Chapter 8: The Guard's Vigil
The door closed behind Benji with a soft, final click, sealing in the sudden silence.It wasn’t peaceful. It was a thick, waiting quiet, like the held breath of a stalking animal. The great hall, which had felt so full of layered history and violent potential, now felt hollow, a vast auditory cavity tuned to every drip of sap in the logs, every settling groan of timber.
After Benji and the others departed, the homestead fell into a tense, watchful silence.
Mara, her face a mask of calm purpose, moved to the heavy iron bar leaning by the main door and slid it into its brackets with a sound like a gunshot in the stillness.She didn’t look at Zariah. “Upstairs,” was all she said, her voice leaving no room for debate. Zariah stood, her legs unsteady, the blanket slipping from her shoulders. She followed Mara up the wide, creaking staircase, each step echoing in the cavernous space below.
Two pack members—Elena and Marcus—took up positions by the doors. They were younger than Jason, but carried the same ingrained stillness. Elena, a woman with sinewy arms and a long, dark braid, stood at the top of the stairs, peering down into the dim hall. Marcus, broad-shouldered and silent, took a post by the narrow window at the end of the upstairs corridor, his gaze fixed on the tree line. Their eyes glowed faintly in the dim light, not with the fierce emerald of Benji’s, but with a low, honeyed amber. Seeing it so plainly, so casually, sent a fresh shock through Zariah’s system. It wasn’t a trick of the fire.It was a biological fact. A part of their reality she was now forced to share.Mara guided her into a bedroom at the front of the house. It was spartan: a large bed frame stacked with furs, a simple dresser, a carved wooden chair. A door led to a small, private bathroom.“Wait here,” Mara instructed. “Do not come out unless I or Benji come for you. Do not open the window.” Her tone was textbook calm, the kind Zariah herself used when explaining a critical procedure to a nervous intern. It was meant to steady.Instead, it underscored the severity. Procedures are for when things can go catastrophically wrong.Mara left, pulling the bedroom door shut. Zariah didn’t hear a lock turn, but the implicit command was its own lock. She stood in the center of the room, feeling exposed. The fire from the great hearth below provided the only light, casting flickering, distorted shapes of the carved wolf-heads on the bedposts against the far wall. They seemed to be moving.She sank onto the edge of the bed, then immediately stood up again. Pacing was useless, but stillness was worse. She went to the bedroom door, pressed her ear against the rough wood.Nothing.Absolute silence from the corridor.That was worse than noise. She moved to the window, ignoring Mara’s order just to look. The glass was old, warped, turning the moonlit clearing into a smeared impression.The forest was a wall of solid black. She saw nothing.Heard nothing.
Zariah sat by the fire, her knees drawn up, trying to still the trembling in her hands. She focused on the mundane: the rough texture of her borrowed sweatpants, the cold metal of the bed frame against her spine. She tried to recite the periodic table, a grounding exercise from her grad school anxiety. Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium… The words crumbled in her mind. All she could see was the wrongness in Jason’s eyes.The scent he didn’t recognize.Something old.
A soft knock, and the door opened.Mara entered with a chipped mug. “Drink this,” she said, placing it on the dresser.“Chamomile, valerian root. It’ll take the edge off.” Mara’s presence was a solid thing, but her eyes kept flicking to the window behind Zariah, listening to things beyond the house.
Mara brought her tea, but Zariah barely noticed.The air feels charged, electric, as if the very walls are listening.
“What happens now?” Zariah’s voice was a dry rasp.
“Now we listen,” Mara said, not meeting her eyes.She was listening now, her head slightly tilted. Her nostrils flared once, subtly.“Jason and Benji will follow the trail. If it’s just a curious straggler from another range, they’ll escort it out. If it’s something else…” She trailed off.“We hold the house.The homestead is warded.Old ways. It doesn’t like uninvited things.”
“Warded?” The word felt archaic, silly on her tongue, but nothing here was silly. The carvings on the logs downstairs weren’t décor.“Places hold memory.Intention. This place has been defended, blood and bone, for generations.That leaves a mark.It makes the walls… resistant.” Mara finally looked at her. “It’s not a forcefield.It’s a discouragement. Like thorns.”
Outside, a low growl rumbled through the forest.It wasn’t loud.It was pervasive. It seemed to come from the ground itself, vibrating up through the floorboards into the soles of Zariah’s feet.It was not a wolf’s growl. It was deeper, wetter, a sound of grinding stones and tearing roots.
