REBORN ALPHA

One Soul Left

The Moon Stone didn't just hum anymore. It sang.

The sound filled the vault until the walls shivered. Dust rained from the ceiling. Sable drifted toward me, bare feet a hand's width above the floor, silver light pouring out of her eyes and mouth.

"One soul," the Stone said through her. "The ritual demands one."

Kael, said the voice in my head, and it was no longer two voices but one, with Rowan's gentleness and my fury braided together. It wants us. The merged soul is the price.

Then it can't have her.

No. A pause, almost a laugh. It can't.

"Kael, don't!" Seraphine stumbled down the last steps, clutching her ruined arm. "If the Stone takes a fused soul, there is no coming back. Not a second life. Not a third. You'll simply stop."

"You told me there was no way to end this without a death," I said. "Pick one."

"I picked you!" Her voice cracked. "I always picked you! That's the whole stupid tragedy!"

Behind her, Draven had crawled to his knees. Blood ran from his mouth, but his eyes were fixed on the iron crown lying a few feet away, and on the glowing girl above it.

"Don't listen to her," he rasped. "Let the Stone finish. It takes your soul, I take the crown, and everyone gets what they deserve."

I didn't look at him. I looked at Sable.

She reached out one glowing hand and pressed it flat against my chest.

It didn't hurt. That was the terrible part. It felt like being held.

Light peeled out of me in long silver threads, drawn from my ribs into her palm. My knees weakened. The vault tilted. I felt Kael's memories and Rowan's memories begin to loosen from each other, like two coats of paint being scraped from the same wall.

It's pulling us apart, I said, panicked. It's taking you first.

It's taking both. Rowan's voice thinned, flickering. Kael, I can't hold the...

Then a different voice cut through the singing.

"Kael."

Small. Ragged. Impossibly human.

Sable's eyes had changed. Still silver, but for one heartbeat I saw her inside them, fighting to the surface like a drowning swimmer.

"It's... in my chest," she gasped. "The Stone. I can feel where it's tied to me. I can hold it."

"Sable, stop. You'll die."

"I'm already dying." She smiled through tears. "Listen to me. If the Stone takes a soul, it has to be a willing one. That's what the old woman said, isn't it? So I'm giving it mine."

No, said Rowan and I at once.

"I started this," she said. "I'm the one who found the book. I'm the one who pulled you out of death. Let me be the one who ends it."

"I won't let you."

"You don't get to let me, Alpha." Her hand pressed harder against my chest. "Twins don't ask permission."

The threads of light turned in her grasp, away from me, back toward her own heart. I felt it as a physical loss, like a limb being reattached to someone else's body.

Draven shrieked. "No! No, that isn't how it works! The bond is mine!"

He lunged.

Not at me. Not at Sable. At the crown.

His fingers closed around the black iron, and he slammed it onto his own head, shouting words in a language older than any pack. The Stone flared.

For one heartbeat, the entire vault went white.

When my vision cleared, the ceiling was gone.

Not collapsed. Gone. Where stone had been, there was open sky, and in that sky, enormous and swollen and impossibly red, hung the full moon, three nights early, at noon.

"What did you do?" Seraphine whispered.

Draven rose slowly, crowned and crackling with silver light, and laughed.

"I called it down."

His eyes glowed. His shadow stretched across the floor in a shape that was not entirely human.

"The Stone doesn't need a willing Luna," he said. "It only needs a body that can survive the bond. And I will survive."

Sable screamed.

The light in her chest tore free of her, all at once, pouring upward into the red moon, and she fell like a cut string. I caught her before she hit the floor. She was cold. So cold.

"Sable," I said. "Sable!"

Her eyes were closed. The silver veins had stopped glowing.

Kael, Rowan whispered, small and distant, already fading. Her heartbeat...

I pressed my ear to her chest.

Nothing.

Above us, the crowned thing that used to be my brother spread his arms to the moon, and from every hill and valley outside the vault, thousands of wolves began to howl.