Page 9 of The Shadowbound and the False God

“The door has been opened,” he said. Rodney ushered the males inside quickly. Especially in the light of day, despite their human glamours, they looked as out of place as Kael had on the two occasions he’d visited the trailer park. Even if their features had been more accurately composed—cheekbones and chins more rounded, eyes less upturned—their imposing demeanors would have marked them as something just this side of unnatural.

“Took them long enough,” Rodney grumbled as he shut the door behind the pair.

“What happens now?” Aisling rose from the kitchen table, balling the too-long sleeves of Rodney’s sweatshirt into her fists. Her heart raced in her throat; though it had already been one agonizingly long month, she thought she’d have more time. She’d wasted the days drinking and hiding herself away rather than preparing for this eventuality. She had no plan. For someone accustomed to always having a plan, it was a discomforting thing to confront.

“We go through it.” Raif’s answer was matter-of-fact and delivered without pause. Finally, Aisling looked at him. The fury she expected to be met with had shifted to something more akin to fierce determination.

“We?” she asked. She hadn’t considered that they’d come with her into Elowas; when she pictured stepping through the doorway, she imagined she would be entering the god realm by herself.

“We,” Lyre confirmed.

Rodney nudged Aisling gently with his shoulder. “Obviously, Ash.”

Beside Her, a great White Bear shall tread, a guardian and companion through trials ahead.

Her breath caught as she looked around at the group crowded together there in her father’s trailer, and they all stared back at her with the same unwavering resolve. Briar, her anchor. Rodney, who had been with her on her journey from the very beginning. Raif and Lyre, both of whom had gotten her over various hurdles and obstacles with force or with cunning. They were all her White Bear, Aisling realized, every one of them.

But Kael, maybe most of all. Though he wasn’t there, she could see him, too. Bent over thick, dusty tomes, low candlelight casting a golden glow on his moonspun hair. Sitting side-by-side with her before the Diviner. Protecting her until the very end. Giving his life to see her become the Red Woman. Kael was her White Bear, too.

The swell of emotion in Aisling’s chest now wasn’t one of sadness, but a profound gratitude for this unlikely group cobbled together by fate. The prophecy of the Red Woman and the White Bear was so much greater than she’d ever realized, woven so tightly into the fabric of her life that it was inseparable from her past and from her future.

If she truly was the one writing the story, she was glad that she wasn’t doing so alone.

Saying goodbye to Briar would be one of the hardest things that Aisling ever had to do.

He’d been by her side through her first heartbreak, through her return to Brook Isle and the final months of caring for her father before his painful death. He’d braved the Seelie Court, then the Unseelie Court, and had taken Aisling’s grief in stride even when she pushed everyone else in her life away in the aftermath. Those nights she stumbled home from Ben’s, too drunk to even kick her shoes off at the door, he’d curled up at her side wherever she landed: the couch, the bed, the bathroom floor. He was patient, and gentle, and kind. Everything Aisling wished she could be for herself.

She couldn’t look at him as she packed a bag with his treats and toys and favorite blanket. He knew she was leaving him—she knew he did—and it splintered further the pieces of her shattered heart. But Elowas was no place for her first and favorite White Bear. No place for any of them, really, and ithurt Aisling even more to think that she might not make it back through that doorway to see Briar again.

Lida was the most dependable and predictable of Aisling’s friends. It was Saturday, mid-morning, which meant that she would be just arriving home after a meticulously planned trip to the grocery store with a week’s worth of ingredients. So Aisling didn’t ask ahead, but drove over to her home unannounced in Rodney’s car with its trunk full of Briar’s belongings.

True to form, Lida was in the kitchen, pulling vegetables out of a paper bag and handing them to Jackson to organize in the fridge when Aisling let herself in. Briar bypassed her outstretched hand and moved straight to sniff at the carrots Jackson was stacking in the crisper drawer. When Lida saw the bags in Aisling’s hands and the numb, distant look on her face, she turned to him.

“Jack, would you mind running back to the store? I forgot sugar.”

“I didn’t see sugar on the list.” Jackson straightened up, frowning, before he noticed Aisling standing in the hall. “Hey Aisling, I didn’t know you were stopping by. It’s good to see you, though, we’ve—”

“If it was on the list,” Lida interrupted, “I wouldn’t have forgotten it. I didn’t add it to the list.”

Looking curiously between Lida and Aisling, Jackson sighed and shrugged. “Sugar. Anything else?”

Lida shook her head, handing him the car keys and leaning in to kiss him sweetly on the cheek. Aisling turned quickly away from their display of affection.

In the living room, the small television set was tuned to the local cable news station—one of only three channels available on Brook Isle, and the only one clear enough to bother watching at all. The newscaster’s voice was a steady drone as she interviewed a much older man, both of them standing on a hill somewherenear the Washington coast. The footage was dark, the sun just beginning to crest over the Cascades in the background. Filmed earlier that morning, maybe, or the morning before.

“Ash?” Lida followed her into the living room, Briar on her heels.

“We’re speaking this morning with astrologist David Markoff about the disappearance earlier this month of Merak, the star at the heart of the constellation Ursa Major. David, what—” It felt as if the earth had stopped spinning, halting dead on its axis beneath Aisling’s feet. Her knees nearly gave out, and she had to brace one hand against the back of the couch to keep herself upright.

“Aisling, is everything alright?” Lida asked. Aisling couldn’t hear her, so singularly focused on the broadcast that she could scarcely remember to breathe. Merak.The Silver Saints were a star.

Guided by celestial light.Aisling’s heart thundered as yet another piece of the prophecy’s puzzle slid into place.

“Is this common?” The anchor continued.

“It’s unprecedented; I’ve never seen anything like it in my career.” The man gestured towards the sky. “Stars die slow deaths, dimming or exploding as supernovas. Even those we once thought had disappeared entirely are now faintly detectable with the advancements we’ve made in telescopes and digital imaging.”

“They leave traces,” the anchor supplemented. She, too, had tipped her chin up and was gazing at the smattering of stars overhead, fading away as the sky grew lighter. The horizon had shifted from deep blue to a lighter shade of purple.

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