And Elena’s head snapped up from her post in the corridor, her nostrils flaring. Her amber eyes brightened, shedding a faint, predatory light on the wall opposite her.‘Something’s circling,’ she muttered, her voice tight.
From down the hall, Marcus moved from his window, joining Elena at the stairhead. They exchanged a look, a silent, complex communication. Marcus’s hands flexed at his sides, fingers curling as if already holding a shape Zariah couldn’t see. He moved to the window, peering into the dark.“It’s close.Not in the trees.On the ground. Moving slow.”
The thrum in Zariah’s chest, the insistent, annoying cord that tied her to Benji, suddenly cinched tighter.It wasn’t a pull. It was a violent, painful pulse, a drumbeat of pure adrenaline echoing through her own bloodstream from miles away. She gasped, her hand flying to her sternum.He was afraid.No—not afraid.Alert. Agitated.Running.
Zariah feels the blood bond throb in her chest, a painful pulse that tells her Benji is moving fast, getting farther away. She clenches her fists, fighting the urge to run after him, knowing she would only be a liability.
The contradiction was maddening.The bond wanted her to go to him, to close the distance. Every primal instinct scream it. But the rational, surviving part of her brain, the part that had gotten her through committees and dismissals and the cold silence of her father, knew the truth.Out there, she was prey. Here, behind thorns of memory and intention, she was merely vulnerable.
She looked at Mara, who was also feeling it, her face pale. “Benji’s worried,” Zariah whispered, not as a question, but as a shared confirmation.Mara nodded once, sharp. “I can feel it.”
She was terrified because the wolves who were guarding her looked worried.
That was the core of it, the icy water filling her gut. These creatures, who changed shape and spoke of spiritual roads, who carried the ancient violence in their bones—they were worried. Elena’s calm watchfulness had sharpened into razor focus.Marcus’s silent vigil had become a coiled spring. They weren’t just guarding a door anymore.They were preparing for an assault.
The minutes crawl by like hours.Each one stretched, a torture of silent anticipation. The low growl did not come again. The silence it left behind was worse, filled with imagined sounds: the scrape of a branch on the roof, the whisper of something heavy dragging through the dry grass below the window. Her heart was a frantic bird against her ribs.She picked up the tea, sipped. It was bitter, earthy.She didn’t taste it.
She was back in her office in Chicago, the night she’d decided to leave. The silence there had been different—a hollow, institutional silence of emptied halls and dead fluorescent lights.But the feeling was the same.A before-the-storm pressure. The knowledge that the life you knew was already over, you were just waiting for the debris to finish falling.Here, the debris would have teeth.A sudden, violent crash shattered the silence downstairs.
Not from the door.It was from the far side of the great hall, near the kitchen. The sound of splintering wood, shattering glass, and the terrible, cacophonous clatter of metal pots cascading to the floor.
Then came a crash and snarling from down stairs the guards take up defensive positions near the door.
In the corridor, Elena and Marcus moved as one, flowing from the stairhead to flank the bedroom door.They didn’t enter. They became barriers. Elena faced the staircase, her body lowered in a fighter’s stance, a low, continuous growl emanating from her throat that vibrated in the air. Marcus faced the opposite end of the dark corridor, his back to Zariah’s door, his head cocked, listening to the chaos below.Snarls erupted, multiple, overlapping. They were not the deep, wrong growl from outside.These were higher, fiercer.Defensive.Pack snarls. Mara was down there.So were others.
A horrific, guttural roar answered them, drowning out the pack’s warnings.It was the sound from the woods, now inside the house. It held nothing of the wolf. It was pure, mindless rage and hunger, a sound that bypassed the ears and shook the skull.Zariah’s body moved before her mind could command it.
Flight.Not fight.Never fight.A locked door.A small space.A lightless place.
She lunged across the bedroom, slammed through the bathroom door, and fumbled for the lock. It was a simple bolt.She threw it home. Her hands, slick with sweat, then groped for the light switch.Click.Darkness.Absolute, swallowing dark.Turn off the light.
The world vanished.She was blind. She pressed her back against the cold tiles of the wall, sliding down until she was crouched on the floor, knees to her chest. The snarls and roars from below were muffled but clear, a battle raging in the heart of the house. A scream—human, cut short.A howl of agony—wolf.
The pain in her thigh was a sudden, white-hot brand.She’d moved too fast, twisted wrong. A wet, tearing sensation, then a warm seepage through the fabric of her sweatpants. She’d torn one of her stitches in the process she didn’t care as the panic attack took over.
