Page 147 of Nikolay

That talent had always come to me more instinctively than elegantly. Others in my family did many things better—cleaner force, colder calculation, broader command. What I had with darkness felt less like a trick and more like an old private arrangement. The night did not disappear when I called on it. It thickened. It took my outline and blurred it at the edges. Torchlight became something I could slide between rather than merely avoid. Every black trunk, every cut of shade beneath low branches, every seam between one pool of light and the next offered itself as passage.

I moved.

The grounds changed quickly beyond the eastern perimeter. Ironwood had not been built by amateurs. There were outer paths, low stone markers, screened service lanes, stretches of landscaped dark meant to look natural while still directing foot traffic where the owners preferred it to go. I crossed one of them in three strides and heard, distantly, somebody yelling for a line check that would never come. Another voice answered from farther east, too panicked to be useful.

A shape broke toward me from behind the side of a small outbuilding—a guard, then a second just behind him. Both wolves by scent, if not by immediate posture, one carrying a sidearm he did not have the chance to raise properly, the other with a baton already in his hand as though he believed close quarters might save him.

It did not.

I did not stop running. I did not even fully turn.

I opened my hand and threw.

Telekinesis never felt subtle in moments like that. There was no visible beam, no dramatic flourish. Only force applied with perfect insult. The first man lifted sideways off his feet as though struck by a vehicle, his body flung twenty feet into the trunk of a cedar hard enough to make the branches shudder. The second followed a half-second later, ripped backward and down into the edge of a stone water channel with a crack of impact that suggested he would not be standing soon even if he remained alive to consider it.

I passed the place where they landed without looking back.

The bond pulled again.

Ahead stood a stone archway I had not seen on the maps.

Old work. Older than the decorative nonsense wealthy packs liked to install after the fact. The stones were rough at the edges and darkened by moss; their weight real, their age unembarrassed. Ritual herbs had been strung from the curve of it in bundled loops—dried yarrow, rowan twigs, some harsher bitter thing I recognized by scent but not by name. Protective. Purifying. Directed, no doubt, at exactly my kind.

I hit the threshold at speed.

The darkness around me surged tighter for one brief beat as the hung herbs reacted. Something in the bundles shriveled at once. Leaves blackened. Twine snapped. The whole arrangement crisped and crumbled as I passed under it, dead matter falling in brittle fragments to my shoulders and the ground behind me.

The bond lurched so hard my vision sharpened.

There.

Not far now. Through the last stand of trees where the torchlight pulsed amber and wrong between trunks. The scent reached me first, beneath the smoke and ritual herbs and blood-salt magic.

Maddie.

Not merely her general sweetness, not merely the warm, wild note my body had learned before my mind had admitted to anything. Fear in it now. Skin. Adrenaline. The unmistakable copper edge of fresh hurt.

Everything in me went cold.

I cleared the archway and drove forward through the last veil of trees without slowing, torchlight broken into strips across my path, the counter-working still dragging the flames sideways, the bond no longer a distant ache but a wire drawn tight enough to sing.

The clearing seemed to open by degrees and all at once, torchlight staggering in the trees before the whole obscene arrangement resolved itself under it. What I had come for was there at the center, laid out in stone and fire and ceremony, dressed in sanctity so no one present would have to call it what it was.

Iron torches ringed the space in a broad rough circle, each flame bending and guttering under the pressure of Aspen’s counter-working from somewhere beyond the northern tree line. Their light came unevenly now. It lurched. Brightened. Failed by half a breath. Returned again with a weaker spine. Amber and black chased each other across the clearing floor and up the surrounding trunks, leaving every face there alternately exposed and half-lost. The ritual had not broken yet, but it had begun to stammer.

At the center stood the altar.

Stone, broad and flat and old enough that the age of it lived in the surface itself. Not polished. Not ceremonial in any decorative sense. Functional. Enduring. Carved along the base with wolf-script cut deep and sure, each line darkened by centuries of oil, weather, blood, or all three. The kind of artifact packs lied to themselves about by calling it tradition when what they meant was that enough people had suffered on it for suffering to become custom.

And on it...

Maddie.

Every step I had taken from the war room to this clearing found its meaning and its failure in that one sight.

She lay on the stone in white and gold, the festival gown I had not seen until now transformed from finery into insult. The full white skirt spilled around her hips and down the altar’s sides in heavy folds, lace and silk catching the broken torchlight with a softness so out of place it hurt to look at. Her wrists had been pulled wide and secured with leather cord to iron rings bolted into the altar’s edges. Her ankles the same. Whoever had tied her had done it with competent hands and no visible pity.

Her hair—her beautiful chestnut hair I had once thought about with more restraint than was probably healthy for any man—had come half-loose from whatever arrangement they had built for the evening. The gold-and-pearl headpiece still clung above one ear at a crooked angle, pins defeated, while strands had torn free and spread over the stone beneath her like spilled silk. Her chest rose hard and fast against the fitted bodice. Not the measured breathing of someone trying to remain calm. Survival breathing. The body’s own refusal to agree that panic could wait.