Liam can bring help-”
“Careful,” Althea snaps, her voice cracking like brittle glass at the edges. “He can bring whoever he needs if it ensures he comes. But no one else is to know about this cottage unless you trust them with your life. And with his.” She nods toward Ares, whose breathing grows shallow and uneven, the poison tightening its hold.
She presses something into my palm, a needle attached to a long tube. Its weight settles on my skin like a verdict. “Whydo we need Liam?” I ask, barely hearing my own voice over the pounding in my ears.
Althea circles around the table and faces me fully. Her expression carries grief, urgency, and the tired acceptance of someone who has lived through too many Shadeborne consequences. She takes a cloth and wraps it around my upper arm, tightening it with quick, practiced tugs until my veins rise beneath the skin. Her fingers brush against the inside of my elbow, searching for the line of blood she needs. “Because I need your blood to heal him,” she says. “And I don’t know anyone else who can help you replenish yours other than your brother.”
The room sways for a moment. My gaze drifts to Ares, his chest rising in shallow, unsteady waves, the muscles in his jaw twitching as he fights whatever nightmare his body is manifesting. He’s trying to stay awake for me. For her. For anything that resembles survival. His eyes crack open again, not fully, just enough for him to see me. There’s nothing but desperation there. A silent apology. A silent plea.
My heart splinters.
“How much blood?” I ask, my voice steady despite the storm inside me.
Althea holds up the IV bag. It’s far too large. No sane healer would ask this of anyone. No sane person would agree.
“How much can you give me?” she murmurs, and she isn’t asking out of recklessness, she’s asking out of resignation. Because this is the only chance he has left.
I don’t hesitate. There’s nothing to weigh, nothing to fear more than losing him. I take the needle, position it above the vein Althea found, and shove it into my arm before my courage can falter. Blood blossoms into the tube instantly.
“All of it,” I whisper.
45
LIAM
My pencil taps against the library desk in a steady, anxious beat, Sebastian’s glare cutting sideways every time the rhythm shifts. The quiet of the room hangs heavy, smothering rather than soothing. Stacks of books rise around us like watchtowers, sunlight spills across the wood grain in pale strips, and still, nothing distracts from the gnawing unease crawling beneath my ribs. Harper has been gone too long. She left a rushed note, words tilted and uneven, the kind of handwriting she only uses when she’s cracking under pressure. We’d all agreed to give her space, to let her decompress, but every minute she doesn’t walk through that door twists tighter into dread.
Theo sleeps against my arm, lips parted, breath slow. He tried reading for twenty minutes before exhaustion consumed him; now he’s slack on the open braille page, head angled at an uncomfortable tilt. The weight of him keeps me anchored in a reality that otherwise feels like it’s shifting underfoot. On the other side of the table, Sebastian fidgets. His pencil has been through a dozen positions in the last ten minutes. Spinning. Rolling. Clicking against his teeth. Tap. Tap. Tap. His restlessness mirrors the tension in the air.
“How’s Anne?” The question slips out before I can overthink it. His shoulders stiffen. Eyes flicker with something raw.
“She’s been better,” he admits, leaning back with the kindof forced ease no one buys. “Whatever magic Andrew cursed her with… it comes in waves.”
The confirmation sits like a stone in my gut. Father really did hurt her.
Thoughts rush ahead before I can stop them.Maybe letting Ares teach her how to use that magic could-
A wall slams down inside my skull, white pain exploding behind my eyes. Hands fly to my head as the library tilts. Every attempt to follow the line of that thought only intensifies the pain, as if some invisible hand is gripping my mind and squeezing.
Sebastian is on his feet in an instant. “Liam, what happened?”
“It was nothing,” slips out because it has to. The pressure eases only when the thought disappears entirely.
Theo shifts when I slide my arm out from beneath him, his cheek dragging across the table. “Just need some water,” leaves my lips before Seb can pry.
Cold water spills down my throat in slow relief, easing the pulsing heat in my temples. Still, unease thrums below the surface, something is wrong, out of place, tightening like a snare.
A flutter of movement catches at the corner of my eye. A raven, black as pitch and unmistakably conjured, lands on my abandoned chair. A scroll is clamped between its beak, the wax seal imprinted with initials I don’t recognize. Sebastian reaches it first. His entire expression changes. Fear. Shock. A rage edged with something like grief. The chair screeches as he stands, jolting Theo awake.