Logic was a distant star.The parameters of reality had dissolved into noise and pain and terror. Her breath came in short, useless gasps.She couldn’t draw air deep enough.Her lungs seized. Black spots swam in the darkness behind her eyelids. The cord in her chest was a live wire, electrocuting her with every surge of fear, every spike of aggression that pulsed down it from Benji.He was fighting.He was hurt.He was coming.She couldn’t breathe.
She was seven years old, hiding in her mother’s closet, the smell of lavender sachets and wool coats, listening to her father’s measured, disappointed voice on the phone downstairs. “She’s just so sensitive, that’s all.” She was in the university boardroom, every face turned toward her, waiting for her defense of her research, and her voice had vanished, stolen by the airtight silence.She was here, in a dark bathroom, while monsters fought below.
What if the monster hurt her again?The thought was not a question. It was a childhood ghost, resurrected and given fur and fangs. The wound on her leg, the one given by a rogue wolf, throbbed in time with the memory of every failure, every rejection, every time she had been made to feel small, fragile, breakable.Her father’s clinical assessments. The department head’s smug dismissal.The rogue’s claws.She couldn’t.
She wrapped her arms around her knees, pressed her forehead into them.The tile was cold.The air was cold. Inside, she was burning up, suffocating. The sounds from below reached a crescendo—a crashing, a final, deafening roar that trailed off into a wet, choking gurgle, then silence.
A heavy, absolute silence.It was worse than the noise.Footsteps on the stairs. Slow, dragging.More than one set.A voice, rough with pain.Jason.“Secure the perimeter. Check the wards.Mara… see to Mara.”
Zariah’s heart hammered against her knees. She didn’t move.She couldn’t. The bolt on the door felt flimsy as paper.Anyone could break it.Anything.The footsteps approached down the corridor. They stopped outside the bedroom door.She heard the door creak open.Silence. Then, a slow, limping tread across the wood floor.Coming towards the bathroom.She held her breath. The seepage from her torn stitch was warm and steady.The footsteps stopped on the other side of the thin wooden door.
A scratch at the lock.A low, weary sigh.
Benji’s voice, raw and frayed at the edges, seeped through the wood.“Zariah.”
It wasn’t a command. It was exhaustion.It was a calling-in.She didn’t answer. Her throat was locked shut.“Zariah,” he said again, softer.“It’s done. You can open the door.”
She couldn’t she wouldn’t.
The fear was a solid thing, a resin that had encased her, hardening in the dark. To move was to crack it, and she didn’t know what would spill out.Her?Or something else?
A whimper escaped her, a tiny, broken sound.
On the other side of the door, the sigh deepened into something wretched. “Okay,” Benji’s voice came, thick with a pain that wasn’t physical. “Okay. Just… just unlock it.Please. I need to see you’re whole.”
The ‘please’ did it. It was a crack in the resin. That raw, unguarded need, so unlike his usual contained intensity, seeped through the wood and into the cold, dark air she was choking on. Her hand, trembling violently, rose from her knee. It moved through the darkness as if through deep water, slow and resistant. Her fingers found the cold metal of the bolt.
Her rational mind, the astrophysicist who dealt in observable facts, screamed a warning. It cited the wrong scent, the unrecognizable trail, the ancient thing circling. It presented a logical conclusion: verification was required. The voice outside had to be verified against known parameters.
But the bond in her chest was a tidal pull, drowning out the scream. It pulsed with his fatigue, his concern, a weary relief that the fighting was done. It felt like him. It felt like the emerald gaze that had watched her eat stew, that had seen her shame. It felt like the cord that had connected them since the night on the mountain. Her fingers slid the bolt.
The metal scraped with a sound like a grave opening.
She pulled the door inward, just a crack, the darkness of the bathroom bleeding into the lesser darkness of the bedroom. The fire from the great hall below provided the only light, casting the room in weak, pulsating amber. She saw a silhouette framed in the doorway, tall, leaning heavily against the jamb. Details resolved slowly in the gloom. The long, dark hair. The slope of a shoulder. The faint, emerald glow of eyes regarding her from the shadows.
“See?” the silhouette that was Benji said, its voice a soft echo of his. “It’s me. You’re safe.”
It took a step into the room, and the firelight caught it fully.
The figure was wrong. The proportions were a hair off, the shoulders too narrow, the way it moved a fluid imitation that lacked his innate, predatory grace. It was Benji painted in watercolors and then left in the rain, the lines blurred, the substance diluted. And the eyes—they glowed, but the light was thin, watery, a filmed-over pond rather than a deep, forest spring.
