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Haylee's POV
The trees become a blur as we run through undergrowth, my triggers catching on my clothes, in my hair. My heart hammers against my chest as if it’s a trapped animal desperate to be set free, each pounding rhythm a cacophony of the fear that scratches at my insides. I grasp Lior\\'s trembling hand, his tiny fingers icy against mine, so tiny I\\'m scared if I hold on hard, I\\'ll break them.
At my side, Aiden is holding and carrying Kael, with the same hurried purpose that reflects my own fear. His face is a mask of total panic, jaw clenched so hard I can see the muscle twitching under his skin. Beads of sweat form on his forehead even in the cool forest air and his breathing is comprised in short sharp bursts that alert me to the fact that he's battling with the wolf instinct to bound wildly through the trees.
"How much further?" I pant, my breaths coming in painful gasps that sear my chest. I feel the bounce of wolfsbane extract against my hip in its protective pouch, and can smell its bitter, noxious odor through the leather.
"Just there," Aiden's voice is taut, hoarser than normal. His eyes rove the trees with a predator's intensity, flaring nostrils sniffing for the magical signature we're looking for. “I can smell the lingering magic on it from here. It’s … God, it’s like a scar on the air itself.
The grass lies in a perfect ring of blackened, dead earth, as if a life-draining force has been eradicated from the ground. Dead trees rise to the horizon like skeletal fingers pointing to the gray sky, with peeling rotting bark which falls off in diseased chunks. Even the air here is different: It’s thin, poisoned, wrong.
"This is it," I whisper, my voice a mere whimper over the sound of the wind howling through the dead branches. The noise sounds hollow, empty, the echoes of ghosts. “This is where he — where Xavier — Cut!
"I know." Kael's father grimaces and carefully lays him down outside of the dead circle and without letting his body touch the changed land. I feel the dregs of the ritual. The magic here is ill, corrupted into a thing that should be but never was.”
Lior is whimpering in my arms, body shaking as sweat drips down his pale face. The hours-long fever has made his skin translucent, and I can see every vein under the surface. Now his veins black, contaminating his body in a lacy pattern as they fill up with corruption that thrums and thrums with every slow beats of his aching heart.
Kael is a little better as of that moment but Kael’s breath is shallow and his eyes keep rolling into the back of his head, the whites flashing for a moment before his eyelids flutter shut again. His lips have turned a bluish hue, scaring me more than anything else.
"Are you sure about this?" Aiden inquires, but he’s already making his way over to help guide the boys in the center of the circle. His touch is soft as he lays Kael’s lifeless body but I see his break in his hands. “If we’re wrong — if this makes things worse —”
"We're not wrong." I steel my tone, though doubt claws inside me like something alive. "This has to work. It has to. I won't lose them. I can't."
I sow the wolfs bane extract around the boys, as he makes his blood drip out in patterns onto the lifeless earth—patterns, symbols that Elder Patricia had us all practice until we could draw them in our sleep. The silver liquid hisses against the floor, wisps of acrid smoke rising that make my nostrils burn and eyes water.
The magic curdles at once, crackling through the air like electricity before a storm. I get goose bumps on my arms and I can taste the copper-tinged ozone on my tongue. The dead grass starts to smoke more heavily, and a furious wind from another world begins to blow around us, spinning tight on us, pulling at my hair, flapping my garments about my body.
“It’s working,” I whisper, reaching for Kael’s hand, fingers trembling with relief. “See, the link is dying — I can see it.”
The boys’ silver flames dance more strongly, more in tune with each other, and I feel a lurch of triumph. We're going to save them. We're actually going to—
Lior’s eyes fly open, and they’re not his soft brown eyes. They’re inflexibly cold, and are the same amber of Xavier’s, but radiate with a malicious satisfaction that turns my blood into ice.
"Hello, darling." It is my 6-year-old son, and Xavier’s voice comes out of his mouth, smooth and mocking, so very wrong coming from that innocent face. “You didn’t really expect it to be that easy, did you?”
Ice fills my veins and freezes the hope that had been building seconds before. “Xavier, you son of a bitch — leave my son! Get out of him right now!"
Lior’s — from Xavier’s — laugh is so very cold, too cold for such a tiny little thing to be making, a sound of pure malice that a child should never make. "Your son? He's been mine ever since I saved his snot-nosed life in your belly. And every breath he had drawn since, every beat of his heart, every dream and nightmare—all at my will.
Wolf sneers and lunges toward Aiden, his wolf brimming with fury, but I reach out and grab Aiden’s arm, holding him back. I dig my fingers into his muscled forearm hard enough to leave bruises, but I can’t let him hurt Lior’s body. Whatever Xavier is up to, my son is still in there somewhere.
“A battle, and who better against than someone with unfathomable mental powers?” “I’ve seen through his eyes the whole time,” Xavier says, Lior’s innocent face grinning with cruel amusement in a way that makes me want to puke. Seeing you run around like scared rabbits, taking your little plan piece by piece. Do you really think I wouldn’t see this childish bluff coming?”
