Claimed by the scarred Alpha

ÉTIENNE

I caught her before she hit the ground.

Her weight dropped into my arms all at once, unconscious and impossibly still, and I lowered myself to my knees on that ruined floor without letting go of her for even a second, my hands shaking as I brushed hair away from her face.

The others crossed the room toward us.

I looked past them, toward where the demon had been, and found only stone now, a frozen, snarling figure carved out of whatever he actually was underneath the human mask he’d worn.

"Is she free now?" I asked, my voice raw. "Was that why she hesitated?"

Arania shook her head, small and grave.

"I’m afraid not," she said. "I managed to put him in stasis, but they’re still very much connected. It will only take him a while to work out how to break free of what I did. We have perhaps days."

"So she’ll stay this way?" I said. "Like this?"

"She could have killed you," Arania said, ignoring my question entirely for a moment, her eyes fixed on Margaux’s slack face. "She had every opening to do it. But she hesitated instead."

"I saw that," I said.

"I’m not entirely certain how or why that happened," Arania admitted. "When a whisperer loses her shade, she becomes callous. Entirely. Regardless of relationship, regardless of how close she was to someone before it happened." She studied Margaux for a long moment. "It must be nothing short of a miracle that she stopped herself. But she is not the woman you knew. She cannot become that woman again unless the connection to the demon is severed. Either it dies, or the bond breaks some other way."

"So how do we do that?" I said. "She cannot stay unconscious forever."

Arania’s expression didn’t change, but something in the set of her small shoulders did.

"I fear it may already be too late," she said. "The only way through this involves death."

Something inside me went cold.

"What?" I said, pulling Margaux tighter against my chest, some instinct in me curling protectively around her even though there was nothing physical to shield her from right now. "That is not happening. I will not allow it."

"That is not what I mean," Arania retorted quickly. "I do not mean she should die." She hesitated, choosing her next words with visible care. "A superior spirit carries more weight than most demons. If she could strike a deal with one, a fae, or something greater still, the larger soul contract would override the smaller one already binding her." She glanced down at Margaux’s unconscious face. "But in her current state, she will never agree to bind herself to anyone. She cannot say yes to anything right now. So I do not know how else to help you."

"She cannot stay like this forever," I said. "I will do anything. Anything!"

Arania looked at me for a long moment.

"It would be unethical of me to say what I’m thinking," she said.

"Say it anyway," I said. "I do not care whether it’s ethical. I will do it. Whatever it takes, I will do it to save her."

That was when Prim gasped.

I turned, along with the others, and found her staring down at her own hand, watching it slowly begin to disappear, her fingers thinning into something translucent before fading entirely from view.

"I guess your job here is done," Ophelia said quietly.

"I don’t want to go now, though," Prim said back, and something in her voice cracked, some fear finally bleeding through the composure she’d carried through all of this. "But I suppose my time is up regardless. I got what I wanted."

She turned to Arania and Ophelia.

"Thank you," she said. "For all of your help."

Then she turned to me, her body continuing to vanish inch by inch, and I felt something tighten painfully in my chest watching her go.

"You have to do everything you can to save her," she begged. "And not only her." Her eyes held mine, urgent despite how faint her voice had become. "Your brother. Your mother. They’re both in that creature’s belly. You have to save them too."

She then vanished entirely before I could respond.

My mind spun with what she’d just told me. It was like what Margaux had said when she was taunting me. I had suspected, in some quiet corner of myself I hadn’t let fully surface, that my family had never truly found peace after everything that happened to them. Margaux’s ghost encounters, the strange half answers I’d gotten whenever I asked too many questions, all of it had circled around a truth I hadn’t wanted to name directly.

Now it sat in front of me twice now, undeniable.

My mother and my brother had never rested. They were trapped, both of them, somewhere inside the same creature currently frozen in stone across the room from me.

I looked back at Arania.

"So what do I have to do to fix this?" I said. "Any of it."

"I have a blade," she said slowly. "It is called a harvester’s knife. When the earth was younger, it was used to supplement the luminous world and prevent atrophy across it."

"What does that mean?" I questioned.

"Superior spirits can be made," she replied. "After all, obsession is what makes the world turn. It fuels both progress and destruction in equal measure, and a spirit that carries a strong enough obsession is reborn onto this plane already powerful. There are certain conditions that strengthen a spirit further, too. A violent death carries weight. A death among many violent deaths, a war, a massacre, the annihilation of an entire family, carries even more." She paused. "And if that spirit is born on blessed or cursed ground, somewhere superior spirits and creatures already walk in droves, they consume spiritual energy freely and become something greater still. A true superior spirit in their own right."

I felt the shape of what she was building toward before she finished saying it.

"Since Margaux cannot make a choice for herself right now," Arania continued, "someone with a strong connection to her could make that choice on her behalf. You are her mate. Intimately bound to her, in every sense that matters for this."

"What are you saying, Arania?" Ophelia cut in, her voice sharp with alarm. "That he kills himself to save his mate?"

"That is precisely what needs to happen," Arania said, entirely unflinching.

"Will that actually save her?" I asked.

Ophelia turned toward me, horror written plainly across her face.

"Alpha Theodore—" she started.

"It’s Étienne," I corrected.

"Alpha Étienne," she corrected herself, her voice softening slightly even as urgency still colored every word. "Death is not an easy choice to make. I understand you are sick with grief right now, watching her like this. But that makes this precisely the wrong time to be making decisions of this weight." She glanced at Arania. "My superior spirit here simply says things exactly as they are, without softening them, without considering how they land. I am certain there is another way. There is always another way."

"I do not care," I retorted.

I looked down at Margaux, still unconscious in my arms, her face slack in a way that terrified me more than anything the demon had thrown at us tonight.

"I get to stay by her side either way, do I not?" I said. "Whatever happens next. That is fine by me."

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