But these observations, the screaming inconsistencies, were secondary. They were background noise.
Because the floor of the bedroom was a charnel house.
The guards lay in heaps of blood. Elena was crumpled against the far wall, her neck bent at an impossible angle, her amber eyes wide and flat as stones. A dark, glistening canyon had been opened across her torso, from shoulder to hip, and the contents within were not meant for light. Marcus was nearer, half-sprawled across the threshold of the room itself. His head was turned towards her, his mouth open in a silent snarl. The lower half of his face was gone, shattered into a red pulp of bone fragments and teeth.
The copper-sweet, iron-tang stench of it all hit her a second later, a physical wave that coated the inside of her mouth and nose. It was the scent from the mountain, from her own wound, multiplied a hundredfold, warm and alive and wrong.
Her mind broke cleanly in two.
One half, the professor, detached and observational, calmly noted: Cardiac tissue exposed. Probable spinal severance at C3. Arterial spray pattern indicates severance of the carotid. Survival likelihood: zero percent. For both subjects.
The other half, the animal hiding in the dark bathroom, reacted.
She didn’t scream. Sound was impossible. She shoved the door wide and stumbled out, her torn leg buckling, sending her to her knees on the slick, sticky floorboards beside Marcus. Her hands, those instruments of delicate calibration, flew out. The rational mind was not sensing that they were beyond help. It was screaming it, but the animal couldn’t hear.
Logic was a distant star. These were people who had stood guard. They had been barriers between her and the roaring dark. Barriers weren’t supposed to be broken. They could be mended. She could mend them.
Her hands went to the ruin of Marcus’s face. She tried to scoop blood into her hand and force it back into them. The blood was everywhere, warm and slippery, refusing to be gathered. It poured through her fingers, a hopeless sieve. She pressed her palms against the jagged edge of his jaw, as if she could hold the life in by sheer pressure. “No,” she grunted, the word a puff of air. “No, no, no.”
She looked desperately at Elena, at the horrific vista of her interior. There was so much blood there, a lake of it. If she could just… get it back in. The concept was pristine in its madness. A container had been emptied. It must be refilled. She crawled through the slickness, leaving a smeared trail, and reached for Elena’s shoulder.
But she couldn’t focus because of loud sobbing. A raw, jagged, wrenching sound that filled the room, a noise of utter desolation. It scraped her ears. She glanced around, wild-eyed, looking for the source of this distracting, useless grief. Who was making that awful noise? It had to stop. She needed quiet to fix this.
She realizes she was the culprit of the noise.
The sobs were tearing from her own throat. Each one was a convulsion that racked her entire frame, shuddering up from a place deeper than her bones. They were the sound of the locked room inside her bursting its hinges, of every held breath, every swallowed scream, every muted tear for her mother, for her career, for the simple, shattered hope of being safe. They were for the guards who were pulp and meat, for the universe where this could be real, for the terrifying understanding that the thorns of this place had failed. They were for her.
She hunched over Elena’s still form, her bloody hands hovering uselessly, and simply wept. The tears cut hot tracks through the spatter on her cheeks. The analytical mind was gone, obliterated. There was only the feeling, a vast, dark ocean she was drowning in.
The shadow-like thing claiming it was Benji watched her. It had not moved from its place by the bathroom door. A faint, unpleasant smile touched its blurred features, a mimicry of comfort that didn’t reach its watery eyes. It took a silent step closer, its form seeming to drink the weak firelight rather than reflect it.
“Zariah,” it said again, its voice still soft, still wrong. “Come away from that. It’s messy.”
She barely heard it over the storm of her own grief. The thing extended a hand towards her, a pale, indistinct shape in the gloom. The gesture was almost tender.
Then it evaporated.
One second it was there, a corrupted sketch of Benji, the next it simply wasn’t. It didn’t fade or dissipate like mist. It winked out, as if a projector had been switched off. Where it had stood, the air seemed to curdle for a fraction of a second, a brief, oily shimmer in the darkness, and then there was nothing but the empty space and the bloody floor.
Then she heard several foot steps running up the stairs towards the room.
These were different. Not a slow, dragging approach. These were pounding, urgent, multiple. They hammered up the wooden staircase, a thunder of intent that shook the floor beneath her knees. They were real. The sound of boots, of weight, of haste.
