Page 29 of Embers of Midnight
They move first—three rifles bark, the launcher thunks, the crescent tightens like a hand about to close. Darian steps and the first volley hits a wall I can’t see but can feel: pressure against my skin, like a storm leaning on glass. The bullets sizzle out midair, little tantrums of heat. The net hisses toward us, humming with null charge.
Ash’s shadow lifts like smoke turned predatory. It splits into three slick shapes—one small and quick with a whip-tail, one long like a cloak catching wind, and a third that rises taller than a man and drops to all fours in front of me, shoulders ridged,head lowering. The air around it goes colder, edges razor-clean. It plants itself between me and the world without looking back.
“Meet Morrow,” Ash tells me without turning. “He bites.”
The net meets the long shadow—turns, stutters—and springs back like it made a bad decision. It wraps the hunter who launched it in singing wires. He convulses, eyes rolling white, and collapses into snow that doesn’t agree to catch him.
Darian is movement and halt, movement and halt: an old rhythm sharpened for now. Lightning crawls the length of his blade in fine threads, quiet and hungry. He pivots, catches a bullet on steel, and returns the favor by sending a bright line into the shooter’s chest. The man seizes, drops his gun, steam curling from his jacket. He’s still breathing. For half a heartbeat.
Caelum doesn’t draw steel. He presses two fingers to his temple and lifts his other hand, palm outward. Four hunters stagger like they’ve been shoved by something only they can see. One screams—a high, thin sound that scrapes my nerves—and drops his rifle to clutch his head. Caelum steps, soft as if he’s crossing a library, and the scream stops mid-breath. The man folds to the ground in a boneless, ugly way. Caelum’s eyes are steady. It feels like he pulled a plug in that man’s night and left it dark.
“We warned you,” he murmurs, voice almost kind.
Ash is everywhere. He draws knives from places that don’t look big enough to store them and sends them spinning. The crow—Vex rides a blade’s shadow, leaps at a hunter’s face, and rakesphantom claws across both eyes. The man drops his weapon, hands slapping to the blood on his cheeks, mouth open in a noise the forest refuses to echo. Ash is already there, sliding in under the rifle’s barrel. The knife kisses the soft place under the jaw, hand twists, and red opens like a door. The man’s knees give. Ash eases him the last inch, and the knife is gone.
“Three,” Ash counts, almost bored. “Anyone want mercy? No? Okay.”
Ronan hits the line like a landslide.
His half-shift comes on a breath, no flare, no flourish. The bones of his shoulders widen under his shirt. Something ripples under his skin; scales catch the light for a heartbeat before fading. His hands become weapons—nails redrawn as hooked black claws, each as long as my thumb. His eyes go molten, pupils thin. When he breathes, heat ghosts the air.
He moves faster than a man his size should. The first hunter doesn’t get a scream out. Ronan’s claw catches his throat and rips. It’s not a slice; it’s a decisive subtraction. Blood jets in a high arc and spatters a fir trunk, hot even from here. The body falls wrong. Ronan is already turning.
Two more come at him at once—one with a baton sparking, one with a knife held stupidly high. Ronan steps into them and the baton hits his forearm. The spark dies on contact, steam rising from skin that heals while I watch. His other hand closes on the knife wrist. Bones crunch like dry sticks. The knife clatters. He headbutts the baton guy and I hear the wet crack of a nose folding. Then his claws open the second man from collarboneto belly. Heat pours from the wound with the blood. The man makes a sound I’ll never confuse with anything else and drops his own insides into the snow.
I should be horrified. I should be running. Instead something inside my ribcage loosens, like a trap opening the wrong way.This is violence. This is mine, too.
