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AllissaThe red had banked when the blow’s work was done, folding itself back down under my skin, and only a faint hot crawl was left in my palms. Finn watched it go with the gravest face I have ever seen him wear. “Later,” was all he said, when Darren looked the question at him. “Tonight is hers. Later, I will tell you what I know, and then we will make a plan.”The Nursemaid stood at the rim of the circle with his empty arms and his finished song and absolutely nowhere in the world left to stand.It was Lyra who solved it for him, because of course it was. She turned around with Thorin’s hand still in hers, imperious, tear-streaked, three years old and issuing decrees, and pointed one small finger at the warden who had sung her through the end of the world. “He’s coming,&
AllissaI saw it with my own eyes, the thing that had lived between those two children since a ballroom years ago. A line of light ran from my daughter’s outstretched hand straight into Thorin at the circle’s heart, and Lyra’s silver poured down it like water finding a channel. Thorin’s head came up. His hands came up with it, wrapped in her light, and he turned to the sleeping mountain, and he did something none of us knew he could do. That they could do.Crystal rose out of the circle. It climbed her flanks in clear sheets, over the battered wings, up the great neck, closing around the last of the First like ice closing over deep water, smooth and perfect and impossibly gentle, until the whole sleeping length of her lay held inside it, preserved down to the frost on her scales, and the moonlight came through it and lit her from every side.
AllissaI was already moving. I had been moving since the ward broke, Darren beside me, the two of us crossing the last of that circle toward the Nursemaid and Lyra while the sky came apart overhead. Ten steps away. Then five. Close enough to see Smoke squashed against her chest and her arms already reaching. And the oldest thing alive spent her final unbroken breath on me.I never saw her choose it. Finn did. Finn moved, and for the first time since I’ve known him, the Vampire King was too slow. Something thin and cold as the dark before the first dawn came up off the stones where she lay broken, crossed the circle, and went into me just under the heart.It didn’t hurt. That was the horror of it. It went in like a key.And something inside me that I had never once felt, in all my
AllissaMy daughter called her monster down out of the sky, and her monster came.The griffin never slowed. It stooped at the circle with its wings shut. Thorin stood in the stirrups the whole way down, ten years old and wrapped in rippling heat. What came off him wasn’t a boy’s fire, and it wasn’t his father’s. It was older than both, and it was furious. It struck the ward from above in the same breath that Lyra’s silver rose to meet it from below.The two lights found each other through the wording like hands finding hands in the dark.The bond between two children answered the ward and wording at once. Nothing was built to argue with that.The ward didn’t flicker this time. It broke. All of it, everywhere at once, and the sound it made breaking shrieked off the mountainside.Thorin came off the griffin’s back before it touched stone. He landed inside the circle between Onyssa and my daughter, small against everything, and he set his feet as he had once set them on a ridge in front
AllissaThe word went up over the rite, over the wind, over the moon itself as far as my body was concerned, and my daughter came alive in the warden’s arms, both hands reaching over his shoulder with her fingers spread wide, calling for me with her whole small chest while the oldest working in the world tried to sing above her. “MAMA! PAPA! I KNEW IT!” She twisted around to inform the entire mountain, the wardens, the stones, the bleeding sky itself. “SEE? I TOLD YOU!”I pressed my hands against the bend in the light. “I’m here!” The words tore out of me. “Mama’s here, baby! Mama’s RIGHT here!”Darren’s voice came over mine, breaking on the words. “Papa’s here! We came, sweetheart, we’re HERE!” Ancient law stood between our palms
AllissaI didn’t get to say be careful. I didn’t get to say anything. The goodbyes happen at a run, over your shoulder, half heard.There was no time for speeches. Eira’s hand closed hard on my arm. “Listen for my word.” Then she and Heath headed into the red dark.Heath took Eira and bent away along the terrace walks, toward the circle’s skirt, to get her close enough to reach the rite’s seam. Squall had the western sky, and any breath now he was going to make the whole mountain look at him. And Darren, Finn, and I had the only road my heart would allow. Up the servant ways. To the door of the man who had become an ally to Lyra.The inside of her mountain was built for wings, and we climbed it on feet, and every stair felt like it took ages.Finn took the point, stealthy as the wind. Darren counted the turns behind him in a whisper. Left, then left, then up. Heath’s drilling lived in all three of us now. We had memorized those lefts and rights in our sleep, and tonight our feet moved
The months slipped away, barely recognizable, barely there, and then suddenly it was as if I’d always been alone, like it was normal to pad through the halls without Darren by my side. Calls, messages, each one fleeting, each one hurting as much as it healed. I touched the place where he should hav
AllissaI was losing the war with my own body.Every contraction hit like a meteor, atomic and intense. My knees were up, my hands curled so tight I was gouging the tender skin of my own palms. Sweat slicked my scalp, pooled in the valley of my chest, and trickled down the sides of my face in slow,
The grand ballroom of the Lycan Kingdom was wall-to-wall with every noble, dignitary, and hanger-on that the new alliance could scrape from the edges of the world.I stood at the center of it all, holding my six-month-old daughter in my arms. Lyra was heavier than she looked, which was saying someth
AllissaEira flung herself over me, her magic a last-ditch wall of icy blue, but Angelica’s attack punched right through. The pressure slammed me to the bed, pinned me by the throat, and for one long, surreal second, everything went quiet. I saw Eira on the floor, twitching but alive, her hands clam







