Chapter 9

The scream did not end. It lodged under my skin and kept tearing.

I doubled over so hard my hands nearly hit the stone. The pain was not mine, and yet my body took it like it had been carved into my own bones. Every breath came ragged. Every heartbeat felt wrong, split between my chest and somewhere beyond the northern falls where a woman I had never stopped needing was hurting badly enough to bleed through blood and prophecy and distance.

“Sila.” Ty caught my shoulders before my knees gave out. Around us, the battle was collapsing into the aftermath of violence—groans, snarls, shouted orders, the scrape of bodies being pinned to the ground. Alpha Cameron was demanding prisoners. Luna Lea was asking if I was hurt. None of it reached me properly. The scream inside me drowned everything else.

“We have to go now,” I said. The words came out shredded, but they carried. “Not in an hour. Not when the ridge is secure. Now.”

“It could be a trap,” Alpha Cameron said. His voice was close now, iron under strain. “If Marian crossed first and a guardian is awake, charging blind into sanctuary land could get all of you killed.”

I turned toward him, fury burning cleaner than pain for one brief, savage second. “Do not use blind like it means helpless.” My voice shook, but not from weakness. “If we wait and she dies, I will never forgive any of us.”

Silence hit the ridge. Then Luna Lea exhaled sharply. “She’s right,” she said. “We can argue strategy over a grave later if we must. Right now, we move.”

Ty’s hand slid down from my shoulder to my wrist, firm and steady. “Me, Sila, Neeka, and four of our fastest,” he said immediately. “The rest secure the ridge, interrogate whoever’s still breathing, and keep Beth under guard. If this is bigger than Marian, we need both answers and speed.”

Alpha Cameron swore under his breath. Then he stepped close enough that I could feel the heat of him and the violence of the worry he was trying not to show. “You come back to me,” he said, the command roughened by something dangerously close to fear. “Both of you.”

Then we ran.

The northern trail was cruel even in daylight. At night, with stone slick beneath our boots and the roar of distant water rising through the dark, it became something meaner. Ty kept pace at my side without crowding me. Two wolves ranged ahead. Two stayed behind. Neeka pulled me forward through scent, instinct, and the thread of agony that still connected me to the woman beyond the falls.

I should have been thinking only about survival, only about the path and the danger ahead. Instead, my mind refused to stop tearing itself open. My mother was alive. My father had lied. Ty had kept too much from me and still ran beside me like I was something worth defending with the whole of his body. Every truth I touched cut. I had no idea which wound to bleed from first.

“You don’t have to hold all of it tonight,” Ty said quietly, as if he could hear the spiral of my thoughts over the river and the pounding of our feet.

A bitter breath left me. “That sounds dangerously close to comfort.”

“Maybe it is,” he said. “I can’t seem to stop loving you just because the timing is terrible.”

The ache that answered him felt older than this night, older than the bond, older even than the girl I had been before the accident. “Don’t,” I said, though there was no force behind it. “Not unless you mean to survive what comes next.”

The sound of the falls found us before the spray did. Water thundered through the dark with enough force to shake the ground. Mist soaked my face and hair. The air changed too—colder, older, touched by something that made the small hairs rise all along my arms. This was not only a hidden place. It was a protected one.

One of the wolves ahead shifted back to human with a curse. “Blood on the stones,” he said. “And drag marks. Something big moved through here.”

“Not something,” Neeka whispered, and for the first time in all the years I had known her, she sounded afraid. “Someone old.”

Then the thread inside me pulled tight enough to steal my breath. Not pain this time. Recognition. Grief. Love so fierce it felt like a bruise pressed from the inside. I stopped dead, my hand flying to my chest. “She’s close,” I whispered. “Goddess—she’s close.”

Ty caught that change in me instantly. “There,” he said. I heard him splash through shallow water, then curse softly. “There’s a break in the rock behind the falls. A passage.”

The water hit like winter when we pushed through. For one blinding second—blinding even to me—there was only cold and roar and the violence of the falls against my skin. Then stone closed around us and the sound dimmed into an echoing thunder. The air inside the passage smelled of wet rock, old magic, and fresh blood.

Our footsteps changed as the tunnel widened. Water dripped from the ceiling in slow, hollow beats. Somewhere ahead, something scraped across stone, heavy and deliberate. One of the wolves behind me inhaled sharply. “Bodies,” he said. “Two of them. Not ours.”

The scent told the rest. Blood. Opened flesh. Fear cut short. The guardian had met some of the men who came for me, and the guardian had not been gentle.

“Leave.”

The voice did not come from one place. It rolled through the stone itself—female, ancient, and edged with power old enough to make my teeth ache. The wolves behind us faltered. Ty stepped closer to me without thinking. Neeka lowered herself in the back of my mind, not submissive, but wary.

I swallowed once and found my voice. “I’m not leaving without her.”

Silence followed, vast and listening. Then the voice came again, closer now. “Many came claiming blood. Many came claiming prophecy. Most died screaming.”

My hands shook, but I kept them open at my sides. “I don’t care about prophecy,” I said. “I care that she screamed, and I felt it. I care that she is my mother, even if I do not yet know whether I should love her or hate her. I care that everyone in this world keeps deciding my life for me, and I am done asking permission to walk into my own story.”

The passage trembled. Not violently. More like a held breath finally released. Somewhere ahead, stone grated against stone. Ty exhaled once, quietly, as an opening widened deeper in the sanctuary.

We moved forward carefully. The tunnel opened into a chamber so large the echoes changed shape. Water ran along the edges in narrow channels. The stone underfoot was smoother here, worn by time and ritual. And at the center of it all, I could feel her now with terrible clarity. Weak. Alive. Waiting.

Then another scent cut through the chamber—perfume turned sour with sweat and blood. Marian.

She laughed from somewhere to the right, though the sound shook with pain. “Always late,” she rasped. “You were born late, awakened late, told the truth too late. And still somehow the world bends for you.”

Ty shifted his weight, ready to go for her, but the guardian’s voice lashed through the chamber first. “Do not.”

A low hum filled the stone beneath our feet. Neeka bared her teeth inside me. “Blood-lock,” she warned. “If Marian dies in here, something opens.”

“Now you understand,” Marian whispered. “I was never only a messenger. I’m the key.” Her breath hitched into a broken laugh. “Kill me, and you’ll tear the seal wide open. Spare me, and she dies slowly anyway.”

Then, from deeper in the chamber, a voice I knew only from absence and instinct broke across the dark. Weak. Fraying. Achingly familiar. “Sila?”

The world narrowed to that one word. No prophecy. No ridge. No blood. No Ty. Nothing but the shape of my name in a voice that had once sung me to sleep so long ago I had convinced myself I imagined the memory. My body moved before thought could catch it. “Mum?”

I took one step toward her voice and the entire chamber erupted. Chains screamed through the dark. Stone cracked. And Ty’s hand slammed into my arm just as he shouted, horror breaking through every ounce of control he had left. “Sila, stop—she’s chained inside the seal.”