Page 75 of Renegade Kingdom
A void. A dark shadow where the lightning seemed to disappear entirely. Not reflect, not arc around, just... vanish. Like there was a hole in reality itself, a place where light and energy went to die.
“There!” I shouted.
Maddox was already moving. In one smooth motion, he ripped his sword from its sheath and threw it. The blade spun through the air, end over end, and buried itself deep in the center of that darkness.
A shriek filled the air. High and terrible and nothing like any sound a living creature should make. The void writhed, the darkness convulsing around the blade that impaled it.
“Now!” Fizzle screamed.
Maddox sent his magic into the sword, fire racing down the blade and exploding outward in a burst of orange and gold. At the same moment, I hit the void with the biggest bolt of lightning I could summon, pouring every ounce of power I had left into a single, devastating strike.
The shriek cut off abruptly.
The fog fell. It didn’t dissipate slowly or drift away on the wind. It just... fell. Like a curtain dropping at the end of a play, revealing the stage behind it.
The tree creatures were gone. The illusion shattered, leaving nothing but the normal forest around us. And when I turned, gasping for breath, my magic depleted and my muscles aching with exhaustion, I saw what our pack had wrought.
Bodies. Dozens of them. Fae hounds and anastids scattered across the forest floor. Blood and ichor soaked into the earth. Trees frozen solid, their branches encased in ice that glittered in the strange twilight. Scorch marks where fire had torn through flesh. Wooden spears embedded in carcasses.
And in the middle of it all, standing back to back, Alyssa and Damon. Covered in blood that wasn’t their own, weapons raised, magic still crackling around them like a living shield. There was something different about them, something that hadn’t been there before. A connection. A bond. Even from this distance, I could feel it through my own tie to Alyssa. She and Damon were linked now. Truly linked. The fifth bond had formed.
They’d done this. While we were trapped in an illusion, fighting shadows, they’d been tearing apart an army. Together. As partners. As mates.
“Holy shit,” Maddox breathed beside me, his voice filled with awe.
Tank emerged from the trees to our left, limping slightly but alive. His clothes were torn, and there was blood on his face that might have been his own, but his eyes were sharp and aware. He found us first, then tracked to Alyssa and Damon, and I saw the relief flood through him. The tension in his shoulders eased slightly, even as his gaze catalogued our injuries, assessed our conditions, began planning what came next.
Dean was further away, standing alone in a circle of frozen corpses. Ice radiated out from where he stood, coating the trees, the ground and the bodies of the anastids he’d killed. There was something different about him, something darker in the way he held himself. He was looking down at his hands with an expression I couldn’t read from this distance. But he was alive. That was what mattered. We could deal with whatever had happened to him later.
Fizzle landed on a branch nearby, his feathers ruffled but his eyes bright with something that might have been satisfaction. “Well,” he said, “that could have gone worse.”
“That’s your idea of congratulations?” I asked.
“I’ve never been very good at that.” He ruffled his feathers, adjusting them back into place. “I’m better at telling people what they’re doing wrong. Which, in your case, was nothing. You figured out the jin. You found a way to kill it. You survived.”
“We all survived,” Maddox added, his voice rough. “Somehow.”
“Not somehow.” Fizzle’s eyes found mine, and there was approval in them. Actual approval, which was strange enough coming from him that I almost didn’t recognize it. “You used your heads. You worked together. You didn’t panic.”
I wanted to point out that I had definitely panicked, at least a little, but I kept my mouth shut.
We’d survived. All of us. Against impossible odds, against creatures that shouldn’t exist, against the full fury of the Wildling Forest.
“We might actually be able to do this,” I whispered, looking at the carnage around us, at my pack scattered but whole, at the woman I loved standing in the middle of it all like a queen of destruction.
And for the first time since we’d entered this forest, I actually believed it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Alyssa
Iwas exhausted in a way I’d never felt before. Every muscle ached. Every breath was an effort. The magic that usually hummed beneath my skin felt thin and frayed, like a rope that had been pulled too tight for too long. I’d poured so much of myself into the fight, into the destruction of the fae hounds, that there was almost nothing left.
But I was alive. We were all alive.
The fog had fallen, and for the first time in what felt like hours, I could see clearly. The forest around us was a testament to violence. Bodies scattered across the ground, blood soaking into the earth, frozen trees standing like monuments to Dean’s power. It should have been horrifying. Maybe later it would be. But right now, all I could feel was relief.
I looked around at my mates, checking each of them in turn, needing to see with my own eyes that they’d survived. Needing to confirm what the bonds were telling me, because after so long with those bonds muffled by the fog, I didn’t entirely trust them yet.