A hunter at the perimeter finally remembers training. He sights down his rifle at me, not at the monsters tearing through his friends. My heartbeat spikes. Morrow lifts its head, a low growl rolling through its chest like rocks in a riverbed. It steps once and the ground seems to step with it. Shadow slides up from the base of the log and onto the hunter’s boots, pinning him in place. He fires; the bullet whines, tears the blanket near my knee, and goes somewhere I don’t. Ash’s hand snaps and a blade takes the rifle’s sight clean off. The next blade goes through the man’s throat and nails him to a birch.
Caelum’s voice is a metronome at my back, gentle and unrelenting. “Sera, breathe. In. Hold. Out.” He skims a palm in the air and another attacker falters like he forgot how legs work. Caelum tilts two fingers. The man sleeps on his feet for a fraction, then folds like bad origami.
Four to the right break and try to flank. Darian goes to meet them, lightning climbing his blade in brighter veins. He moves like he’s rehearsed this with ghosts. The first swing is a simple cut that rolls a head from shoulders and sends it tumbling into brush. Blood fans the snow with sick painter’s strokes. The second thrust slips under a ribcage and comes out the back in a hiss of steam. The third isn’t a cut at all—Darian catches theman’s arm, turns, and uses his own momentum to break the shoulder clean. The scream is short. The follow-up ends it.
“Left,” Ronan grates, and Darian is already pivoting.
Someone shouts behind me.
I don’t turn fast enough. The world narrows to a breath and a blur of motion in my peripheral—the shape of a man skirting the fire’s smoke, low, careful, smart. He’s close enough for me to see the cracked skin around his nails, the little twitch at the corner of his mouth that means he thinks he’s already won. The blade in his hand is meant for meat. Me.
Morrow surges, but he’s quicker. Steel kisses the back of my neck, cold and so real my bones feel it. My body forgets how to move.
Ronan doesn’t.
He comes in from the side with the axe I saw him set in the snow earlier, both hands on the haft, eyes bright as molten coin. The hunter turns—wrong direction—and the axe takes his arm above the elbow. It doesn’t stick. It shears. There’s a flash of bone, a fountain of arterial red, the slap of meat hitting snow. The man’s mouth opens in a square of disbelief; nothing comes out. Morrow is already there, jaws a dark hinge. It hits the man’s throat and pulls. The sound is wet and final. They go down together, my breath smashes into a gasp I didn’t authorize, and then it’s quiet in my little circle again except for my pulse.
Ash whistles low. “Good catch.”
Ronan plants the axe, breathes, doesn’t take his eyes off me until my nod tells him I’m still here. His hand—claw—lifts a fraction like he wants to touch my face and check. He doesn’t. He turns and becomes ruin again.
I find my voice. “I was… fine.”
“Sure,” Ash says, casual, throwing a knife that pins a palm to a tree like it’s a butterfly. “And I’m a nun.”
Two hunters bolt. Caelum steps into their path and doesn’t raise a hand. He just looks at them—into them. Both men crash to their knees as if gravity remembered them specifically. One convulses and goes limp. The other foams at the mouth, eyes rolling back, and slumps forward. Caelum’s jaw tightens for the first time. He breathes out through his nose, then smooths his expression like a sheet. “Enough.”
Darian reaches the leader. The man fires at point-blank range. The bullet hits the barrier still hovering near my skin like a memory and ricochets. It doesn’t do that for Darian; it punches into his shoulder. He grunts, stumbles a half-step, and then the quiet fury in his face does something ugly to mine. He knocks the rifle aside, drives his blade through the leader’s sternum, and leaves it there. The man wheezes, eyes huge, fingers clawing at the hilt like he can argue with physics. Darian’s free hand catches the man’s chin and tilts it up with brutal tenderness. “You asked,” he says, voice low. “We answered.” He twists. The light goes out.
Ash’s shadows do cleanup. The long one—which had tangled the net—unwraps from a fallen body, spills across the ground like night poured from a knocked-over bucket, and pulls the dead down into it. Not swallowed—just… gone. Vex hops back onto Ash’s shoulder and licks a claw that doesn’t exist.
