He was buying her time. Burning himself up to give her another chance to fire the weapon.
“It’s not enough,” she gasped, pouring more power into the orrery. “Even with everything I have, it’s not enough?—”
And then she felt them.
The bonds.
Not just the mated pairs—though she felt those too, blazing bright against the darkness, every bond a point of light that the void could not swallow. Her own among them—fragile, new, but present. Chosen rather than fated, and alive because of it.
But beyond the mated pairs, she felteveryone.
The pack bonds linking Theo’s wolves. The pride bonds among Leo’s lions. The sleuth loyalty binding Cal’s bears. Ancient dragon kinship between Aero and Delos.
And more.
Friendships. Families. Neighbors who’d known each other for generations. Children who’d grown up playing in each other’s yards. Elders who’d guided the community through decades of change.
Sue Tidewell, standing at the edge of the battle with Georgia Gentry, both of them pouring their accumulated wisdom into the battle. Isandro Holt, freed from his silencing spell, lending his elder magic to the defense.
Beck and Rosemary, their research boat circling the harbor, ready to evacuate anyone who needed it. The fishermen who’d rebuilt after the tsunami. The shopkeepers who’d weathered supernatural crises. The ordinary humans who knew their town was strange and loved it anyway.
Haven Shores wasn’t just the mated pairs.
Haven Shores was everyone who’d chosen to stay. Everyone who’d built lives here, formed bonds here, created futures here through sheer stubborn determination.
The Hollow King fed on destinies that were supposed to happen.
But Haven Shores was full ofchosenpotential. Futures that people had built for themselves, bonds they’d forged through will rather than cosmic decree, love that existed because they’d decided it would.
The entity couldn’t consume what it had never owned.
Power flooded into Lunaria.
The orrery blazed white-gold.
Not just starlight anymore. Something else. Something more.
She channeled the energy of every bond in Haven Shores—every chosen commitment, every deliberate tie, every stubborn refusal to let go of the people they loved. The mechanism under her hands sang with it, the living flowers burning bright as miniature suns.
The beam that emerged wasn’t light. It wascommunity.It was belonging. It was every choice everyone in Haven Shores had ever made to stay, to fight, to love despite knowing that love always ended.
She poured it into the Hollow King.
The entity screamed.
Not a sound—a pressure, a wrongness, reality itself protesting as an entity that should not exist confronted truths it could not consume. The Hollow King had been feeding on stolen potential, gorging on futures that should have belonged to the Holts, growing fat on the emptiness it created.
Now it faced a tsunami of potential that had never been stolen. Freely given, consciously chosen, offered by people who knew exactly what they were sacrificing and did it anyway.
The entity couldn’t process it. Couldn’t consume it. Couldn’t do anything but starve as the very thing it hungered for turned to poison in its void-mouth.
This is—impossible—The Hollow King’s presence stuttered, flickered.Fated bonds are the only—you cannot feed me what was never mine to take?—
“That’s the point.” Lunaria’s voice shook with the effort of channeling, but her hands stayed steady on the orrery. “You’ve been stealing from people for so long, you forgot what freely given looks like. Let me remind you.”
This was her home. These were her people. And she would stand here until the stars went dark before she let anything take them from her.
The beam intensified. The Hollow King’s form began to unravel.
