Page 55 of Hellfire to Come
My breath caught, ragged and unformed.
I didn’t understand all of it. But I knew this: something ancient and hidden inside me was being unearthed. Slowly. Irrevocably confirming the truth in her words.
Dominic tightened his hold on my fingers. I gripped his without looking away from her.
“Then help me dig through those forgotten truths, Shaman,” I said. “I’ll walk into every fire and sift every ash if I have to. But I’m done letting people speak for me or use me for their gain. If the land remembers me, then maybe it’s time I remember it, as well.”
Laughing Crow inclined her head, just barely. But the glint in her dark eyes had changed. Wariness had not vanished. But something else settled in behind it.
Respect.
“We’ll speak again soon,” she said. “When you’re ready. Not before.”
Then she turned, her shawl sweeping the floor like trailing feathers, and headed toward the trees, the scent of sage and the echo of ancestral breath trailing behind her.
“You said the spirits took something,” I called out to her. “And I felt it. I need to know… what changed.”
Laughing Crow looked back over her shoulder. “You are not dying. That’s what matters.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
She studied me, then turned around slowly tilting her head, as if listening to something far off.
“The magic in your blood is no longer bound, girl. It’s… layered now. Altered. Intertwined with something older. The cost was not your life, but the shape of your gift. It belongs tomore than just you now. The Fates waited for a chance to alter your destiny. You opened that door for them tonight.”
Dominic’s voice was ice. “Stop speaking in riddles, human, or I will break your neck. What does that mean?”
Laughing Crow’s black eyes flicked between us. “It means the spirits did not take her power. They made itfree.We will all see what that means in time. I am the Great Spirit servant, I am not a seer to see the future.”
Silence fell again when Laughing Crow turned her back to us and walked away, but this one felt different.
Not tense.
Final.
Dominic carried me back to the house to a woven mat near the hearth and laid me down carefully, his arms still wrapped around my waist as if letting go might invite some invisible hand to take me from him.
I didn’t fight it.
After a long moment he settled next to me and pulled me gently into his arms once more. “Are you all right?”
“No,” I said truthfully, burying my face into the safety of his chest. “But I think I’m finally on the edge of some real answers.”
He held me there for a long time.
And for once, neither of us filled the silence. We just let the land breathe. Let the house watch. Let the truth settle like dust between bones once forgotten, now stirring again.
For the first time in hours, maybe days, the trembling had stopped.
But nothing felt settled.
Not yet.
Because whatever shifted inside me…
Was just beginning to wake.
Chapter Twenty-Two
