She did not tell him.
Actually, she was running a fever, not feeling well at all when she returned to Shadowclaw, and he tucked her into bed.
His bed. The one she’d been sleeping in for four days now. Which was fine. Completely platonic. People slept in other people’s beds all the ti. Soldiers did it. Prisoners did it. Hospital patients did it. This was no different, except for the part where he slled incredible and she kept waking up with him wrapped around her like a koala with attachnt issues.
She also accidentally kissed him goodnight.
There was no version of that sentence that held up to scrutiny. ’Accidentally’ implied a lack of intent. She had looked at his mouth, leaned in, and made contact. That was not an accident. That was a choice her brain made without consulting her.
A minor hiccup. Fixable. She would address it tomorrow
She didn’t know when sleep took her.
When she opened her eyes, she was standing in a stone room she didn’t recognize with no windows. Water dripped from sowhere above, pooling in uneven rivulets across a floor slick with gri and sothing darker.
His skin was a canvas of fresh wounds layered over older ones, so still bleeding, so crusted black at the edges where dark magic had cauterized the flesh wrong. His head hung forward, chin to chest, breathing shallow and uneven.
"Dex!"
Dex lifted his head slowly, not toward her, but downward, toward the puddle of filthy water collecting beneath his boots. His reflection stared back at him, gaunt and bruised, and then his eyes shifted, catching sothing behind his own face in the water.
Her.
"Serena?"
His voice was wrecked. Raw and cracked and stripped of every ounce of confidence. He said her na like he wasn’t sure it was real, like he’d said it a hundred tis already and no one had answered.
She cut her hand open without hesitating. Gold blood hit his body, running towards his wounds in rivulets that moved with purpose, seeping into his body. His skin knit together where the blood touched, bruises fading from black to green to nothing.
He exhaled, sothing between relief and a sob.
Then the room shifted. Figures erged from the dark edges of the cell, hooded, faceless, their hands trailing black smoke. They pressed their palms to his temples, and the smoke poured into him like liquid through a funnel. His body seized, spine arching against the chains, every muscle locked rigid.
He scread.
It wasn’t the sound of pain. It was the sound of sothing being ripped out of him, sothing deep and rooted and fundantal, torn loose by force. His eyes rolled white. The veins in his neck went black. He scread again, and this ti the sound didn’t stop, it just kept going, raw and animal and endless, until Serena couldn’t tell if she was hearing him or feeling him.
Serena woke up panting, drenched in sweat, her heart slamming against her ribs so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
Fin wasn’t in the bed and Onyx wasn’t in his basket, which ant it was still early evening.
She bolted out of bed, threw on her bra under her silk camisole and pulled on a pair of socks from the bag ogas packed for her. She grabbed her cloak and boots and moved.
She tried to make a portal.
Her insides burned the mont the Fae magic answered her call. Not the usual strain of channeling on low reserves, but sothing vicious and wrong. She hunched over in agony, one hand braced against the wall.
The pain... she realized it wasn’t all hers.
So of it was Dexmon. A combination of whatever her body was doing and his, tangled together so tightly she couldn’t separate one from the other.
Her Hidden Fla mark flared molten white hot against her skin. She pressed her palm over it and panted through clenched teeth, waiting for it to pass, knowing it wouldn’t.
Her legs gave out. She slid down the wall, back scraping stone, until she was on the floor with her knees drawn to her chest and her hand still pressed over the mark.
"Serena!" Fin was in the room kneeling in front of her instantly. Onyx was with him, tilting his head.
He pulled her in his arms, and kissed her forehead.
The burning didn’t fade. It deepened, burrowing into muscle and bone, until she couldn’t tell where the mark ended and the rest of her began.
Her vision split in two.
The lavish rug in Fin’s quarters stayed beneath her, but layered on top of it like a painting on glass was the sa room from before.
Sa chains. Sa dripping water and the sll of iron and rot. Dexmon hung from his wrists, fresh wounds overlapping the ones her blood had just healed, as though the hooded figures had started over the mont she’d left. His breathing was shallow and wrong, a wet rattling sound that ant sothing inside him was broken.
She could see both. Feel both. The cold floor under her body and the damp air of the cell against her skin. Two realities stacked on top of each other, and she was pinned between them, unable to close one out.
In the real world, Aeron was leaning over her talking with Fin. Elias, Shadowclaw’s Master Healer was also hovering over her.
She could hear them, barely, like voices underwater, but the vision held her with teeth and wouldn’t let go.
She existed in both places at once, her body on the floor of her room while her mind stood in a torture cell she couldn’t find on any map.
The hooded figure raised a hand. Black lightning arced from its palm and hit Dexmon square in the chest. His body convulsed against the chains, and Serena scread, high-pitched and in agony.
She heard Dexmon’s voice, wrecked and furious and desperate.
"Stop!"
The hooded figure paused. Tilted its head. When it spoke, its voice was layered, two tones at once, one almost amused.
"Oh, now you respond. When it’s her that’s being hurt." It stepped closer to him. "Just in case she needs to hear the ssage again."
The black lightning hit him a second ti. This ti Dexmon felt it fully. He scread, a sound that tore through the vision and landed in Serena’s chest like a physical blow. A high-pitched scream erupted from her at the sa ti, her mark on fire, her back arching in Fin’s arms.
Elias pressed his hand to her forehead and said sothing she couldn’t process.
And then, in the white-hot center of the pain, she felt it.
A thread. Thin and frayed and impossible, running from her straight to him, still intact despite the distance. Possibly done by the black magic designed to torture her and him together.
Regardless of how, it was there, she knew she could channel into him.
She didn’t hesitate.
She shoved fla through the thread with everything she had. In the vision she watched his cuffs begin to glow, the tal softening, turning red at the seams where her fire was eating through it from the inside.
The Dark Fae didn’t notice. Its back was turned, hands raised, gathering another bolt of black lightning between its fingers.
Serena’s mind raced. She rembered ice being the only thing that worked on the High Emperor and on the Dark Fae on the water dragons. But if Dexmon killed it, would it detonate?
Her stomach lurched at the thought. But no. This one wouldn’t detonate inside its own fortress. It couldn’t afford to. She made the call and committed to it.
She found Flareon through the chaos of her own magic, reached for her the way she reached for Velkaris, and pulled.
She was unaware of Elias’s hands on her, unaware of Aeron’s voice cracking beside her, unaware of anything on her side of reality.
She shoved ice into Dexmon through the thread, freezing the chains from the inside while the fire ate them from the outside, and then she pushed every ounce of pink Fae magic she could find behind it.
Her insides burned like she’d swallowed molten glass.
Her Hidden Fla mark split. Half ice, half fire. Fire because she was dying. Ice because she was channeling it.
The two elents warred across her skin, frost crackling over one edge while the other glowed white hot, and Serena held both in place through sheer will and the knowledge that if she let go, he was dead.
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