Page 137

He laughs around it even then. Even as I shake him once, hard enough to break what Aestrata should never have called. Even as roots burst from the quarry edge and wrap his limbs, holding him not for me but for judgment. Even as his cracked lantern swings loose and strikes stone, glass splitting, blue flame guttering into smoke.

His voice comes through blood in a wet, fading rasp. Too… late.

I tear his throat out, and the forest goes silent.

His body convulses once beneath mine, claws scraping stone. The false Labrador tea scent rises in one last thick wave, sweet enough to choke, then collapses like a lie losing the mouth that spoke it. Under it comes rot, deep and black, then old earth as the roots tighten. His lantern cracks fully. The stolen blue light dies, and his scent goes with it.

Lucas’s pulse comes through the bond so weakly I almost mistake it for my own fear.

I stagger away from my brother’s body, nearly falling when my torn side pulls. I do not look back. The forest can take what remains. Roots already slide over him, not tenderly, not in burial honor, but as containment. A Varkhyn returns to the earth the way poison returns to soil after long work: slowly, bitterly, watched by every root that knows what he was.

Pain arrives now, trying to claim me. Shoulder torn. Ribs open. Skull cracked along one edge. One hind leg dragging. I do not care. I lower my muzzle to stone, breathe Lucas, and follow.

Down the old quarry path. Across broken shale. Through bramble thick with my brother’s blood. The forest opens too late, but it opens, roots drawing back, moss bending toward the trail, every living thing pointing now that the false scent is dead. Lucas’s pulse trembles in the bond. Faint and fading, but still there.

Hold, Little Ember. I send the thought with everything left in me, but no answer comes.

The path ends at an old mine mouth half hidden behind newly fallen rock. Wrongness clings around it but weakening now, unraveling without my brother feeding it.

Lucas’s scent seeps from the dark, thin and terrible. Human fear. Rope. Blood. The mark at his throat burning distantly. His pain is so faint it has become almost peaceful, and that frightens me more than screaming would.

I tear the entrance wider. Stone cuts my hands, roots snap, and earth showers down my skull, but I force myself through and into the dark.

I see him, and for one heartbeat, I cannot comprehend what I see because the mind refuses shapes that would end it.

Lucas hangs by his wrists from the ceiling in the old mine, bound and bloodied, head fallen forward, copper hair dark with sweat and blood, body too still above the stained ground.

His pulse flickers once through the bond.

Almost gone.

The roar that tears from me shakes the mine walls, splits dust from the beams and sends every root in the dark recoiling from my grief.

44

Onyx

I run with Lucas dying in my arms.

The world has no other shape now. No ridge. No creek. No old quarry hollow behind me with broken stone and blood on the rocks. No brother’s corpse being swallowed by roots somewhere in the ruined dark. No Parker dead on the mine floor, no ropes cut by my claws.

I tore through the hollow and found my mate suspended like an offering to cruelty.

There is only Lucas, limp against my chest, his blood soaking into my fur, his head tucked beneath my jaw. I cannot stop checking that he is still there, still warm, still breathing in shallow, wet pulls that do not sound strong enough to hold him.

I can feel his life thread fraying inside the bond. A thin, golden thing dragging against darkness, strand by strand, breaking where I cannot reach. The mark on his throat burns under blood. His pulse flutters beneath my palm each time I shift my hold, too faint, too far apart, a trapped bird beating itself against bone.

I push strength through the bond until my own body shakes, but it slides away from him like water poured into cracked stone. I send warmth.

Mine. Here. Stay.

Every word I have, every old root of my language, every shape of devotion my kind was made to carry. Nothing holds long enough. He slips and slips, and I run harder.

Branches break against my antlers. Rain and leaves lash my skull. My wounds open again, my brother’s claws and teeth tearing fresh beneath the strain of each stride, but pain has no meaning if it is not Lucas’s pain.

The forest opens before me with fear and grief because it knows what I carry. Ferns flatten under unseen wind, thorns pull back, roots lower themselves like bowed heads. No human has set foot where I am going. No boot, no tool, no prayer spoken with a human mouth has crossed the old boundary of Aestrata’s hollow.

Humans are not forbidden because she hates them. It is a place that remembers too much, and human bodies are brief things, bright and breakable, easily crushed by old attention.