76

76
Haylee's POV

Seeing Aiden vanish into the midst of the bedlam, chasing Arielle and our kidnapped son, is like having half of my soul torn from me. Every survival instinct in me is urging me to go after him, to leave everything behind and fight to get Lior back. But Kael’s small hand squeezes mine, pulling me back to what’s really real.

“Mom,” he says softly, but his little voice is filled with a strength that shatters me, “we need to trust Dad. He'll bring Lior home."

I ease myself back into my chair, and then look down at my surviving son — my brave, impossible boy who’s at this very moment trying to comfort me when he’s the one who needs comfort. His eyes are hazel like Aiden's but are determined despite the impending flood of tears.

“You’re right,” I murmur, giving his hand a squeeze. “We’ve got to stand the line here.

But, easier said than done, hold the line. United, the pair are able to balance the ritual's magic using Lior's strength, and now the energies are starting to scatter. I can sense Xavier sucking more energy from our uncompleted circle, his change multiplying by the second.

"Haylee!" ‘Elder Patricia says, urgently, over the defensive perimeter. "The shadow beasts are re-assembling for a counterattack!"

I look at our spot, and my heart sinks. We’ve lost half our allies in the opening assaults. Marcus is organizing a last stand of our forces, but only so much tactical skill can compensate for being overwhelmingly outnumbered.

Xavier guffaws his way through the battlefield, his dichotomous voice reverberating with an impossible-sounding laugh. You thought your family would simply be able to split you in half and be done with it? So now you have the worst of both worlds — half power and half-focused.

“Fuck you,” I hiss, focusing more power into the ritual barrier which is the only thing between him and his instant completion.

"Fire like that," he marvels, his hideously twisted body dominating the battlefield. I always did like that about you, my dear. Even when you were tearing and bleeding in those woods, still you had that spark of defiance.”

The memory of that night—the night I fell while running away, the night Xavier allegedly rescued me—sends a shiver through my core. There’s something about his tone that tells me there is more of that story than I ever knew.

Behind Xavier, my father is still desperately fighting the corruption of shadows, but I can tell he is losing. More and more, the dark magic is eating up what’s left of his old self and his movement becomes less fluid and more grotesque.
"Papa," I whisper, my eyes welling up with tears.

“Concentrate, small moon,” my father's voice calls out across the battlefield, twisted but still his. "Don't watch me fall. Watch your son rise."

His words remind me that I’m not battling to save Xavier only—I’m struggling to prove to Kael what it feels like to never give up, despite the crushing hopelessness that meets you on every front.

Kael," I speak facing him fully, "can you feel your brother? Through your twin bond?"

Kael shuts his eyes, his jaw scrunching as he focuses. “He’s afraid,” he adds after a beat. "But not hurt. And he's... moving. Fast."

“Can you determine the direction?”

“North,” he responds instantly, but then his eyes pop open in revelation. "Mom, I can track him. Through the bond. "But we would have to adapt the ritual to use our bond as a guideline.”
The concept is brilliant as well as terrifying. We could harness the twin thing as a magical conduit and theoretically pin-point Lior better that way, but it would have the added bonus of exposing Kael to whatever the dark magic is that Arielle has working on his brother.

“It’s suicidal,” I begin to protest, but Kael talks over me.

“Mom, it’s all dangerous now. But "to do nothing is the most dangerous of all."

His words remind me of something Aiden used to say years ago when we were naive children who believed love could fix everything. I can laugh at the irony that our son is now exhibiting more sense than either of his parents did when we were his age.

"All right," I decide. "But we do this together. I'm not going to leave you to explain that kind of magical exposure, alone."
We start to reform the ritual circle, shifting the flow of energy so that we outline the bond between the twins instead of caging in our power. It’s hard, concentration is key, you can’t talk, but as the new pattern forms, I can sense something shifting.

The altered ceremony unearths more than just Lior's whereabouts. It illustrates for us the strange web of magical energy Arielle is manipulating to get him there: a web of corrupted ley lines stretched out across the region.

“Oh my God,” I say on the verge of tears, seeing the breadth of the network for the first time. "Kael, look at this."

The ley lines and are not natural formations. They were artificially created and then kept alive for years, perhaps decades. The amount of planning and resources to do something like that is enormous.”

