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Finally.
Months. It had been months since he felt this welcome burn, the heat flowing between him and the earth with such gut wrenching ease.
But it had also been two fucking months since he truly felt her.
“Where is she?” Brand growled.
“Weeping shite, lad.” Magnus was crouched low, ready, his features stuck somewhere between wary and hopeful. “Please, for the love of everything, tell me you mean the witchling and not something else we have to deal with.”
“Who else would I mean?” he rumbled, trembling with impatience.
“Aye, alright.” Mag’s breaths were sawing as surely as his own. “And just to be especially clear—you want her why?”
There went all of Brand’s slim tolerance. “Because Luna is mine, and I am hers, but she is not here beside me. Which means something isn’t right. So, where the fuck is she?”
Mag practically melted into the floor. “Ach. Thank fuck for that.”
His parents grinned at him and Fionerys ran over, giving his leg a squeeze. “I am so happy to see you returned to us, my precious boy.”
“Do not call me that.” One of Brand’s eyes twitched. “Ever again.”
Alwyn recoiled, dark brows pinching together, but Brand didn’t care. It was too close to the endearments Okthana had used to wheedle her way into him. Even in his rage, he couldn’t stand the sound of it falling from his own mother’s lips.
“Oh. That’s…” Fionerys blinked at him, the deep blue of her midnight curls starker against her light brown skin as the frost around her picked up. “Whatever you need, Brand.”
He didn’t have it in him to feel guilty for the hurt beneath her tone as she backed away into Alwyn’s hold. Not any more than he already did, anyway.
“For the last time—”
A hammering blow sounded on the door, bowing the panel despite its enchantments. “Let me in!”
Magnus muttered beneath his breath all the way across the room and swung it wide, revealing a disheveled, sweating Fern with mace in hand, her other arm propping her up against the wall. She looked like absolute shite, something off in her gait—more proof than ever that something was wrong.
Fern took one look at him and cackled as she stumbled in. “Yes, I knew it! Fucking finally, twig dick. Just the monster we need. Let’s go. We’re almost out of time. I can feel it.”
Seeing her on her feet with the fullness of his memories was strange. He hadn’t known her before now, and this interaction felt as if he was finding out for the first time that her healing was a success, an odd mix of joy and relief amidst the self-reproach.
Fern grabbed a handful of his trousers at the knee and pulled, but she needn’t have bothered—he was all too willing to follow, knowing the Fae’s loyalty to Lunara was surpassed only by his own.
“Explain.”
He and Fern would have a reckoning, someday. Brand owed her as many apologies as he did the others, but now was not the time.
“Tell me how much you remember, so I know how much to cover without wasting time.”
“Everything,” he rasped, “up until we were blasted apart on the practice fields.”
Brand still felt it in his chest, a sundering and rebuilding of his most basic parts. Luna had been stunning and catastrophic at once. The most incredible creature he ever laid eyes on.
“Perfect.” Fern slipped and skidded down a couple of the winding steps but didn’t miss a beat. “Your troll fucker of a baby brother stole her about a quarter hour after that.”
“What did you just say?”
“It’s not what you think, Brand,” his mother called down the stairs.
Magnus huffed, right on his heels. “It’s definitely what you think.”
“Magnus,” his father snapped. “We talked about this.”
