Chapter 22 - Spring Break and Selfless Sacrifice
– March 21, 2027 – Spring Break**
The valley spends the shortest day of the year preparing for the longest night.
**3:00 p.m. – Calder pack house**
Fifty-three coyotes in various stages of shift fill the clearing.
Some still human, some half-wolf, some fully four-legged.
Calder stands on the porch in full alpha war-form, eight feet tall, silver-black fur rippling.
He looks at me and nods once.
Permission granted.
Tonight the pack answers to the storm queen.
**4:30 p.m. – Ohio Club basement**
Al Capone and thirty of the hardest ghosts in the afterlife are cleaning spectral tommy guns and pouring ghost-gin into flasks.
Frankie Yale hands me a sawed-off made of pure moonlight.
**Frankie:**
"Point and think loud, doll.
It'll sing for you."
Al himself just tips his hat.
**Al:**
"Tonight we finish what we started in '33.
Nobody takes kids on my watch."
**6:07 p.m. – North ridge**
The sun dies behind the mountains.
The Hollow Choir arrives exactly on schedule.
Thirty-three vessels wearing thirty-three stolen faces.
Children. Teenagers. Some I recognize from missing-person posters I used to think were just tragedies.
They walk out of the treeline in perfect silence, barefoot in the snow, smiling with mouths that don't belong to them.
The lead vessel wears the Oregon heir's face.
She opens her arms like she's greeting family.
**Lead Vessel (all voices at once):**
"Celeste.
Give us your face and the rest may live."
I step forward.
Behind me: fifty-three coyotes growling in unison.
Seras's fire turning the snow to steam.
Holly still wounded but awake, copper curls full of blades of grass, grinning like a demon.
Malik's trumpet now glowing with runes.
Vera racking her shotgun with one hand.
And every ghost Hot Springs ever buried standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the living.
I raise my right hand.
The first Vinča symbol still hasn't appeared on my skin, but tonight I don't need it.
Tonight I have something better.
I have people.
**Celeste (voice calm, carrying across the ridge):**
"You want my face?"
I smile, fangs out, bloodstone blazing like a second moon.
**Celeste:**
"Come take it."
The Hollow Choir charges.
The valley answers.
Coyotes in full war-form tear into the front line.
Ghost tommy guns sing in perfect 1920s harmony.
Seras becomes a walking inferno.
Malik's trumpet note cracks reality itself.
Vera's shotgun roars like judgment day.
I'm everywhere: Mirror Step, blood-lightning katana, Vinča symbols flaring across the air faster than my healing can erase them.
I fight like every person I love is standing behind me.
Because they are.
We lose ground.
We take it back.
We lose it again.
Holly takes a hit shielding Malik and goes down for good this time.
Vera screams and empties her shotgun into the thing that did it until it's nothing but ash.
Remy shifts to full dire-coyote (bigger than any natural wolf) and fights at my side, covered in blood and refusing to fall.
Hours bleed into each other.
At 11:47 p.m. only one vessel remains.
It wears a little boy's face now, maybe ten years old, tears dried on stolen cheeks.
**Last Vessel (whisper):**
"You can't save them all."
I'm on my knees, lungs burning, katana planted in the Grass.
**Celeste (hoarse):**
"Watch me."
I raise my hand.
Every ghost, every coyote, every friend still breathing pours their will into me.
I speak the first full Vinča sentence I've ever managed without Dacia's help.
The ridge explodes in crimson light.
When it fades, the last vessel is gone.
Just ash blowing away on solstice wind.
Silence.
Then the longest night finally ends.
Dawn on March 22 breaks cool and clean.
We count the living.
We lost eight coyotes.
Holly didn't make it.
Vera is missing two fingers and refuses to cry.
But the Hollow Choir is gone.
All thirty-three vessels destroyed.Plus the twelve from the day before.
The valley is ours again.
Remy finds me where I collapsed against the cedar tree.
He's human again, half naked in tattered ripped clothes and covered in mud grass and blood, but alive.
He pulls me into his arms.
**Remy (voice broken):**
"We did it."
I bury my face in his neck and finally let myself cry.
**Celeste:**
"We paid for it."
Behind us, Al Capone lights a cigar that will never burn down.
**Al (quiet):**
"Worth it, kid.
Every damn bullet."
The bloodstone pulses once (soft, almost gentle).
**Dacia (whisper):**
*First war won.
Thousands more symbols to go.
But tonight, little queen… rest.*
I close my eyes.
Ten pieces down.
One enemy ended.
And the longest night of my life is finally over.
The sun rises on The last day of Spring Break morning over a valley that's still standing.
We paid the price.
And we're still here to pay it again tomorrow.
Because that's what family does.
The Monastery of Mages and Wizards, Shambhala**
**March 22, 2027 – 03:11 a.m. Himalayan time (thirteen hours after the battle)**
In the great obsidian hall, one of the thirteen eternal candles gutters and dies.
It is the candle that has burned without pause for 2,117 years, the one tied to the Hollow Choir's existence.
The flame does not simply vanish.
It collapses inward, turning black, then explodes into a single coil of smoke that refuses to rise.
The smoke hangs in the air like ink in water, twisting, folding, forming symbols no living mage has ever seen.
Symbols that predate even the First Wizard.
**One** stands motionless on the lotus throne, robes of shifting galaxies frozen for the first time in recorded history.
They inhale once.
The smoke tastes of Spring blood, geothermal steam, 1920s gun-smoke, and the particular copper tang of a fifteteen-year-old girl who just burned an immortal abomination out of existence with nothing but love and borrowed ghosts.
**One (voice barely above silence):**
"The Hollow Choir is no more."
The remaining eleven candles flare brighter, as if in relief.
Rowan Vale steps out of a shadow that wasn't there a heartbeat ago, still smelling of Arkansas pine and battlefield ash.
**Rowan (quiet, almost smiling):**
"She did it.
On one of the darkest nights of the year.
With fifty-three coyotes, thirty gangsters who've been dead for a century, and six teenagers who refused to let each other die."
He places a single object on the obsidian floor:
A shard of black-glass (once part of a Hollow Choir vessel), now cracked and lifeless.
**Rowan:**
"Zero active signatures.
All thirty-three vessels destroyed.
The Choir is extinct."
**One** closes their eyes.
For the first time in three millennia, the First Wizard looks… small.
**One:**
"She is fithteen.
And she just erased something we sealed away before Rome was founded."
Rowan meets the galaxy-eyes without flinching.
**Rowan:**
"She didn't do it alone.
She did it because she wasn't alone."
The smoke-symbols finally dissipate.
The dead candle will never relight.
**One (soft, almost wondering):**
"Then the world may yet survive her."
Rowan turns to leave, pausing only to add:
**Rowan:**
"Tell the Council the storm has a family.
And the family just won its first war."
He steps back into the mirror that isn't there.
In Shambhala, twelve candles burn on.
In Hot Springs, Arkansas, a very tired storm queen sleeps in her coyote's arms while dawn paints the valley gold.
The Hollow Choir is gone.
And somewhere in the silence between worlds, something ancient exhales for the first time in two thousand years.