Page 30 of Embers of Midnight
Blood steams in the cold. The snow around the fire looks like a butcher’s floor. My throat tastes of copper I didn’t drink. I wait for the shake. It doesn’t come. What arrives instead is a brittle, clear thing I don’t trust. Safety.
I should be terrified.I look at the men who made a wall with their bodies and knives and terrible gifts, and my chest does that treacherous loosen again.
Ash nudges a corpse with his boot, then thinks better and lets shadow take it. “Inventory: twelve idiots, zero survivors. Anyone got souvenir requests? No? Shame.”
Caelum glances at me first, then turns to Ronan and Darian. “We need to move. Hunters travel in pairs and pings. This team was small enough to be a probe.”
“Agreed.” Darian pulls his sword from the leader’s chest. Blood ropes free, drips to the snow, goes dark. He checks his own shoulder as if the hole’s an inconvenience rather than an injury. The flesh is singed at the edges, not cauterized, not bleeding much. He rolls it once, jaw ticking. “I’m fine.”
Ronan’s claws retract slowly, like reluctance. The edges of his half-shift blur, scale-points sinking back under skin, eyesdimming to their normal amber. He picks up his axe and wipes it on the dead leader’s coat with the efficiency of someone who’s done this too many times to pretend otherwise. When he looks at me, I feel the check-in like a hand on a railing.
“Still with us?” His voice is rough, quieter now. The tips of his fingers twitch like they remember almost touching my throat.
“Yeah.” It comes out steadier than my bones deserve. “Not a fan of surprise guests.”
Ash barks a laugh, a short flare of sound. “I mean, technically we invited them by existing. Rude of them to RSVP so enthusiastically.”
Caelum gives me a once-over that isn’t invasive, just thorough. “Any dizziness? Nausea? Flashing lights?”
“Hungry,” I admit. “Again.”
“That we can fix.” He nods to the packed case. “Portal’s twenty minutes if we walk careful. Less if we run. But we’re not running.” His eyes cut to me, a gentled command:you set the pace.
The clearing is mostly clean now—no bodies, just churned snow, broken branches, scorched spots where Ash’s shadows left stains the light won’t touch for a while. The hunters’ footprints enter, then smear, then disappear. It’s like the forest decided to redact them.
Darian tosses a last armload of gear into a pack. Ronan shoulders both tents like they’re nothing. Ash folds my blanket with theatrical precision and tucks it into the case as if hospitality points still matter after arterial spray.
I stand, legs protesting, head light for one breath and then settling. The coat slides around my calves. My hands smell like stew and fear and smoke. I look back at the fire because it’s easier than looking forward at whatever a portal is.
My feet don’t move.
Of course they don’t. Change feels like stepping off a roof. My ribs pull tight. The forest creaks, private and indifferent. The wind noses at my cheek like a dog that wants to be sure I’m meat.
Ash notices first. He always does. He clocks my posture, the way my shoulder blades try to kiss, the tilt of my chin that means stubbornness is winning over sense. He doesn’t comment. He just pivots, puts himself at my three o’clock, and starts juggling a knife because apparently we’re doing street tricks now.
Caelum does comment, but softly. “It’s okay to stall.”
“I’m not stalling,” I mutter. “I’m… calibrating.”
“Same thing,” he says. “One sounds more scientific.”
Ronan steps to my other side, not crowding. His hand hovers, then drops. I feel the absence of weight like an ache I haven’t earned.
Darian faces the treeline we’ll take, eyes scanning for the next problem. “We don’t have to leave this second.” He says it to the air. He means it for me.
It should be funny that the four most dangerous men I’ve ever seen are waiting on my breath like it’s a detonator. It should be, but my throat is busy.
“Portals are weird the first time,” Caelum adds, moving just ahead and turning so he can walk backwards, gaze on me. “A little drop, a pop in the ears, and then you’re somewhere that smells different. You’ll hate it for two seconds and then you’ll forget you hated it.”
“That’s a sales pitch,” I say.
“It’s also true.” His mouth quirks. “I could tell you it’s fun. It isn’t. But it’s fast. And safer than being found here again.”
Ash flashes me a look that is pure mischief with steel under it. “Also we have a house with actual beds. And a shower that could fix a war.”
I snort. “That a promise?”
“A threat,” he says. “Of comfort.”
