My skin cracked faster, splitting with silver threads as sharp agony tore through my bones. I screamed as my spine snapped in places, bone becoming ice—splintering into pieces.
This was so much worse than the mountain.
So, so much worse.
Blood sprayed from my mouth. I fell forward, crashing onto the glacier as I fumbled with the frequency collar, trying to turn it on. My fingers no longer fully existed. Translucent and barely there, vanishing into the night.
Hurry.
Hurry.
I couldn’t see.
My eyes fractured like shattered glass—
I found the button.
I pressed it.
Frequencytorethrough me like a hundred thousand blades of pain.
The ice screeched as white-hot, soul-deep agony detonatedthrough every nerve and cell and ligament. I’d never felt such pain. Such absolute, life-stoppingpain.
My skin split open, glowing silver and bright. The pieces that made me human all broke—every bone, every memory, every laugh and tear and emotion.
The immortal power surged free, hurling my breaking body into the sky. A maelstrom of ice held me aloft like a sacrifice as it tore away my skin, my tendons, my sanity.
I screamed as it rewrote me.
I howled as it obliterated me.
Frost detonated outward in catastrophic waves. The ice fields cracked below, waking up the ancient glacier and stealing its frigid power.
Power built and built. My entire body hovered on the edge of bursting. The sky lit up with silver auroras, arrowing toward me like lightning bolts.
“ROOK!”
My labouring heart hitched.
That voice. Thatman.
Blinking through broken vision, I searched for him. Even if it was an impossible hallucination, I wanted to see him...one last time.
“Where you go, I go, remember?!”
No...it couldn’t be.
A sob crawled up my throat as our eyes connected.
Lucien stood on the glacier far below, his shirt whipping around his body. Whisper stood beside him like a dark shadow, allowing his master to lean heavily against him.
“Don’t do this, Rook!” His voice was snatched by the winter storm. “We can fix this. Come here and let me fix this.Please.”
How?
How was he here? How was he still alive? How had I not felt him coming for me?
I searched inside my heart for the bond, but...it was still broken. I couldn’t talk to him, feel him, be with him.