"You're lying," I growl, but terror is eating through my resolve like acid. “The counter-ritual is functioning. I see the bonds loosening right in front of my eyes.”
"Oh, my sweet, naive Haylee." Xavier’s voice falls into a purr that sends shivers up my skin. “You only see what I want you to see. All those drops of blood, all those grains of wolfsbane, every desperate word in that pathetic spell - they've been feeding my power. Creating the tether as opposed to severing it.”
The smoking grass suddenly bursts into silver flames that caress the boys like living creatures. But rather than agonizing, Lior looks positively radiant, his small body soaking in their magical energies like a sponge absorbing a spill. The dark cracks that were once receding now blackly pulse faster outward than ever.
"No," I gasp in horrified disbelief as our scheme goes entirely, spectacularly awry. "No, this can't be happening. This can't be real."
“The wonderful thing about soul magic,” Xavier says while speaking through Lior, voice now spouting from that vile mouth, sound changed to an educational twang that grates against my very soul, “is that it is adaptable. Evolves. Smartens up from each attempt to outsmart it. “Link is just the tool I needed to add to myself a perfect channel to both children.
Kael begins to jerk violently, his body lifting from the floor as he lets out a howl of torment so raw, it feels like a blade squeezing tight around my heart. Black veins pulse outward across his skin, just like Lior’s, forming a knotted system of corruption that binds them. The silver fire jumps to him, and I look on in sheer panic as both of my sons become linked to Xavier at once.
"Kael!" I lunge toward him, but Aiden grabs me when another wave of magic sweeps through the clearing, so strong that it makes the air appear to ripple like heat waves.
";The bastards both the sons of bitches.They didn't have to do that" Aiden's tone is guttural and barely contained anger. "He's got both our boys now. The bastard has them both."
The flames go out as quickly as they came, the two children falling motionless, barely breathing on the corrupted surface. Their wolf energies, typically hot and bright enough for me to sense them halfway across a room, flicker like dying candles in a hurricane these days. Lior’s eyes are back to normal, but they are glassy and staring into the void.
There’s a vibration on my hip where my phone is. It's jarring against the stark silence of the clearing of the dead, slicing through the wake of the failed ritual like a knife. My hands shake as I take it out of my pocket, and the bright light of the screen feels garish and foreign in this place of death and black magic. Screen indicates incoming video call from an unknown number — one we two know too well.
"Answer it," Aiden whispers, a storm of cold fury underneath his words, like a wolf stalking its prey for the last time. “Both of us know who it is, and they won’t outrun us now.”
I swipe to accept, my fingers strangely rubbery and removed from my body. Xavier takes up the entire screen, and he’s just as much the predator he’s always been. He’s being filmed in what appears to be an industrial warehouse, the gray lines of a concrete wall stretching up behind him into darkness. Figures clad in darkness slipped through the shadows with wraith-like swiftness -- Whisper Faction agents by the dozens. His smile is cold and triumphant, the smile of a man who has won a game he has been playing for years.
“There’s my lovely girl,” he says, and even over the phone, his voice makes my flesh crawl with disgust. "I hope you're getting a sense of just how utterly pointless it is to go against me?"
“Let them go,” I snarl, my wolf pressing against my human skin with murderous force that has me blipping between human sight and the scent of my packmate, my mate, my humans, my friends and the shapes of the creatures I’m willing to lose my hands for a chance to kill. "This is between us, Xavier. It always has been. Leave my children out of it."
"Our kids," he rebuffs smoothly, his amber eyes shining with possessive pride. “And I regret to say that’s impossible now. You see, that little ritual of yours, it’s so graciously provided me with what I need to close the circle. I'm finally able to siphon off their power from a distance, anywhere in the world. Now there is no pigeonhole of space between us.”
Aiden steps into the camera, his Alpha-ness transmits even miniature-screened. Power rattles off of him in spades as I glimpse the wolf just below the surface, ready to rip apart Xavier with teeth and claws. "If you harm them — if you harm our children —"
"You'll what?" There is an abrupt cracking like breaking glass. "You'll challenge me? Please, Aiden. I´ve got the strenght of both family trees in me now. What I’ve become, your precious pack alpha strength is shit, less than shit, against me.”
"What do you want?" Then I ask, although I already know that the answer will dismantle everything we have left.
"Simple." Xavier smiles, a predatory grin with teeth too sharp for his jaw. "You and Aidan turn yourselves in to me within an hour. You'll want to bring yourself to the warehouse complex on the East side— coordinates to your phone. Come alone and come now freely, and perhaps I'll let the two boys live long enough for you to take your leave in saying goodbye.
"And if we refuse?"
Xavier’s face does not change, but something black and terrible passes his eyes. "And I murder them both, right here, suck them dry until all that's left is empty shells. The choice is yours, darling. So make your decision quickly—Their life energies are waning even as we speak, and I don't know how much more of what’s being done to them they can endure."
The screen goes to black, and we find ourselves kneeling next to our dying children in the midst of death and decay, murderers gathered around us, exactly fifty-seven minutes to choose if we will save our sons, or die instead.