Page 119 of Revenant

My head turns before my brain catches up. Moriah’s shoulders are squared, left hand at her side—and her thumb is working the band of the silver ring she always wears on her pointer finger. Around and around. A nervous tick I’ve watched her do a thousand times. Only now the ring is catching the light differently.

“Moriah?” My voice is hesitant. She knows what I’m about to ask, but she doesn’t turn around. Her shoulders drop a fraction, and it tells me everything I need to know…she’s been preparing for this moment, bracing for it even, and now that it’s here, part of her is relieved.

“Pryce.” Her voice is steady, measured with a type of effortless calmness that comes from years of practice. “I need you to get her out of here.”

“Moriah?” I repeat. She can’t be serious.

Tristan laughs, dragging his hand through his raven black hair, the light catching on the single streak of silver threaded through. “Wait. She doesn’t know?” He takes another step farther into the common room, and I feel when every student lingering finally catches up to the fact that something is very, very wrong. “Little sister.” He clicks his tongue again. “That’s cold.”

“Call them off, Tristan!”

“You know I can’t.”

“Then…I’m sorry.” Moriah pulls the ring off her finger. For half a second, nothing happens. I’m staring at my best friend, the girl who willingly lets me steal her cardigans and throws sour patch kids at my head. And then the air around her moves. Ripples, the way heat does over asphalt in the summer, except it’s wrong and my skin pulls tight against my bones. Her spine lengthens, shoulders arching outward. The sweater she’s wearing splits down the seam as black fur floods up her arms in a wave, and the sound that comes out of her isn’t a scream, it’s a snarl.

Someone in the common room screams.

That’s when everything detonates.

Moriah lands on all fours between me and her brother. A growl tearing out of her chest that I feel in my ribs as she bares all her teeth at Tristan. “There she is,” he says wickedly. Just as the double doors behind him slam open.

I don’t get to see what comes through because Pryce moves. One second I’m rooted to the common room floor, and the next I’m whisked off my feet, clutching the front of his jacket with both hands. Cold air slams into me before I realize we’re outside. My hair whips across my face, and when he finally sets me down on the bridge above the quad, my knees don’t quite agree to hold me. His hand stays at the small of my back long enough to make sure I’m upright, then drops.

“Pryce—what about Moriah?”

“She can handle herself. And she has Sage with her.”

“She’s my friend! I can’t just leave her there!”

“She’s a wolf, tesoro.” His voice is clipped, stripped of his usual softness. “And right now, you are the only thing that matters.”

“Fifteen to twenty,” I hear myself say, numbly. I grip the railing. “She knew. She knew how many were coming. It’s her pack.”

Pryce is scanning the quad, jaw set, one hand braced on the railing beside mine and the other already bloody at the knuckles. I don’t remember him hitting anything.

Below us, shapes move at the treeline—too many of them, low to the ground, eyes catching the light and reflecting gold. Something crashes. The window of the common room blows outward in a spray of glass like falling stars, and a black shape launches through it, tearing across the quad toward the nearest cluster of glowing eyes. The wolf is immediately followed by a silver one—Tristan, I can only assume—with Sage on his tail.

A howl goes up that sounds like a command, and Pryce’s hand closes over mine on the railing.

“Listen to me.” He turns me to face him, and his eyes are doing that thing where the gray goes almost silver around the edges. “They are here for you. Nothing else. You, tesoro. So whatever you are feeling right now about Moriah, you put it in a box, and you throw away the fucking key. Do you understand? Tu sei tutto ciò che conta.”

I can’t answer. My throat has seized up, unable to allow oxygen through, let alone words.

I hear Moriah’s whimper just as her body hits the cobblestones and doesn’t get up.

Pryce’s hand tightens on mine. “Alicent. Do you understand?”

I nod. Once. That’s all I can manage. What I want is to jump off the fucking bridge and help her.

“Good.” He says it the way you say it to someone you’re about to ask to do something terrible. “Because I need you to do exactly what I say.”

Pryce takes my face in both his hands and rests his forehead against mine for the length of one breath—just one, because we don’t have more than that to spare—and then he’s talking again, the clipped rhythm of a contingency plan he’s carried for months. “The grimoire. Do you remember the last section Eldritch marked for you?”

I do, actually. Circulus Custodia, the binding circle Bastian helped me translate while his fingers dragged absent shapes on my hip. Five points. Five anchors. One witch pulling all their power together like a spider in the middle of a web to create a dome.

“Yeah,” I manage. “I remember it, but Pryce, I’ve never actually—”

“You nearly set the archives on fire.”