Page 90 of Embers of Midnight
The man with the tube lifts it. I don’t give him the chance to think.
Heat rolls up my spine and out through my shoulders. I don’t explode. I open. Fire blooms along my bones and then my bones are not bones anymore. The shift takes my jaw, my chest, my hands. The ground hits different as hooves. Air bites colder inside a body built for it. I drop my head and the world edits itself to edges I can actually use.
I can’t speak like this. I don’t need to. I plant my weight between Taya and Laz and the men who came to take me apart. One lungful and the world tastes like iron and old oil. The closest Hunter reaches, fast. I answer faster. Heat punches out. His coat catches. I push the flame sideways so it eats fabric, not him. He screams anyway and stumbles into his friend.
Another comes low with a baton crackling at the tip. I take the hit along my shoulder plate. It claps pain down my nerves. I lower my head and drive—horn aimed at his centerline like the world gave me geometry to stab with. The point slides under his ribcage and out again clean. I hate that clean. I hate that there’s no time to hate it.
“Now,” someone barks.
The net flies.
Null-weave looks like spider silk until it hits your skin. Then it’s razors. The mesh lands over my back and the horn, and every square that touches me steals something I need. Heat bleeds out of me like a punctured lung. My legs go stupid. I buck instinctively; the weave bites deeper. The beads along the hem hum as someone charges them. Power drains and locks, drains and locks, a stuttering choke.
I stumble. The world narrows. The mesh snags high where horn meets skull and hooks. The pull is wrong. The wrongness lights up my whole body.
I try to breathe and get half an inhale. The net tightens. They pull. The pain spikes sharp and bright, pressure at the base of the horn, a white-hot bolt that slices everything else out. I panic hard and hate it. Somewhere Taya is shouting my name. The men step in with gloves ready to the elbow.
No. I slam my head sideways, hard, trying to free the horn from the mesh, and the horn doesn’t free—it splits.
Sound drops out. Sight narrows to a ring. The crack runs through me like a command I didn’t agree to. Pain staggers the body I’m supposed to trust. The break is not neat. It is not clean. Heat runs out of me in a rush that leaves the air cold around my head.
The part of me that plans things shuts down. The part that survives doesn’t.
I put my head down a second time and smash into the floor. The horn takes the blow. The world goes black around the edges. When it comes back, something light clatters on concrete near my hoof.
A hand reaches for my flank.
The alley turns inside out.
Ash arrives like a blade thrown hard. His shout isn’t human. It’s a promise spoken in the language you use when you run out of words. Shadows rip off the walls and snap around three throats at once, black bands bit down tight. He moves through them like he’s cutting a line through cloth—three steps, one man down, pivot, another down, the third gagging on nothing. Silks flashes pale from his wrist and buries needle teeth in a wrist vein, venom numbing fingers before the man can throw anything else. The baton falls. Ash crushes it under his heel without looking.
Ronan hits next. Half-shift takes him in a breath—scales along forearms, eyes gone bright, teeth wrong in a way that still reads right to me. Smoke hooks from his mouth when he exhales. He doesn’t roar. He moves. The first man in his way loses his footing, then his windpipe. The second tries for the net; Ronan’s hand closes on his shoulder and bones give like kindling.
“Left,” Darian’s voice snaps, close, and Caelum is already there with a frost vial and a strip of treated cloth. The world crawls back a notch. I feel their hands through the mesh—one set ice-calm, one steady with heat. Beads first. Rell’s voice in my head from weeks ago. Freeze the anchors. Do not tear.
Caelum touches each bead with the vial and the humming drops a tone. Darian slips the cloth between mesh and my neck and pulls a corner of the net away from skin by millimeters. Not fast. Not showy. I feel the hooks let go one at a time. The pain tries to spike and then recedes in miserable waves. I breathe because they tell my ribs how.
“Easy,” Darian says, not to me, to my nervous system. “Hold on.”
On the alley mouth: Nyra hits like a thrown promise, vaulting the bin, her knife work quiet and mean. Kieran’s ward pops against the lip of the lane with a soft chime, putting a bend in space that makes the last two Hunters choose wrong with every step. Thorn blocks the service road without moving much; Ilya sings one short bar that turns a grab into a stumble.
“Two more,” Ash warns, eyes on the roofline. Vex peels out of nowhere, tags a mask with his beak, and goes screaming past like a joy grenade.
“Perimeters,” Kieran answers. “Clear in ten.”
“Six,” Ronan says, and sweeps the alley clean of moving problems like he’s mowing a lawn made of men.
The mesh goes slack. Darian hauls it off my shoulders. Caelum catches the last hooks at the horn base before they can tear more. I try to stand and my legs shake with the kind of tremor that insults more than it hurts.
“Shift back,” Darian says, palm against my neck. “If you can. We’ve got you.”
I let go.
Bones remember the way home. Skin closes over heat. Hands return where hooves were. The ground is still the ground. Air tastes like metal and relief. I’m on my knees in a dead net, arms bare, hair stuck to my neck. Cold rushes in first. Pain arrives behind it like a freight train.
“My horn,” I say, stupidly, because language came back and that’s what my mouth finds. Tears break without permission. I hate that less than I expect. “My horn broke.”
Darian is already there, arms around me, my face tucked into his shoulder, his hand on the back of my head exactly where it doesn’t hurt. “I know.” He doesn’t shush. He doesn’t tell me to be brave. He holds until my breath stops hitching and then holds longer.
