I tried for the magic, whatever it ends up meaning. I clawed for it the way you claw for a light switch in the dark, some old, half-remembered shape of the thing that had torn out of me in the cave, and found nothing there at all. No heat. No current. Just my own ordinary, broken body and a scream that stayed a scream, nothing more, useless against what was happening twenty feet away. Octavia had Damian’s arm wrenched up behind him at an angle that shouldn’t have been possible, and Vanessa’s teeth were at his throat, not feeding, not yet, savouring instead, the way a cat savours the last stillness before it stops letting something go. Damian was not a small man, and he was not, by any ordinary measure, weak, but two of them working together had found the exact seams five centuries of restraint had never been tested against, and I watched him struggle and gain nothing, watched blood run from his temple in a way I’d never once seen it run before.
“Where is she.” Octavia’s voice was almost gentle, which made it worse.
“The witch who did this to my mate. I know it wasn’t you, not really, not the way it needed to be. Something is using you as a door. I would very much like to know what.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Damian’s voice came out thick, blood in it now.
“You’re lying to me very badly for a man who’s had five hundred years of practice.” She twisted his arm further, and the sound he made then was one I will hear for the rest of my life, raw and involuntary and entirely without the composure he’d spent centuries building.
“Vanessa, darling. I think it’s time.” I don’t remember deciding to move. I remember the ground under my hands, cold and wet with my own blood, and I remember dragging myself up onto one knee by sheer refusal rather than any strength I actually had left, my shoulder screaming, my vision swimming at the edges, and I remember the sound that came out of me wasn’t a scream at all this time. It was his name. Nothing answered it. No white light. No force. Just my own raw voice cracking on two syllables in an empty stretch of frozen grass, and for one endless, terrible second I understood that whatever had saved Noah in that cave was not going to save Damian now, that I had nothing left to offer except my own broken body dragging itself toward a fight I could not possibly survive joining.
Damian heard me anyway. I don’t know what it cost him. I only know that something in him found one more measure of strength he shouldn’t have had left, and he drove his free elbow back into Octavia’s ribs hard enough to break her grip for half a second, just long enough to twist, just long enough to get one hand up between himself and Vanessa’s teeth before they closed. He threw her off him bodily, and she landed badly, disoriented for the first time all morning, and Damian was on his feet before she’d finished skidding across the frost, the same length of dark, sharpened wood already back in his hand.
“This ends now,” he said, and there was nothing left in his voice that resembled mercy. Vanessa didn’t get up in time. I watched her eyes go wide, the same flash of the girl from the gym doorway underneath all that borrowed hunger, and I watched Damian drive the stake home in one motion that had no hesitation anywhere inside it. She didn’t scream. There was a sound, brief and terrible, and then simply nothing at all, her whole body going still and grey the way ash goes still after the fire’s finished with it. Octavia was already moving by the time he turned. Not fighting, not fleeing in a straight line either, something more controlled than either, backing toward the treeline with her eyes fixed on him the entire time, unhurried even now, even bleeding from where his elbow had caught her.
“This isn’t finished,” she said, and there was nothing in her voice that sounded like a woman who’d just lost.
“I know what she is now, Damian. I felt it, watching her try to reach for something and fail. Whatever’s in her hasn’t woken up properly yet. I can wait for that.” Then she was gone, the treeline swallowing her whole, and the reserve was silent except for the distant, oblivious cheering of a fun run still going on three hundred metres away, entirely unaware that anything at all had happened. Damian was at my side before I’d finished trying to stand, and the look on his face when he saw the state of my arm, my shoulder, the blood soaked dark through my sleeve, undid something in him that I felt rather than saw.
“Sarah.” His hands hovered over me, uncertain for the first time in longer than I’d known him, afraid to touch anywhere that might be broken.
“Sarah, I’m so sorry, I should never have let this happen, I should have seen this coming—”
“You’re alive,” I said, and found that was the only thing in the whole terrible morning I actually had room to care about.
“You’re alive. That’s all that matters right now.” He gathered me up as carefully as he’d ever done anything in his life, and carried me away from the tree break, away from the ash still settling into the frost behind us, and somewhere behind him, unseen, unheard, something old and patient was already deciding how long it was willing to wait.