The trucks broke through the tree line just as the blood moon began its slow fade back toward ordinary silver, headlights sweeping wild across the ridge before finding her standing there, still as carved stone, Magnus seated calmly on the fallen log behind her like a man who had known exactly how this moment would look before it happened.
Damian was out of the lead truck before it had fully stopped, boots hitting the dirt hard, and for one long second neither of them moved, the distance between them suddenly feeling far greater than the twenty feet of open ground actually separating them.
"Elena." Her name came out of him rough, stripped of every careful wall he usually kept around it. "You're alive. You're safe. I thought, when Rhea said you were gone, I thought—"
"You thought what," E
