Page 34 of The Bound Zodiac

She patted my hand. “It’s the only advice there is, I’m afraid. Unfortunately your situation has no precedent.”

I shut my eyes tight and focused, trying to pinpoint which stream of thought belonged to whom. I managed to identify Rowan first, because gravity was the loudest and the heaviest. I pushed it down, trying to rise above the mental noise until my head was above water. Then Lucas, cold and enormous and weirdly easy, like he’d been waiting for me to do it and stepped back the instant I reached for him. Then Theo, then Phoenix, then Jamie, who didn’t resist at all, who folded himself down small the second he understood what I needed, but Jamie was used to subduing thoughts. He’d been practicing for years.

Nightfall was harder. Their bond was older, and it had lived in me for months, worn a groove through my psyche and made itself at home. But to my surprise and knee-buckling relief, all four of them took a mental step backwards, doing most of the leg work for me. In that moment, as my brain started to become mine again, I could have kissed them all.

By the time I got them all to a low collective murmur—like the sound of a fridge in another room, or a crowd two blocks away, my ears were ringing, and my mouth tasted like pennies. I was also drenched in sweat.

I lifted my head off Phoenix’s chest. The chamber had gone completely silent. Thirty elders in black robes, all of them staring at me, and not one of them was breathing loudly enough to hear. The weight of expectation landed like an anvil on my shoulders. This was real now. Very, very real, and I was going to be expected to follow through on this insane plan to save an entire species.

“Well,” I said a bit breathlessly. “That was horrible. Negative ten out of ten. Would not recommend.”

Eris chuckled, and I met his warm eyes for just a moment, and somehow it was like the last several months fell away. He grinned at me, and to my shock and his disbelief that I could feel through the bond, I smiled back.

Then, Tala started clapping. Malakai joined her, and then a man I didn’t know at the back, and then the whole damn chamber was applauding. I blinked as I pulled away from the guys, looking around the room at the faces of the Order, the people who’d spent their entire lives hoping and praying for this exact moment. For some semblance of hope. That maybe in their lifetimes they’d return home.

It went on for so long that I had to look at the floor because if I looked at any of their faces I really was going to lose it. My cheeks were on fire. It was a million times worse than having everyone sing you Happy Birthday at a restaurant.

“Fucking hell, lass,” Eris said, somewhere just behind me. “I can hear the daft Libra thinking about biscuits.”

“I’m hungry,” Theo said, unashamed. “It’s been a long night.”

“You cannae just—” Eris stopped, shaking his head as if to get water out of his ear. “Now you got me thinkin’ about them too.”

“Custard creams,” Theo clarified.

“I will kill you, friend.”

The word friend didn’t sound too friendly to my ears.

“You’ll feel it if you do.” Theo’s grin was slightly smug.

Personally, I was wondering how long it would take the two of them to realize that they were having this conversation entirely in their heads as if they’d been linked for years and not minutes.

“The bond is complete,” Tala said. Everyone shut up. “Which means, now, the practical matters.”

“Never a good phrase,” I muttered. Practical matters could mean anything, but more than likely, it meant pain.

“Nine warriors and an axis.” She looked around at the ten of us with those bright black eyes. “There is no precedent for this. The largest shield ever recorded was seven including its axis, and it was formed in Bavaria in the fifteen hundreds. It collapsed within a year, and every zodiac in it died.”

“Cool,” I said. “Great. Love that for us.”

“They collapsed because their axis could not hold them without overextending themself. They couldn’t figure out how to balance one another rather than taking for themselves. According to historical records, they took on two class fives at once, and it destroyed them. But they did not have an Ophis. Therein lies the difference in strength.”

Arthur Bennett stepped forward into the ring of scorched stone. “A shield of this size requires its own identity,” he said. “It cannot be Stardust and it cannot be Nightfall. Those names belong to shields that no longer exist as of tonight. The axis names the shield.”

“Me?” I gaped at him, feeling all eyes turn to me.

“You.”

“Right now?”

“Preferably.”

I looked around the chamber. At the burn mark under my boots where the last of my kind had stood and closed a door on his entire species to buy them time. At thirty faces that had waited their whole lives, and their parents’ whole lives, and their grandparents’ whole lives, for tonight. At nine men who had just handed me their minds, their bodies and their souls without a single condition attached.

Nightfall. Stardust. Both of them names about the dark. About the space between things, the long cold waiting. Riftward. Dreadwatch. Veilbreak. Every shield name I’d ever heard was a name that assumed the dark was permanent.

I was so goddamn tired of the darkness...