All Chapters of Alpha's Second Choice : Chapter 61 - Chapter 68

Dante reached his father on the third night, somewhere past the Wind Warrior border, when the distance finally thinned enough to carry.It was not a long conversation. There was not much in it that needed saying twice.The Abyssal Gate, Dante sent. The old crossing in the No Man's Zone, where the sea border runs into theirs.Ian did not ask why. He had been Alpha himself for years before he handed it over, and he could hear the shape of a thing in his son's voice without needing it drawn.How long.Six days.You will see us in five.࣪ ִֶָ☾..☘︎ ݁˖-ˋˏ ༻❁✿❀༺ ˎˊ-He was wrong. It took them four.The two forces met on a churned stretch of the sea road where the mountains finally let go and the land began sloping down toward salt. Three thousand wolves coming south. Three coming north.Dante shifted in the middle of the road and stood there half dressed and shaking with the cold he had stopped noticing days ago.His father crossed the whole distance to him.Ian did not say anything. He put

The orb had been awake for hours before Victor used it.He spent most of that time simply holding it, sitting on the drowned steps of Ledger Court with the water at his shins and the thing burning steadily in his cupped hands, learning what it would let him do.There were forty-one mythical sea creatures that the orb could summon.Forty-one. Curled in trenches and under ice shelves and in the black water beneath the fairy coast, most of them asleep for so long that the seabed had grown over them and made hills.Victor went through them slowly, the way a man goes through a wine list.Then he stood up, and put his hand flat on the surface of the water, and began.The first thing anyone in the six realms knew about it was the tide going out.Everywhere. At once. Every coast in every realm, and it did not stop where a tide stops. It went out until the harbours were mud and the ships were on their sides and the fishing villages of four kingdoms were standing at the edge of their own seabeds

There was no pain.That was the first thing Jo understood, standing barefoot on wet sand under a sky that had no colour and every colour at once.The second thing she understood was that she could speak."Oh," she said out loud, and burst into tears at the sound of her own voice.She had been silent for six weeks. She had screamed inside her own skull until her head rang and nothing had ever come out, and now she stood on a shore and said "oh" and heard it, and she sat down in the sand and sobbed like a child until she could not breathe.The sea waited."I know this place," she said eventually, wiping her face.You should. You have been coming here for months.She got up very slowly.The water was rising. Not as a wave. As a shape, coming up out of the deep and taking form as it came, coils going out past the edge of what she could see and still going, a head the size of a house crowned in something between coral and light.And the eyes.She would have known those eyes at the bottom o

He did not take her far.Just past the last of the fires, to where the ground sloped down toward the water and the noise of the camp thinned out into wind. There was a flat rock there, half dry. He sat down on it and pulled her down beside him and did not say anything for a while.He took her hand instead, and turned it over, and looked at it. Checking. He had done it twice at the crack and he would keep doing it for months without knowing he was doing it."Say something," he said eventually. "Anything. I do not care what it is."Jo considered it."Your eyebrows," she said, "are doing a thing."Dante made a sound that was half a laugh and half something far worse, and pulled her into his chest, and did not let go.She let him.He was not in good shape and she could feel all of it. The blood dried down one side of his jaw. A rib that moved wrong under her cheek. His hair too long and stiff with salt, gold eyes ringed with silver and rimmed red underneath, five days of poison still work