Claimed by the scarred Alpha

ÉTIENNE

Isabelle gasped.

The sound barely made it past her lips before her knees gave way. I caught her against my chest, one arm hooking beneath her shoulders, the other catching her weight as she folded into me. Her head lolled against my shoulder.

Then the threads came.

They streamed into her from every direction, slipping between the trees, spilling out of the darkness beneath the roots, descending from the branches in long, luminous strands. Gold struck her first, then blue, then black, each one disappearing beneath her skin before another took its place. They twisted around one another as they entered her, braiding and unbraiding in frantic coils until the entire grove seemed caught inside a storm of color.

I tightened my grip on her.

"Isabelle?"

She didn’t answer.

Her fingers twitched against my chest.

Then, slowly, her hand rose.

It shook violently as she reached toward the sky, fingers stretching toward something I couldn’t see.

"Margaux," she whispered.

The instant the name left her mouth, every thread snapped taut.

I felt the pull through Isabelle’s body.

She jerked in my arms.

And then everything came out.

The threads tore free of her in a single violent surge, ripping through flesh and air alike. I felt the force of it in my ribs. Isabelle’s body went limp against me as gold, blue, and black streamed from her like blood pulled backward through an open wound.

The mass of them shot upward.

I looked up just in time to see them stop.

They hung above us.

For one breath, nothing happened.

Then the threads began to move.

They circled something that wasn’t there.

At first, I thought I was watching the air distort. Then a faint outline appeared inside the weaving, so pale I could see the trees through it. A shoulder. The curve of a back. The suggestion of a head.

The threads tightened. One passed through the shape. Another curled around its waist.

More followed, crossing over one another with increasing precision until the emptiness was almost completely hidden beneath layer after layer of luminous strands.

It reminded me of a cocoon.

Except nothing living should have been able to hang inside one made of light.

The thing inside shuddered.

I stopped breathing.

Its outline jerked again, harder this time. The threads strained around it, pulling tight enough that several of them flashed white.

Then the cocoon split.

A crack of light tore down its center.

The explosion that followed threw me backward.

My boots carved through the earth as I fought to stay upright, Isabelle still cradled against me. Leaves and loose dirt whipped past my face. The trees groaned around us.

Then everything stopped.

Silence settled over the grove.

I looked up.

Someone was standing where the cocoon had been.

My mind refused to make sense of what I was seeing.

Isabelle.

It had to be Isabelle.

The shape of her face was the same. The fall of her hair was the same. Even the small crease between her brows was there, though she wore an expression I’d never seen on her before.

She looked at her hands.

Slowly, she lifted one in front of her face.

Her fingers flexed.

Light moved beneath her skin.

It was not a glow I could name. There was no single color to it. Gold slipped into blue, blue dissolved into violet, violet flashed silver before sinking into something darker, only to surface again along the delicate of her fingers.

The light traveled.

It spilled beneath her fingernails, traced the veins along her wrists, climbed her arms in thin, shifting ribbons. Her skin caught it and gave it back differently, scattering it across her shoulders and throat.

She turned her hand over.

The light followed.

Her other hand rose.

She stared at both of them as though they belonged to someone else.

A strand of hair, if it still could still be called that, drifted across her cheek. She caught it between two fingers.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the strand lit up.

Isabelle flinched and released it.

The tiny glow remained suspended in the air.

Her eyes widened.

She reached for it again, more carefully this time, and the light crawled over her fingertips before disappearing beneath her skin.

She seemingly swallowed.

When she looked down at herself, her breath caught.

The light wasn’t coming from around her.

It was coming from her.

It poured from her hair in faint, shifting ribbons. It gathered at her fingertips. It traced the edges of her shoulders and collarbone, illuminating every movement with a soft radiance that changed whenever she moved.

She raised one hand toward her face.

The light reflected in her eyes.

For the first time since I had known Isabelle, she looked completely and utterly lost.

She flexed her fingers again and watched the light answer.

"She’s powerful," Arania murmured beside me.

I kept my eyes on Isabelle. "More than you?"

Arania’s mouth tightened, as though she were weighing whether answering honestly would be wise.

"I wouldn’t go that far." Her gaze remained fixed on Isabelle, and for the first time since I’d known her, there was something almost reverent in her expression. "But this rebirth..." She paused, watching the strange light move beneath Isabelle’s skin. "She could face a primordial demon now and walk away victorious. I’m almost sure of it."

I glanced at her and Arania’s voice softened as she continued. "This was the right choice."

Before I could ask what she meant, Isabelle disappeared.

There was no flash... No burst of energy...

One moment she stood before us, shimmering with that impossible, shifting light, and the next there was nothing where she had been.

My stomach dropped.

"Where did she go?"

"To the one thing she will always be unable to abandon now," Arania replied.

I turned toward her.

"Her point of obsession," she clarified. "Her daughter."

The words had barely left her mouth before she reached for me.

"We need to move."

Her fingers closed around my arm.

"Why?"

"Because even miracles can fail."

The world tore apart.

The grove stretched into streaks of color, trees and moonlight smearing into ribbons as the ground vanished beneath my feet. Static crawled over my skin. My stomach lurched as though I’d been dropped from a great height, and then the entire sensation snapped shut.

My boots struck solid flooring.

The smell hit me first.

Antiseptic.

Then the fluorescent lights and the muted hum of medical equipment.

The infirmary slammed back into existence around us, painfully ordinary after the impossible place we’d just left.

I staggered once, catching myself before I fell.

Arania didn’t bother waiting for me to recover. Her attention had already locked onto the far side of the room.

I followed her gaze.

Margaux’s cot stood exactly where we’d left it.

Except Isabelle was already there.

Her new form hovered beside the bed, suspended a few inches above the floor. Light moved through her constantly, slipping across her body in translucent waves. She barely seemed solid enough to belong in the room, and yet the air around her trembled with every pulse of energy she released.

Ophelia stared at her.

Her lips parted.

"Is that her?"

Arania’s gaze softened as she watched Isabelle hover protectively over Margaux.

"Yes," she answered quietly.

Isabelle’s radiant form drifted toward Margaux without hesitation, and I watched, my heart lodged somewhere in my throat, as she sank directly into her daughter’s unconscious body, light folding into flesh until nothing remained visible on the surface at all.

"Now we wait," Arania said. "And hope."

I didn’t wait.

I crossed the room and dropped into the chair beside Margaux’s cot, taking her hand in both of mine, her skin cold against my palms in a way that terrified me more than anything I’d faced tonight.

"You have to beat this," I said, my voice cracking. "You have to come back to me. Do you hear me, Margo? Come back."

Nothing changed for one long, agonizing moment.

Then her fingers twitched inside mine.

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