Page 4 of To The Final End
“Wes.” My voice comes out scraped raw. “Wes, wake up.”
He groans. Shifts. His eyes open slowly, unfocused at first, then sharpening with something like panic.
“Bree—”
“I know.” I push up, and he rolls off me, both of us struggling to our knees. “I know.”
Movement to my left. Rhett coughs, rolls onto his side, fire sputtering weakly from his fingertips like a candle guttering in wind. He looks like hell—blood at his temple, ash in his hair, one arm hanging wrong.
But his voice is steady when he speaks.
“Get up.” He forces himself to his feet. Sways. Stays upright. “Bree needs us.”
I grab Wes’s arm. He grabs mine. Rhett reaches down and hauls us both upright, and for a moment we’re just three broken men holding each other together.
Then I see it.
The enemy army.
Five hundred soldiers who should still be charging. Who should be organizing, regrouping, pressing the advantage while we’re scattered and broken.
They’re not.
They’re standing still.
Some look around wildly, weapons lowered, faces blank with confusion. Others are backing away—slow, uncertain steps like they’ve forgotten why they came. A cluster near the treeline has dropped to their knees, hands clutching their heads, mouths open in silent screams.
And the Feeders—the ones who marched with the Council, the ones bound by compulsion and threat—
They’re blinking.
Hard. Rapid. Like waking from a nightmare they didn’t know they were having.
“Why aren’t they moving?” Rhett’s voice is rough.
Wes stares at them. His hunger should be spiking—I can usually feel it radiating off him after a fight. But there’s something steadier in him now. Something in his aura has shifted—purposeful, calm, as if whatever Bree did reached straight through the hunger and rewired it.
“It broke them,” he whispers. “Her magic broke them.”
Not killed.
Freed.
Even if only for a moment.
A voice cuts through the silence.
“Bree!”
Thane.
I’ve never heard him sound like that—raw, ragged, stripped of every layer of control he’s spent centuries building. The name tears out of him like something breaking.
Rhett’s head snaps toward the sound. His whole body goes rigid.
“Go.” He shoves us forward. “Now.”
We run.