"Mom," says Kael, his voice wobbling with fear, "these are all places where kids disappeared. Lots of kids."

The news is like a punch in the gut... literally. We’ve been framing this as Xavier’s faction wars with Arielle’s group, but this is just even worse. Arielle has had her faction out snatching supernatural children for years, slowly building this network daughter by Ku’damm daughter.

"How many?" I whisper as I trace the ley lines with my keened peepers.

“Dozens,” Kael says, his face pale with horror now that he’s turned full around to face us. "Maybe more. They're holding everyone at the central hub."

The core of the network is situated a few miles north of our current position, in some abandoned industrial ruins. It is the site of the original rift between our world and the shadow realm, and the place to which all the corrupted ley lines in the zone flow.

They have taken Lior in there, I realize. “And that’s where they plan to do the ritual for real.”

But understanding the scale of Arielle’s plan comes a terrible choice. I have a choice… I can even hole up here just to get to Lior and the other children, and and leave Xavier here in the open free to complete his vampire transition. He can rise to a point of power without the ritual barrier we’re keeping up that we won’t be able to stop.

On the other hand, remaining here to keep Xavier at bay is putting all of Lior in the hands of Aiden not just for her rescue, but for freeing dozens of other supernaturally-enslaved children from what is basically a dark magic fortress.

“Sometimes as a parent you’ve got to trust who you’re with,” my father, engaged in a running war of words with Xavier, tells me with his own voice, “and what you’re the only one able to do.”

My decision becomes crystalized in what he says. Aiden is strong, competent, and unwaveringly set on bringing our son back to us. But to take apart a network of corrupted ley lines does in fact take a specific kind of magical know-how that right now I’m the only one to possess.

“Go here: there are a bunch of them about to escape, and we’re going to cut off their escape routes,” I say firmly to Kael. If we can scramble the ley line network, Arielle won’t be able to activate it to take your brother or any of the others away.

"Will that make it easier for Dad to find them?"

"Even better," I say, starting to integrate power into the network disruption pattern. “It will leave them pinned at the center, where your father can get to them.”

Kael and I work together to methodically overpower the infected ley lines. It is incredibly draining work — every line we break fights back with all the dark magic it’s absorbed — but I can feel the network beginning to collapse in on itself.

Its impact on Xavier is sudden and profound. His transition falters as his power is increasingly unstable. The shadow creatures linked to him grow more unstable, even attacking one another as their magical connections fray.

"What are you doing?" Xaver roars, his voice comes out like grinding stone because of his part transformation.

“Good,” I respond darkly, fueling the interference with another surge of power.

But Xavier isn't helpless. Fury of being out of control of the ley line network causes him to separate from my dad's desperate attack and barrel straight at our ritual circle.

“If I can’t have absolute power,” he hisses as shadow magic crackles around his talons, “then I’ll have to make do with your deaths!”

At the last second my Dad swoops in, putting himself between Xavier and our group with a roar of paternal rage. The two Alphas clash in midair, but this time Xavier, fueled by rage, gets the better of him. His claws penetrate and rip long trenches along my father’s chest.

"Papa!" I scream, and when the man who raised me and who taught me to be strong falls to his knees, blood spread out in a pool from which he won’t rise, I scream harder.

"Little moon," he gasps out, voice faint but still full of endless love, "take this last strength of mine. Take it, and you become what you were always meant to be.”

Before I can tell him that he must not waste his energy, that I won't allow it, my father does something I've never seen him do. He digs into his Alpha center and channels what is left of his uncorrupted strength right into my blood bond to him.

It's mind-blowing. His history, his settings...his love—it all pours into me as his direct, unfiltered supernatural might. Something in me, my own Alpha calling, responds, stretching, changing into something new.

Not only does this means inheriting his power. This is about \[…\] becoming something never before heard of – a Luna with the power of both Alpha lines combined, with powers that have never before been seen.

As it finishes, I can feel my father’s spirit slip from this world. But his last gift is a blazing star inside me, and I know exactly what I need to do with it.

“Xavier,” I say, standing as power crackles around me like tangible lightning, “you said you wanted to know what ultimate power looked like. Let me show you."
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