Chapter 285: Twelve Minutes & A Supernova Baseball Bat

If hell had a scoreboard, Guinevere Lunaris was speedrunning the final boss level with zero lives left.

ALPHA COMMAND: Crushing her skeleton.

SILVER: Cooking her blood.

WOLF: Somewhere between electrocution and extinction.

RUNES: Doing gods-knows-what.

The clock on Nicholas Shadowfell’s life had run out and the only person in the corridor still arguing with that fact had her teeth in his neck.

He had been dead for eleven minutes. No heartbeat.

Minute twelve arrived with a baseball bat and, outside of a Beta on his knees, every wolf was about to be caught with their pants down.

CRACK.

White light detonated everywhere.

Nicholas’s back arched off the stone.

The last cuff rattled like it had just been force-fed a lightning bolt with a full charge up the ass and the surplus was now crackling out as voltage.

Then it stopped all at once.

Silence dropped over the hall.

At some lost moment her father let go of her shoulder. She only noticed because his voice was further away.

"You want to finish this? Finish it. But know what you are buying. When your stunt right now gets back to the Dragon King, it will be paid for by every life in Lunaris—"

His words became muffled. The runes pulsed under her skin with her heartbeat, agitated and most definitely about to erupt like a shaken bottle of pure shit.

It could get the fuck in line. There was a long one. Unless it was trying to snatch just her. In that case, it could fuck all the way off. It either took both of them or it got her corpse. Those were the options because she wasn’t abandoning Nicholas.

"—burn your home to the ground, starting with the wolves you care about, Daughter. That’s the price you are paying by marking a dead man."

CRACK.

Another hit of white light landed like a slap from the gods.

Nicholas’s back arched again.

Then the runes on her body started spreading onto him like they had decided one person wasn’t enough. She was too focused to notice. The rest of the corridor watched the infection jump hosts.

Renwick’s hand found her arm again with a grip that said he wasn’t fucking around.

"You’re leaving me no choice. If I rip you off of him, his throat won’t survive it. Shadowfell deserves to bury their king whole, not in pieces. So you are going to unclench your jaw, and you are going to let him be whole, because that is the last act of love available to you right now."

The torches turned gold and the longer he talked, the higher the flames climbed in their brackets.

Higher.

Hotter.

Until—

WHOOSH.

Every torch in the hall erupted at once, scorching the ceiling above them.

CRACK.

White light went nuclear, turning into a flash bang from hell, bright enough to make the actual sun look like a dim asshole.

All wolves were knocked flat to the ground, including Renwick. The windows at the end of the hall were blasted into smithereens and three doors blew off their hinges completely.

The two purple portals flickered out with a pop.

Then—

WHOMP.

Every trace of light vanished. Sucked from the corridor in a vacuum that swallowed every last photon.

PING.

A broken cuff hit the floor.

Dark Fae ash floated in the air like dust particles in the sunlight.

And Nicholas Shadowfell and Guinevere Lunaris were both missing, leaving only a ring of cracked stone.

✦✦✦

THE KINGDOM OF LIGHT - 5:50 AM

There was nothing.

The kind of nothing that doesn’t even know it’s nothing. Nicholas existed somewhere without knowing he existed at all.

Everything was gone. Warmth. Sound. Time. Self. All of it.

Blackness stretched without end, the kind that predated light and has no word for it.

Then something punctured the dark, a tether between his soul and another. He was moving through the black, backwards, upwards, in a direction the void didn’t have until something forced one into existence.

The black tried to hold him.

It lost.

An old friend howled loudly in his mind. His wolf.

Then pain tidal-waved his ribs, throat, and skull simultaneously, like every nerve had been dipped in hellfire.

Something deep in his chest clenched like it was trying to punch its way out.

THUD.

Nothing.

THUD.

His heart remembered its fucking job.

Blood surged into places that had gone eleven minutes without it.

His diaphragm seized.

His chest heaved.

Air tore down his throat like broken glass.

GASP.

The black shattered.

His arms fired next, both at once, fingers locking around whatever they could find. His legs followed, rigid, every tendon pulled taut.

Agony surged harder, full-spectrum. He was alive, and being alive ranked somewhere below getting kicked in the dick by a horse.

He gasped again, forcing air back into his lungs that had quit. The intoxicating scent that came along for the ride was the kind of shit you chase, so he chased it.

His brain was six steps behind his body. The last thing he remembered was dark magic hitting his chest in a Greyhall corridor and the floor coming up to meet him.

Guinevere.

Shit.

His eyes snapped open.

White was all he saw. Endless, depthless, the kind of white that wasn’t a color but the absence of everything, daring him to find depth.

But someone was against him.

He lifted his head and saw her. For a moment, he felt pure relief, so much it almost hurt. She was in his arms again. From Greyhall corridor to this blank white purgatory.

He didn’t know how they’d gone from a corridor to whatever the fuck this was but all that mattered was he had her.

Her eyes were closed and her white hair was glowing around them.

"Guinevere."

His voice came out as a rasp so fucked it somehow managed to sound worse than he felt, which should’ve been impossible.

Nothing.

Then he noticed the dark veins under her eyes. Silver poisoning’s little black signature. Fucking silver.

Blood around her mouth. Hers and his.

"No. No no no. Baby, wake up."