Chapter 479: Run With Me One Last Time

SOLVEIL - THE KING’S PRIVATE COURTYARD

The courtyard went from fetch to emergency room in under thirty seconds. One moment a wolf was catching balls while two mages clapped and three dragons pretended to not be impressed. The next, the wolf’s shift broke, wolf turning back into human form, and a young dragon hit the ground twenty feet away.

Kael went down and stayed down.

A grunt forced its way out of him through clenched teeth, low and wrong, the sound of a man trying to hold something in that was already coming apart. His palms were flat on the stone and his arms were shaking under his own weight, and the shaking was getting worse, traveling up into his shoulders.

Landon’s eyes cut to him. "Healers. On the Young Light Bearer. Now."

Landon’s crisis voice had no relationship to his negotiation voice. The negotiation voice poured whiskey and discussed blood oaths. The crisis voice moved healers across stone like chess pieces and expected them to land where they were aimed.

Two of them broke off and crossed to Kael, hands already lit, dropping to their knees on either side of him.

"I’m fine." Kael got the words out around another grunt and did not look fine saying them. "Deal with her. I’m—"

His arms gave. His shoulder hit the stone.

Guinevere’s eyes surged gold, but it wasn’t the ancient queen this time. The voice that came out was layered, two of them braided together, hers and the wolf’s, rough and urgent and wrong in the mouth. Her eyes found Nicholas.

"It is not from the head." Her hand clamped around his wrist. "There was one who cast it. I smell them. Hiding. Find them."

"Okay." Nicholas held her gaze and his voice came out level, the register an Alpha used when a wolf under him was coming apart. "We’ll find them. I give you my word, we will find them."

Her grip tightened. The gold in her eyes flickered, dimming at the edges, and the next words came quieter, the urgency draining out of them into something that landed almost tender.

"Run with me one last time. Before I forget how."

The color drained out of Nicholas’s face.

He had heard a wolf say goodbye before. That was what her wolf just did because wolves do not say goodbye. Wolves say: one more. One more hunt. One more howl. One more run. And the "one more" is the end.

He knew the shape of the sentence, and he knew what it meant when the animal underneath came all the way up to say it out loud, and his own wolf slammed against his ribs in denial of every word.

"Guinevere—"

Her back arched off the stone.

The seizure took her all at once. Her spine bowed, her limbs locking and jerking against the ground, the gold in her eyes rolling white, a sound forced out of her throat that had no language in it.

Maddox’s hands flew to her shoulders first, then her head, the instinct of a man who has held someone through a seizure before and knows that the head is what you protect and the body is what you let do what it needs to do. You do not pin. You do not restrain. You hold the skull off the stone and you wait and the waiting is the worst part of every war Maddox has ever fought.

"Solveil. What the fuck is happening to her?" he called to Landon.

"More mages. Sweep the parlor, every corner, scent and signature both, now." Landon fired the order over his shoulder without slowing, his light already gathering as he crossed the stone. "And get a second healer on the Young Light Bearer. He is down and I want to know why."

He dropped to his knees at her other side. White light surged into her, steady and controlled, a king pouring his light into a body that was being drained of it in real time.

Her eyes glowed in answer. Then her whole body glowed, the light recognizing itself, her runes flaring up bright beneath his palms as the seizure fought the thing trying to still it.

Landon’s hand closed and drew back, and a string of dark magic came with it, peeling out of her chest like a root torn from soil, black and fighting the pull the whole way out.

Without a word, Octavian hit the dark construct with his own magic. It cracked in the air.

Octavian began to draw a second one from Guinevere, then he froze. "What on—"

Landon’s wolf surged to the front. His eyes shifted molten gold. The voice that came out was unmistakably an Alpha voice, and unmistakably the kind of wolf that other wolves feel and Alphas bow to. One that is ancient. One that sat at the level of Nicholas’s wolf and Nicholas’s wolf recognized it right away.

"SHIFT."

Landon’s Alpha command hit her like a hand on the back of the head.

White light flashed.

Where Guinevere had been seizing on the stone, a beautiful, glowing wolf lay in her place, displacing Nicholas and Maddox in the process.

The change didn’t fix anything, it only revealed it. Wound around her wolf, cinched across her ribs and neck, were black constructs shaped like snakes, coiling tighter, suffocating her.

The wolf was lying on her side, whimpering.

Maddox was back in a blur, holding the wolf’s head in his lap, petting her to calm her down.

"Around her neck, Solveil," he called in the voice that was calmer than it had any right to be.

Behind him, Nicholas had stiffened the moment she shifted. Then his wolf ripped out of him, forcing a shift.

There was no decision in it. His wolf saw its mate on the ground with blood matting her fur and the wolf took over with the authority of an instinct that predated every kingdom in the courtyard and every king standing in it.

In a flash of white light, a giant black wolf the size of a war horse stood where Nicholas had stood a moment ago. Its shoulder caught Maddox and knocked him back off his knees.