The sobbing choked in her throat. She stared at the empty space where the not-Benji had been, her mind—the two shattered halves trying to re-knit—unable to process the sequence. Illusion. Then reality. Attack. Then rescue. Which was which? Had she just let the thing in? Had it killed them because she opened the door?
The footsteps reached the corridor. They did not pause. They came straight for the open bedroom door.
Panzymoved, a final, desperate scramble. She threw herself backwards, away from Elena, away from the door, her back hitting the leg of the heavy bed frame. She pulled her knees up, making herself small, a bloody, trembling knot pressed into the corner where the wall met the bed. She had nowhere else to go.
Figures filled the doorway.
Jason was first, a mountain of furious, blood-streaked flesh. His shirt was torn to ribbons, revealing long, angry gashes across his chest that were already knitting together, pink and raw at the edges. His eyes blazed a feral, hellish amber, scanning the room, taking in the bodies, taking in her cowering form in the corner. A snarl ripped from him, a sound of pure, unadulterated rage that had nothing to do with the wolf and everything to do with a leader seeing his own slaughtered.
Right behind him was Benji.
The real Benji.
He was shirtless, his lean torso a canvas of fresh bruises and dark, smeared filth. A long, shallow cut traced his ribs. His breath sawed in and out of his lungs, and in his eyes was a storm—fear, fury, a frantic, searching panic that locked onto her the moment he crossed the threshold. This was the source of the pain in the bond. This was the exhaustion, the fear, the violent urgency. He smelled of pine and ozone and wet earth and his own blood.
His gaze swept the scene: the two broken forms of his packmates, the bloody handprints on the floor, the woman curled in the corner, her face a mask of tear-streaked gore, her eyes wide with a shock so profound it looked like vacancy.
“Zariah.” The voice called out to her softly from behind Jason’s broad form.
It was Benji. His voice was real. Guttural with emotion, scratchy from yelling, layered with a relief so profound it cracked in the middle. He took a step into the room, but Jason’s arm shot out, barring his path.
“Don’t,” Jason growled, his eyes not on Benji but on the walls, the shadows, the ceiling. His nostrils flared violently. “The scent is here. It’s thick. It’s mocking us. It wore a shape.”
Benji shook off Jason’s arm, his emerald eyes never leaving her. “Zariah,” he said again, taking a careful step closer, his hands held out, palm-up, showing he was empty, showing he was himself. “Look at me. Just look.”
She was looking. She was seeing double. The blurred, watery Benji superimposed over the real, bruised, breathing one. Her mind couldn’t reconcile them. The bond in her chest was a roaring confusion, screaming that this was him, the pain, the fear, the frantic love, it was all coming from this man in front of her. But she had just let the other one in. She had unlocked the door.
“I opened it,” she whispered, the words barely audible, rusted from sobbing. “It sounded like you.”
A spasm of agony crossed Benji’s face. He took another step, slowly lowering himself into a crouch a few feet from her, careful not to step in the blood. He was now at her eye level, a supplicant before a ruined altar. “It wasn’t me. That was the Wrong. The thing from the passes. It gets inside… it plays with perception. It must have touched the edges of the bond, siphoned enough to mimic my voice.” His own voice was choked with self-loathing. “I felt it. A cold pull. Like a leak. I was running… I couldn’t…”
Jason loomed behind him, a statue of wrath. “It used the bond as a template,” he spat, his voice like grinding stones. “Used your worry for her as a door. Clever. Old magic. Filthy.”
Benji flinched as if struck. He kept his eyes on Zariah. “Are you hurt? Is any of this blood yours?” His gaze dropped to her thigh, where the dark, wet patch was spreading, mingling with Marcus’s blood.
She looked down, as if noticing the warm, fresh pain for the first time. “I tore… the stitches. When I hid.” The statement was absurd. She was sitting in a pool of evisceration, and she was reporting a medical inconvenience.
“Okay,” Benji breathed, the word a promise. “Okay, that’s fixable.” He started to reach for her, then stopped, his hand hovering in the air between them. He was afraid to touch her. She saw it. He was afraid she would shatter, or that his touch would confirm some terrible contamination.
From the hallway, more footsteps, slower. Mara appeared in the doorway, her face ashen, one arm clamped across her midsection. She leaned on the frame, her strength gone. Her eyes found the bodies, and a silent grief, old and deep, passed over her features. Then she looked at Zariah, at Benji crouched before her.
