Page 91 of Embers of Midnight
Caelum crouches beside us, eyes caught between fury and focus. He reaches for something on the concrete with a cloth and lifts it into his palm. A curved shard, white-hot memory dulled to matte. The tip of my horn. My stomach flips.
“I have it,” he says softly. “It’s yours.”
Taya and Laz appear in the corner of my vision, alive, faces blown open with adrenaline and anger. Taya drops to her knees on my other side and presses her forehead to mine briefly,grounding without shaking the cage. Laz’s jaw works like he’s chewing through a scream; he squeezes my shoulder and nods once, ritual of the saved and the stubborn.
Ash stands at the alley mouth breathing like someone ran him hard. Shadows slough off his shoulders in ragged strips and vanish into the corners. His mouth is a flat line that makes me a little afraid and a lot safe.
Ronan wipes his forearms on a filthy rag, the scales along them flickering out. He looks at me and then away like if he stares he’ll start a war. He doesn’t touch me until he can do it without shaking. Then he kneels, thumb under my chin, eyes on my pupils, counting something only he cares about and I suddenly care about too.
“We’re done,” he says to the alley, and the alley believes him.
Ash handles the aftermath the way only Ash can. Shadows climb the walls, swallow the worst of the mess, and leave behind a story no one will be able to tell cleanly. Kieran snaps two pictures—angles, time, one bead for Rell’s records—then wipes prints with a cloth that smells like salt and camphor. Team Umbra melts the perimeter like a trick they’ve done a dozen times: present, then gone, with only a ward humming on a drainpipe to say they were here.
“Home,” Darian says into my hair.
“Home,” I echo, and stand with his help. My legs hold. Barely. Good enough.
We take the long way to the portal to avoid the siren whine crawling this direction. Back through the basement. Up the stairs. House air that tastes like lemon and safe.
Pain behaves, then doesn’t. The break makes my body’s alarms overreact. Taya sits me on the closed toilet and dabs at the bruised base with a medic’s gentle efficiency while I bite the inside of my cheek and pretend not to shake. I cry twice more. It doesn’t feel like failure. It feels like paying a bill.
Ronan stands in the doorway until I meet his eyes. “You did nothing wrong,” he says, voice even. “They did.”
“Feels the same from in here,” I mutter, and he looks like he wants to put the whole city in a box and mail it to the sun.
Caelum brings tea I can actually drink without wanting to punch the cup. He sets the horn fragment on a cloth, palms flat on either side, like he’s keeping it from thinking about running.
Ash leans in the jamb like it wants to become his spine. He studies my face like he’s memorizing a map. When he speaks his voice is low and not for jokes. “We’re making them regret breathing. In the paperwork way. And—the other way, when it counts.”
“Speaking of other ways,” I say, eyes on the shard, “can we use it? If it’s mine, I want it to stay mine. In a way that bites back.”
Ash’s mouth curves for the first time since the alley. “Weaponize your face? Absolutely yes.”
Ronan answers without thinking. “We can forge it into a blade. Horn holds heat. It’ll bind to steel if we treat it right.”
“Tomorrow,” Darian adds, practical. “Tonight you sleep. Your system needs hours, not heroism.”
I hate that he’s right and love that he said it anyway. “Stay,” I ask without dressing it up. “All of you.”
Four yeses in four different shapes.
We build a terrible solution that works. Darian takes the side closest to the door because of course he does. Caelum on my right, shoulder to shoulder, breath steady, a human metronome that doesn’t feel like one. Ronan at my feet, long body taking the worst angle without comment, one hand over my ankle like a quiet anchor. Ash on his back on the rug because the floor is apparently a valid bed if you’re a menace with good hair.
“You realize this is unsustainable,” Ash says into the dark. “We need a bigger bed or I’m going to become a rug person.”
“Tomorrow,” Ronan says again, and the word is a lullaby disguised as logistics.
I fall asleep with pain cradled between the weight of four men who don’t flinch from it. When I wake once in the night, Ash is telling Vex a whispered story about a raccoon who stole a king’s crown and replaced it with a pie. I don’t know what that means. It helps anyway.
The ache in my skull is smaller by morning. The bruise at the horn base looks mean and behaves like a challenge. I eat because Ronan puts a bowl in front of me and stares until I do. Darian changes the dressing with hands that make pain decide it’s embarrassed to be loud. Caelum kisses my temple like he’s stealing a moment from a bus schedule and calls me brave without making it sound like an order. Ash threatens to sit on me if I try to lift anything heavier than tea.
We go to the workshop after breakfast.
Ronan’s forge isn’t a dungeon. It’s a clean room that likes heat. Tools sorted. Oils labeled. Anvils that know the difference between a good day and a stupid choice. The air already hums low between my shoulder blades. It shouldn’t feel like church. It does.
He lays out steel like he’s telling a story—bar stock for the body, a softer strip for the spine, a narrow piece meant to be married to the horn. He doesn’t hurry. He heats the steel until it glows orange like fruit through skin and starts the first draw, hammer moving in rhythmic blows that you feel in your sternum.
Ash preps the quench: oil cut with something dark that drinks light instead of reflecting it. “Keeps the flare down,” he tells me, which sounds like him.
