The Alpha's Cursed Mate

What the Light Left Behind

Chapter Six: What the Light Left Behind

Elena came back to herself lying in wet grass with the taste of copper and ozone on her tongue, and the first thing she registered, before sound, before sight, was that Kieran's hand was still wrapped around hers.

"Hey." His voice arrived rough, close, right above her ear. "Hey, stay with me. Open your eyes."

She did. The clearing looked wrong in a way she couldn't immediately name: the same trees, the same broken circle of moonlight, but the air had a scrubbed, after-storm clarity to it, like something enormous had passed through and taken all the pressure with it when it left. The cracks in the earth had sealed themselves shut, no trace of gold, no trace of the threading light, as if the ground had simply swallowed the evidence of what it had done.

Marcus was gone.

"Where?" she started.

"I don't know." Kieran helped her sit up, one arm braced solid behind her shoulders, and she noticed for the first time that his other hand hadn't left hers, not once, fingers laced through fingers like he'd decided somewhere in the white-out of the light that letting go wasn't a risk either of them could afford. "The wolf lost him in it too. One second he was there bleeding smoke, the next the whole clearing went white, and when it cleared, he wasn't."

"Is he dead?"

"No." Kieran's jaw tightened. "Whatever that thing is, it doesn't kill what it's still using. It just... decided it wasn't finished with him yet. Or it wasn't finished with you, and pulled him out of the way to make room."

Elena flexed her fingers inside his, testing something she didn't have words for yet. Where the light had touched them, her skin didn't hurt, exactly, but it hummed, low and constant, a struck tuning fork somewhere under the bone. "Make room for what?"

Kieran didn't answer right away. When she looked at him, really looked, she found him watching their joined hands with an expression she hadn't seen on him before, not the careful patience he'd worn all night, not the fear from the clearing. Something closer to disbelief.

"Kieran."

"Seven years," he said quietly, "I've been looking for a way to break a bargain that isn't supposed to break. I have read every account, every half-burned journal, every s********e dying hedge-witch was willing to trade for a favor. And in every single one of them, the old bargains only ever take. That's the rule. That's the only rule anyone's ever found unbreakable." His thumb moved again over her knuckles, absent, involuntary. "Nothing has ever given something back."

"And now?"

"Now I'm holding a hand that isn't cursed anymore," he said, "and I don't know what that means for either of us, and it's terrifying, and I don't want to let go long enough to find out if it was real."

The words sat between them, too honest for the hour, too honest for a night that had already asked so much of her. Somewhere beyond the tree line, something moved not Marcus, not the wolf, something slower, more deliberate, the sound of undergrowth parting for footsteps that weren't in any hurry at all.

Kieran was on his feet in an instant, pulling her up with him, positioning himself half a step in front of her without letting go of her hand, the same instinct that had kept him between her and every danger since the moment he'd stepped out of the dark and called her by a name she hadn't used in years.

"Someone's coming," he said.

"Marcus?"

"No." His eyes had gone sharp, tracking the tree line, and something under his skin was moving too, restless, ready. "Marcus doesn't walk like that. Nobody I know walks like that."

The footsteps stopped just short of the clearing's edge, hidden in shadow, and a voice came out of the dark that made every hair on Elena's arms rise before she understood why.

"Hello, little sister," it said, warm and familiar and entirely wrong, in a voice that was not Marcus's and was not the golden light and belonged, Elena realized with a cold drop in her stomach, to someone she had buried seven years ago.