Chapter 16: The Descent of the Dark Moon
Selene chose midnight, because she had always had a sense of theater.
The sky went wrong first—the moon took on a reddish-black tinge at its edges, the quality of an eclipse but total, as though something were swallowing the light from outside the atmosphere. Below it, the wolves began to change without willing it: first restlessness, then fear, then the deep-brain animal panic that turned thirty thousand sentient people into something that acted on older, crueler instincts.
Ava felt it all.
She was standing in the eastern tower with Lex's hand in hers, and the sensation of forty thousand minds fractioning simultaneously nearly drove her to her knees. He caught her.
"Tell me what you feel," he said. His voice was her anchor.
"Fear," she said. "Confusion. Anger that has nowhere to go. They can't—they don't know it's happening to them. They'll hurt each other."
"Can you stop it?"
She thought of her mother's song. She thought of the clearing, three months and a lifetime ago, when she'd stood before a wolf who was coming apart and opened her mouth without understanding why. She thought of what she'd read in the prophecy.
The Moonheart's power flows not from isolation but from bond.
She turned to Lex. "I need you," she said. Not romantically—practically, urgently, the request of someone who has read the instruction manual. "Whatever this connection is between us—the bond—it amplifies everything. What I am, what I can do. I need it fully open. All the way."
He understood immediately. "And the risk?"
"If it doesn't work, we both feel the backlash."
"Then let's make sure it works." He stepped behind her, arms coming around her, and she felt the bond between them open like a set of shutters thrown back from a window—the full, enormous warmth of it flooding through her in all the ways she'd been carefully not examining for weeks.
She began to sing.
It started at her normal volume and climbed. The Moonheart energy moved through her differently with the bond fully open—not the contained pulse she'd been working with but something tidal, an amplitude that belonged to both of them and neither of them. It went into the air. It found the corrupted energy Selene had poured into the ritual and it pushed back, the way light pushes back dark: not through force but through the simple fact of its presence.
She heard Selene, somewhere below—a shriek of rage and something that sounded, distantly, like grief that had finally remembered what it was.
The sky above the tower began to clear.
