Page 226 of Season Warriors & Wolves

Chapter forty-nine

White Queen to H6

Visha

It was strange. The struggle.

I’d twisted his memories, his mind, his perception of time and sense altogether. Yet he fought with such persistence. Snow was wrong. Anger was not the biggest driving force. Jealousy was. He had wanted what he’d been denied to the point of destruction. So much so that he’d convinced himself that what he felt for Aurora was love. The insane obsession he’d developed for her when Esmeray had introduced them was sickening, but I’d soon found out that her obsession for him had been worse.

It took time, patience and an insane amount of magic to pull apart a soul from its living host. But to mend it together? Even more—more that I wasn’t sure I had. But like Snow, my own limits were being tested.

While I occupied his mind with haunting memories, letting his mind replay them till it bled dry, his soul was mending to his body one stitch at a time, each one threaded by my hand. Every single emotion. Every single feeling he’d had through life. Every single memory. There was so much. He’d lived for far too long. Felt things far too intensely. Even more so after he’d met Aurora.

He broke faster when it was her memories I planted back inside his empty mind. It was him lowering Melanthe’s defences from the inside, opening the gates little by little, wanting more of her—more of that feeling he’d given her.

Elation of the highest form.

Every moment they’d spent together was an epiphany of sorts. She had been a drug to him. The effects had festered violently, just like the rush of the hit.

The air was stale from dark magic, unmoving, yet a chilling breeze blew past my neck, and I stiffened.

Something felt wrong.

It was only for a fraction of a moment that my consciousness slipped between the walls of my mind and reality to feel Snow’s power spiral when Vas’s green form let out a deep growl. “Should have kept all eyes on me, little witch.”

His hand slipped through my protection veil before it rose entirely to shield me, claws not even an inch away from slicing my throat when something crashed against him.

My hand reached to my neck and I breathed out a sigh when no blood stained my palm. Blessed death.

A wolf figure made entirely of frost pinned Vas down. Tearing at his throat.

“I had him. I…I had him.” There was so little left. Only a little longer.

“Leave him,” Thora shouted, pulling me back. “Snow needs you. Something is wrong. Why can I feel her, Visha? Her power keeps commanding me. It is driving me insane, I can’t even focus to draw enough magic.”

“We’ve freed the seal. Now it is about to open entirely. Sooner than I had expected.”

Thora’s mouth parted open with horror. “No, no, no, Visha. No!”

“Leave,” Nilsa said, her fists burning. “The both of you, leave him and help her. I’ve got an old debt to pay.”

The ice wolf crushed to bits and Vas rose to his feet again, breathing fast and angry. “Down memory lane, aren’t we, miss Veranesi?”

Nilsa’s eyes burned too. “Don’t you look awful, old friend.”

Thora let an arrow loose, hitting something behind me. “Help. Snow!” she bellowed, breathing hard, struggling to figure which beast closing in on us to aim for first.

Raising a protection veil around me, I sat on the ground, drawing around me a binding halo with my blood and sinking my hands inside the snow to feel the ground below.

“This has to work,” I murmured, my hands shaking. “It has to work.”

Penelope, I called, my own voice echoing down the bounds of my mind. It is time we call to Numen, Snow’s seal is opening. Heed this call when you find my mother.

First, before I shut all the gates to Ustrina. Before I closed every stream of Snow’s magic intercepting the in-between to Caligo and broke the connection entirely, I made the call to another gate—a call that I’d never made before.

To a realm that was no heaven.

To our realm.