Page 54 of Hellfire to Come
There was a pause. Heavy. Laced with an unspeakable something.
It was like time itself hesitated, uncertain if it should keep moving.
And then I saw it.
A flicker in the shaman’s eyes. Subtle. Fleeting. But undeniable.
Shock.
She masked it quickly, too quickly, but the damage had been done.
I lifted my head from Dominic’s chest, the weight of his words settling over me like a mantle of cold iron. “What did you just say?” I rasped, voice dry and rough like wind scraping over salt.
“She has roots here,” Dominic murmured, his voice low and rough, cutting through the air with sharp clarity. He didn’t look at me, didn’t need to. His words weren’t for me alone. “Did you not wonder why her soul burns so loudly in this land that even I could feel it from outside the circle? Why the spirits stirred like wind through dry leaves at the sound of her pain?” He paused, his nose twitching faintly. “I can smell it, too. They carry the same note…your wolves, your trees, your wards. She has it. It’s in her blood. The same scent Alice carries.”
The air thickened like a held breath.
My heart stuttered.
I turned to Laughing Crow slowly, dread pooling behind my ribs. Her gaze, always so penetrating, so direct, was now cast aside. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“I thought…” My voice splintered mid-sentence. I swallowed hard, pushing through the tremor that curled in my throat. “I thought it was just a mistake. I could smell her when we stepped onto the reservation, but I chalked it up to being able to find her anywhere. I thought I was imagining things because I was worried sick about her.”
Still, silence.
A silence too full to be empty.
Dominic’s arms tightened around me, pulling me closer, as if bracing me for a truth he already understood. “You made no mistake,” he said firmly, each word striking like a war drum. “And this woman damn well knows it.”
At last, Laughing Crow looked at me.
Not with the sharp eyes of a sentinel. Not with the cold detachment of a shaman measuring weight and worth. But with something heavier, something that lived deep in the marrow and did not age with years.
“I did not know,” she said quietly. “Not with certainty. But when I looked at her for the first time, I felt the land murmur. It does not speak often. But it remembered her blood.”
My chest tightened as if bound by cords of memory I never wove. “Then you should’ve said something,” I whispered. “You should’ve told me.”
“So, you just let her nearly die anyway?” Dominic’s voice was all claws and thunder now. “You heard the land call her home, and still you left my mate burning on your floor. You let Brooklyn bargain for a life that should’ve been protected here.”
Laughing Crow didn’t flinch. “She offered her life freely. And I do not interfere with the sacred will of the spirits. Alice’s bloodmay call to the land, but her choices, her fury, her grief, her guilt…They belong solely to her. I do not stand between a soul and the storm it summons.”
“That’s convenient,” Dominic bit out. “You’re very good at telling yourself stories to justify letting people suffer.”
The shaman’s dark gaze flashed. “You think I don’t carry ghosts of my own,cat? You think I don’t know the price of interference? This land has bled under our care. Bled for our mistakes. Ancient magic demands balance, and you expect me to tip the scales without consequence?”
“I expect you to honor blood,” Dominic snapped.
Silence pulsed through the room, sharp as shattered bone.
I slowly pulled away from him and sat up straighter, letting my feet touch the ground. The ache that rippled through me was deep, not physical. It was older than flesh. I met Laughing Crow’s eyes without flinching.
“You say the land remembers her,” I said, voice steadier now, carved from something brittle but unyielding. “Then what is she? What is it remembering?”
She watched me for a long time, unreadable. Then, in a softer voice, as if speaking not to me, but to the space between us, she said, “The Great Spirit does not speak about Alice, child.” I almost laughed that she called me a child when I was probably older than her by hundreds of years. “It speaks about you.” Something other shifted in her pitch-black eyes and I started rethinking my certainty of who was older than whom.
“Me?” Shock evident on my face and in my tone, I reached for Dominic’s hand instinctively knowing that this human was about to pull the ground from under my feet.
“You are a child of two forgotten truths. One born of fire, one born of earth. The land remembers your mother’s sorrow. The blood that fled and never came home. You were not supposed to step foot on our land. And yet… here you are walking our soil asif you were born to do so. Asking to die for someone else. And the land answered not because of who you are now… but because of who you were always meant to be.”
