Her hands in mine felt less solid. Like if I squeezed too hard, my fingers might pass right through her.
"Almost there." Her voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere, fractured across a dozen different versions of her words. "I can see him, Elias. I can see?—"
She gasped.
The realm around us exploded into chaos.
Alex's thread didn't just lead forward anymore. It split, branched, multiplied like a cancer through the fabric of reality itself. Each strand showed a different outcome, a different possibility. In one, he was free. In another, he was dead. In a third, he was something…inhuman, transformed by Marcus's magic into a weapon that would destroy everyone we loved.
And Talin tried to see them all.
"No!" I pulled on her hands, trying to drag her back, but she wasn't listening. She pulled one hand free and reached for the threads, trying to determine which one was real, which path would save her cousin.
The moment her fingers brushed the first strand, she screamed.
Not with her voice. With her soul.
Information flooded through her and into me. Every possible version of Alex's fate, every choice that could be made, every consequence rippling out across time and space. It was too much. No mind, mortal or witch, was meant to process this kind of knowledge.
Talin, let go!
But she either couldn't hear me or she ignored me.
Her presence scattered like light through a prism. I could feel her fragmenting, pieces of her consciousness splitting off to follow different threads, different possibilities. She was trying to find the right path by experiencing all of them simultaneously.
She was killing herself.
"TALIN!"
I screamed her name into the void, but it dissolved before it reached her. She was too far gone, too deep in the web. The silver thread connecting us strained, growing thin and brittle.
If it broke, we were both lost.
Wait. There. I could see her, or rather, I could see a dozen versions of her, each one following a different possibility. One found Alex but died saving him. Another failed and watched Marcus kill everyone she loved. The third succeeded, but she lost herself in the process, becoming a creature of pure threadwalking power with no memory of who she was before.
In every version, she was slipping away from me.
The bond between us pulled taut. Pain lanced through my chest. Not physical. Deeper, like my soul was being torn in half. My fangs punched down in response to a threat I couldn't fight.
Come back to me!
Nothing.
Talin, please…
The fragments of her grew dimmer, spreading further apart. Soon they'd be so scattered I wouldn't be able to find them all. Wouldn't be able to put her back together.
No.
I refused to fucking accept that.
A century of control, of carefully maintained order, of never letting myself feel too much or want too hard, it all burned away in an instant. Everyone thought I needed to dominate my environment because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn't. They were wrong. I wasn't afraid of chaos.
But I was afraid of this. Of caring so much about someone that losing them would shatter me beyond repair.
I couldn't lose her.
I grabbed our thread with my free hand. The white-hot strand seared my palm, the magic something that would probably kill a weaker vampire, and my mouth opened, baring my fangs in a gruesome smile. I didn't give a shit about the pain. If this destroyed me, at least I'd die trying.