“Benji,” Mara said, her voice drained. “The wards are… splintered. Not broken. Bent. It focused everything here, on this room, on getting her to open the door. It wanted inside her space. Her fear… it’s like a beacon to something like that.”
A beacon. Her panic attack, her childhood ghosts, her locked-room terrors—they had drawn this thing. They had tuned the frequency it used to find the house’s weaknesses. The thorns hadn’t failed. She had. Her parameters had introduced the fatal error.
“I’m sorry,” Zariah whispered, not to any of them, but to Elena, to Marcus. “I’m so sorry.”
Benji’s hand finally closed the distance, not touching her skin, but gently wrapping around her wrist. His touch was furnace-warm, calloused, utterly solid. It was the most real thing she had felt in an hour. The bond surged, a flood of him-ness that washed away the last psychic residue of the mimic. This was the source. This was true.
“Don’t,” he said, his voice fierce. “Don’t you dare. This is not on you. This is on the thing that did this. And we will find it.” He looked over his shoulder at Jason, his expression shifting from desperate compassion to something cold and deadly. “We will find it.”
Jason gave a single, grim nod. His rage had folded in on itself, becoming a dense, focused core. “It left a trail. A real one this time. It’s bleeding something that isn’t blood.” He looked at Mara. “Get her cleaned up. Get the bodies downstairs. We do this properly. Before dawn.”
Mara pushed herself off the doorframe. “Come on, child,” she said to Zariah, her voice regaining a shred of its former steadiness. “Let’s get you up. Let’s get you clean.”
Zariah didn’t move. She was anchored to the floor by the weight of the blood, by the sight of the bodies, by the crushing understanding of what her fear could do in this new world. Benji’s hand tightened on her wrist.
“You can’t stay here,” he said softly. “You have to get up. One thing at a time. First, you stand up.”
It was a command, but not a harsh one. It was a first principle. An initial condition. Let t equal zero. Define your position. She was in a corner. She was covered in blood. Some was hers. Most was not. The first derivative of her position was zero. She was not moving. To change that required a force.
His hand was that force.
She leaned into it, her other hand pushing against the cold floor. Her torn leg screamed in protest, buckling again. Benji was there in an instant, his arm sliding around her back, taking her weight without effort, lifting her to her feet. She swayed, the room tilting. The metallic stench was overpowering. Her knees were stained a deep, rust red.
He didn’t try to carry her. He just held her steady, letting her find her balance against him. She was acutely aware of the heat of his skin, the rapid, strong beat of his heart against her arm, the scent of him—real, alive, Benji—cutting through the horror. It was the only anchor in a sea of wrong.
Mara moved to her other side, offering a supporting arm. Together, they guided her around the horrific stillness on the floor, towards the door. Zariah kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, on the corridor beyond. She did not look back.
As they passed Jason, he spoke, his voice low and directed at Benji. “You feel it now? What the bond means? It’s not just a tie. It’s a vulnerability. It’s a weapon they can use.”
Benji didn’t stop. “I feel it,” he said, his voice flat. “And I’ll burn out whatever tries to use it again.”
They moved into the corridor, away from the room. The air was slightly clearer, though the scent of violence permeated everything. Mara led them not back downstairs, but to another door at the end of the hall. A bathroom, but a larger one, with a deep, clawfoot tub. She turned on the faucet, and the sound of rushing, steaming water was violently mundane.
“Get the clothes off,” Mara said, her practicality a lifeline. “Into the tub. Scrub the blood off. All of it. Your leg will need re-stitching after.”
Zariah stood listlessly, her hands hanging at her sides. She was a passive variable in their equation. Benji, still supporting her, looked at Mara, a silent question in his eyes.
“I’ve got her,” Mara said, nodding. “You have work to do. Downstairs.”
Benji’s jaw tightened. The bond thrummed with his reluctance to leave, with his need to fix, to protect, to erase the image of her broken in the corner. But Jason’s words hung in the air. We do this properly.Before dawn. There were rituals for the dead in this world. They couldn’t wait.
He slowly, carefully, released his hold on Zariah, making sure she was steady on her feet. He brought his other hand up and, with a tenderness that shattered her, cupped the side of her face, his thumb brushing away a dried tear-track of blood. His emerald eyes held hers, pouring a silent, furious promise into her.
“I will be right downstairs,” he said, each word precise. “You are safe. The thing is gone. It will not get in again.” He paused, searching her face. “The blood on your hands is not your fault. Remember that.”
Then he turned and left, his footsteps echoing back towards the room of death, towards Jason, towards