Page 252 of Scarlet Wars
The empty farmland stretched out around us like a white void, the snow whipping sideways in frantic, punishing gusts until I finally forced my voice up through the numbness lodged in my throat.
“What do I do?” I whispered, the words scraped raw by cold and grief and terror.
James didn’t look away from me—not once—and something steadier than the storm settled into him.
“You focus,” he said, his breath drifting between us in a thin trail of white that the wind immediately tore apart. “You think about wanting to bond with me. Not as an order. Not as a performance. As a choice.”
“A choice,” I echoed, though the word seemed foreign, impossible.
He nodded once, stepping closer. “You picture yourself opening to me, fully. Your mind, your heart, your magic…every single part of you. You let me in. And I do the same. It’s trust. The most absolute form of it our kind has.”
The wind roared, carrying shards of ice across the ground like broken glass, and the swirling snow caught in his hair, in the dark blue glow already building beneath his skin.
Trust. I had to trust James Walker for this plan to work. Can someone spell irony?
“And then?”
“And then,” he said softly, “you release your beautiful scarlet haze, for all of us to see.”
The words dropped between us heavy and undeniable. He must have seen the panic ripple through me, because he stepped even closer, close enough that the outline of his magic reflected faintly in his eyes.
“Emma,” he murmured, and it wasn’t a dismissal or a plea, it was a promise. “You can trust me.”
I blinked a few times, before realizing after everything we’d been through, the lies, the deceit, the fights, and now this…I did trust him with my life.
The Nexus screens flickered violently in my hand—Saoirse’s ruined body, Nino’s trembling breaths, the High Chief’s cold face—all of them floating ghostlike above the snow.
“You ready?” James asked.
I clenched my jaw and rolled my shoulders.
Warrior Emma: time to rise, bitch.
I gave him a solid nod.
“On three,” he said, threading through the chaos and tethering me to something still sane. “You release your haze. Don’t hold it back. Don’t restrain it. Let it surround you. Let it reach me. Let it meet mine.”
My hands were shaking so hard it almost hurt.
“One…”
The storm seemed to pause, as if listening.
“Two…”
I took a deep breath in.
“Three.”
I exhaled—not gently, not gracefully, but like I was ripping open a seam inside myself—and my nowvisiblered haze surged outward in a stunning, violent burst from beneath my skin.
It roared out of me like fire catching wind, a luminous, molten red cloud that illuminated the snow around us, turningthe frozen air into a storm of blood-colored light. The ground glowed beneath it.
At the same moment, James let go of his haze.
His cerulean magic ripped free in a cold, brilliant wave—bright as fractured ice, sharp as lightning, shimmering with depths only Leaders carried—and the two hazes collided mid-air with a crackling sound that vibrated across my bones.
For a heartbeat, they didn’t blend.
