CHAPTER 010_THE VALE OF SORROWS
I knocked a water jug off the table and it shattered before I could catch it.
"Still adjusting," Dante said from the doorway.
"Don't." I crouched down and picked up the pieces. My hands were too steady. My grip is too hard. I'd already split the wooden chair handle this morning without meaning to and cracked the stone basin trying to wash my face. Everything in my body felt borrowed and too big.
Dante meanwhile had knocked himself into three walls since sunrise trying to figure out why he kept sensing everyone's pain before they said anything.
"How is it," I asked without looking up.
"Terrible," he said. "Diego stubbed his toe an hour ago and I almost cried."
I looked up. He looked genuinely offended by this.
"Welcome to having feelings," I said.
He made a face and walked in. "How do you function like this?"
"You get used to it." I stood. "Did you find Enoch?"
"He found us."
---
Enoch looked older. Not old the way people get with time, old the way a candle looks when it's been burning too long. His skin had thinned. His hands shook slightly when he set his bag down.
I noticed and he saw me notice.
"Don't fuss," he said.
"I wasn't going to."
"You were thinking about it." He sat down carefully. "The Blood Moon is accelerating its cycle. Every time a gate opens it takes something from those of us tied to the old magic." He looked between me and Dante. "I'll be fine."
"You don't look fine," Dante said.
"And you have silver eyes and can feel everyone's emotions so let's not discuss appearances." Enoch folded his hands. "The Shadow Court has taken Mia."
The room went cold.
"When," I said.
"Last night while you were dealing with the rift. They moved fast. She's in the Vale of Sorrows." He paused. "They're going to sacrifice her. Her bloodline is the last royal Silverfang line outside of yours. Her death gives Lucas enough energy to reclaim a full physical body."
I stood up. "Then we go now."
"Leah—" Dante started.
"Don't say I should stay here."
"I wasn't going to say that." His voice was steady. "I was going to say we go now."
I looked at him. He looked back and there was nothing to argue with in his face.
"Then let's move," I said.
---
The courtyard was full. Word had spread the way it always does in a pack house, fast and slightly wrong. Half of them thought we were marching to war. The other half thought we already lost.
I stood at the podium above them and felt every single heartbeat. Nervous, angry, confused, afraid. Most of them had never taken orders from anyone but Dante. Half of them didn't know my name two weeks ago.
Cael stood near the back with his arms folded. Watching.
Dante stepped up beside me and leaned close. "You don't have to explain yourself to them."
"I know," I said. "I'm not going to."
I opened my mouth and let the roar come.
It wasn't a sound I planned. It came from somewhere below thought, from the wolf of silver light and everything the Between World had left in me. It rolled through the courtyard and hit the walls and I felt the stone vibrate under my feet.
Every person in that yard went still.
Not afraid still. The other kind. The kind that happens when something old recognizes something older.
The silence lasted three seconds.
Then one warrior in the front shifted and howled back.
Then another. Then a row of them. Then all of them.
I raised my hands and let the light come. It moved differently now, controlled, like water from a tap instead of a burst pipe. The silver spread from my palms and arced across the crowd in thin threads, settling onto shoulders, across chests, into the spaces between armor plates.
Dante watched me and said nothing. But through the bond I felt it, something quiet and warm and completely involuntary. He covered it fast but not fast enough.
I kept my eyes forward.
"We march to the Vale of Sorrows," I said. My voice carried without trying. "We bring Mia home."
---
The sky started changing an hour into the march.
Not the weather. The Blood Moon had no patience for weather. It just appeared at the edge of the horizon in full daylight, red and enormous, washing everything below it in the color of old blood.
Diego fell into step beside me. "That's not a good sign."
"No," I agreed.
"How far is the Vale?"
"Close," Enoch said from behind us. He was managing, just. "Too close."
Dante was ahead, moving through the army in a way that wasn't quite leading and wasn't quite pacing. He kept touching his temple. Another headache from the emotional feedback. I had spent years building walls against it and he was running bare into a crowd of fifty armed wolves without any.
I moved up beside him. "Put your hand on my arm."
He frowned. "Why."
"Because the bond filters it. You'll feel me instead of all of them."
He looked at my arm. Look at me. Then placed his hand there without saying anything else.
The headache lines around his eyes eased by half.
"You could have told me that an hour ago," he said.
"You could have asked."
He made a sound that wasn't quite an argument.
---
The Vale of Sorrows opened up between two dead ridgelines, a wide flat basin where nothing grew and the ground was pale and cracked. In the stories Enoch used to tell about it, it was always full of shadow wolves, ritual fires, the noise of dark ceremony.
It was silent.
No army. No shadows. No smoke.
The warriors behind us slowed without being told to.
In the center of the Vale stood one person.
She held a sword at her side, pointed down, blade dark with something dried and brown. Her hair was white, not grey, not aged, white like it had been drained. She was dressed in silver and her feet were bare on the cracked ground.
I knew her face before my mind caught up with what I was seeing.
My mother.
Alive.
Standing in the Vale of Sorrows with a bloody sword and eyes that held nothing I recognized.
The army had stopped. I had stopped. Everything had stopped except my heartbeat which was going too fast and too loud in my own ears.
Her gaze found mine across the distance between us and didn't change. No relief. No recognition. No warmth.
"You're late, daughter," she said.
Her voice was my mother's voice.
Her eyes were not her eyes.
Dante's hand tightened on my arm.
"Leah," he said quietly. "Her heartbeat."
I already knew. I felt it the second she spoke.
It was the wrong one.