Chapter 75 The Name In The Dark

Chapter 75 The Name In The Dark
Sera's Pov

Wren's room was too small for everyone who wanted to be in it. Tobias stood at the foot of the cot with his arms crossed and his jaw tight. My father sat in the chair by the wall, too weak to stand for long and too stubborn to leave.

My mother and Gia stood on either side of me.

I looked down at Wren.

The marks had reached her jaw. Thin silver lines, branching slowly upward toward her cheekbones like frost crawling across glass. Her breathing was steady but shallow, and her skin had gone the kind of pale that didn't come from cold.

"Tell me what to do," I took a deep breath. “I have to do it now,"

Nobody argued. That alone told me how bad it was.

"Don't force it," my mother said immediately. "That's the first thing. Whatever you feel rising in you, don't grab for it. Let it come on its own."

“What if I am not ready and it doesn't come?”

"It will," Gia said. "You proved that yesterday. The bloodline knows what it's doing even when you don't. Trust that."

"I'm not good at trusting things I can't control."

"Nobody is," my mother said quietly. "Do it anyway."

I pulled in a slow breath and sat on the edge of the cot. I put both hands just above Wren's arms, not touching yet, hovering the way Gia had taught me. I needed to feel first.

"Talk to me," I said. "We have to do it together, all of us."

"Close your eyes," Gia spoke up first.

I closed them shut.

"You're not trying to take the marks," she said. "You're not trying to remove anything. You're going in to find what's underneath them. The place where her bloodline is tangled. And you're going to help it unknot."

"How do I know when I've found it?"

"You'll feel it," my mother said. "It'll feel like recognition. Like finding a word you've been trying to remember."

I let my hands drop to Wren's arms.

The moment my palms made contact, everything changed.

It wasn't gradual. It wasn't the slow warm build I'd felt during training yesterday. It was immediate and violent, like stepping through a door and finding a completely different world on the other side.

I felt Wren. Although deeper than that. Whatever the witch bloodline was, wherever it lived in the body, I was suddenly in the same space as hers, and what I found there hit me so hard I almost pulled my hands back.

"Stay," Gia muttered sharply. Like she felt it too. "Whatever you just felt, stay there and hold it.”

"She's in so much pain," I whimpered. My voice came out strange, as if I was in an empty room. "She's been in pain this whole time and she hasn't said anything."

"I know," Gia said. And the way she said it broke something in me, because it wasn't information to her. It was grief. "Keep going for her sake."

I went in deeper. Even though I felt every single push.

The marks had roots. That was the only way I could describe it. Under the surface of what I could see, they had wound themselves through Wren's body like vines through a fence, and every place they touched they were pulling, slowly and constantly, taking something from her that her body couldn't keep regenerating.

"I can feel where they're anchored," I said.

"Good," my mother said. "Don't pull, put yourself between the mark and let your power be the barrier."

"That sounds impossible."

"Everything you've done in the last year sounded impossible," my mother said. "You can do anything,"

With my mother's praise, I tried. The first time the marks pushed back and I lost my grip and for one terrifying second I didn't know where I was, I wasn't in the room anymore, I wasn't in Wren’s mind.

I was somewhere in between, suspended in the dark between two things that both wanted my attention.

"Sera." Gia's voice, loud and clear and sharp enough to cut through. "Come back if you're sinking in too deep."

I grabbed for the sound of her voice like a rope. And I came back.

"I slipped," I gasped.

"I know, this is your first time. You can try again."

I tried again. This time I didn't grab it. I let the power move the way my mother said, from the inside out, slow, like water finding its level and I put myself between the mark and Wren's bloodline the way you step between someone and a door they're being pushed through.

The marks resisted but I stayed anyway.

"That's it," my mother sounded reverent.

I don't know how long it took. It could have been five minutes or forty. Time did something strange in that space. But I felt the moment it worked, felt the roots of the marks release, one anchor at a time, like something finally deciding to let go, and Wren pulled in a breath so deep and sudden that I heard it clearly.

Just when I was about to release it all and come back, the room disappeared entirely.

I found myself standing somewhere else.

“Where am I?” I looked around. “Mom? Aunt Gia? Anybody?” I yelled but no response came back.

A grey, open space with no walls and no ceiling and no floor I could see, and I was standing in it like it had always been there.

It reminded me deeply of the time I died.

There were people ahead of me.

I couldn't see their faces clearly. But they looked like soldiers, warriors. They were moving, organized, purposeful, following a path I couldn't see but they clearly could.

And I recognized the direction. I recognized it because I had walked the outer perimeter of our camp enough times to know it in my bones.

They knew our blind spot.

The eastern ridge. The section where the trees grew too close together for the outer scouts to cover efficiently. The section we'd discussed reinforcing and hadn't gotten to yet. They were heading straight for it, moving in a formation that said someone had told them exactly what they were walking into.

My eyes moved through the group and landed on a figure near the back.

My stomach turned over. I couldn't dismiss the familiarity that whispered back to me.

“Nice to meet you, Sera. You can't stay for long, I only came to warn you.”

“Who are you?”

“Wake up, Sera.”

I opened my mouth to speak and then I regained consciousness.

"Sera." My mother's voice called out to me.

Hands on my face. My back was on the bed. I didn't remember falling. The ceiling of Wren's room came back slowly, the lantern light, the faces crowding above me.

"She's awake," Tobias said immediately. "Give her air everybody back up,"

"Sera." My mother's hands didn't leave my face. "Look at me. I am right here, my brave girl.”

I looked at her and she had worry plastered on her face.

"There you are," she breathed. "I shouldn't have let you do it. I am so sorry.”

"Wren," I said immediately. "Did it—"

"The marks are gone," Gia said from somewhere above me. "They stopped expanding. She's sleeping but she's breathing properly. You did it, Sera."

I closed my eyes for one second. I opened them and tried to sit up.

"Don't get up too quickly. You must rest." Tobias started.

"I'm fine." I pushed up onto my elbows. The room tilted. "I'm fine, mom, stop worrying,"

"You just collapsed," Caden said. He was closer than I realized, crouched at my left side. "You don't get to say you're fine."

"I saw something," I finally let out to everyone in the room.

The energy changed immediately.

"When I was in there," I said. "I saw people who were coming. I saw the route they're taking."

“Make us understand,” Damien crouched down to my level.

"The eastern ridge," I said. "The blind spot in the tree line. The section we haven't reinforced. They know about it. Someone told them."

The silence that followed was sharp enough to cut.

"Someone on the inside?” Maera questioned.

"I think so,”

"You saw who?" Damien asked.

"I—" I stopped. The face was still there. Sitting right at the front of everything I'd just come back from. "I'll tell you. But there's something else. I saw someone else in the vision. He wasn't with them. He was separate, standing apart. And he looked straight at me like he knew I was there."

"That's not possible, Sera. You were astral projecting," my mother asked.

"He told me his name, he didn't say it but he gave me awareness of his name," I sounded confused, because I was.

"Sera," Gia said carefully. "What name?"

I looked up at all of them.

"Rudolph," I said. "He said his name was Rudolph."

The room went completely dumbstruck.

Damien frowned. "Where have I heard—"

"Maera." My father called out from the corner of the room. "Maera, is that possible?”

I turned to Maera. Her face had gone white.

"How did you get that name?" she asked. Her voice came out barely above a breath.

I stared at her. "What's wrong? I told you, I met him in the vision. He was there. He looked right at me."

Every face in the room was looking at Maera.

She looked at me for a long time. Her mouth opened once.

“Uhm….” when she finally found the words she said them quietly, like they were too enormous to be spoken at full volume.

"That is the name of the first hybrid.”