Chapter 94 — The Devil in White

Chapter 94: Chapter 94 — The Devil in White

~ Raven ~

The word left her and kept going.

It did not come from her lungs.

It rose from somewhere beneath her ribs, from a place she had never been able to reach, rolled across the clearing and struck them.

They went down.

Three dropped face-first into the leaves. Two more caught themselves on their hands and stayed there, arms locked and shaking. The ones farther back simply froze where they stood, heads bowed, unable to lift them.

Raven stood among them with blood drying at the corner of her mouth and felt no surprise.

Yes.

The certainty came without thought.

This was right.

This was how it should be.

She remained standing.

They did not.

Something deep inside her regarded the difference as natural. As obvious.

They had touched what they had no right to touch.

And now they were where they belonged.

She looked at them and waited for them to understand.

The leader forced his chin up.

The muscles in his neck stood out with the effort. One knee remained buried in the leaves, and when his eyes finally found hers, Raven saw terror in them.

Raw.

Absolute.

The look of a man who had finally understood what stood in front of him.

Then it changed.

She watched the fear burn into humiliation. Into fury. His lip peeled back from his teeth.

And Raven thought, distantly,

Ah.

Then the screaming started.

The screaming came out of all of them at once, and there was nothing human in it.

Black spread beneath their skin in branching lines, crawling up their throats and across their faces as their bodies began coming apart and putting themselves back together wrong. Coats split across widening shoulders. Spines rose beneath skin. One of them was still on his knees when his arms lengthened, the bones dragging out until the joints bent in directions Raven knew they shouldn’t.

They shifted.

What stood up was not what had gone down.

They were bigger than anything that had come out of the trees near the quarry, their black hides stretched over ribs that showed beneath the skin. Dark veins threaded through them, and their limbs were just slightly too long, enough to make every movement look wrong. Their eyes were worse.

They were pitch black.

The smell followed a moment later, thick enough to coat Raven’s throat. Blood came first, then that same sweet stink of turned meat she remembered from the forest, until she could taste it at the back of her tongue.

And just like that, the thing beneath her ribs went quiet.

It wasn’t gone. Her eyes still burned, though the heat behind them had dimmed, like someone had turned a lamp low. But the enormous certainty that had held her upright withdrew into whatever place it had risen from and left Raven standing there in a torn uniform, covered in drying blood that no longer matched the body beneath it.

She looked around.

Ten enormous corrupted wolves.

One of her.

I’m fucked.

The nearest wolf came off its haunches.

Something crawled over the back of Raven’s neck half a second before it moved. Every hair stood on end, and she managed to get one arm up before—

White hair tore across her vision.

Something struck the wolf from the side hard enough to take it completely off course. The creature disappeared through the leaves and hit a tree trunk with an impact Raven felt through the soles of her boots.

Cassian Blade landed between her and the rest of the pack.

He straightened without hurry, rolled one shoulder as though he had merely bumped into something inconvenient, and started walking toward them.

"Who are you?"

The wolves answered with snarls.

Cassian kept walking.

"What do you want?"

One snapped its jaws at him.

He stopped.

For a moment, Cassian simply looked at them, head tipped slightly to one side.

"Right," he said. "You’re shifted."

Raven planted one hand beneath herself and tried to stand.

Cassian didn’t turn around.

"Sit down, Rivers."

"I’m not—"

"I’ll handle the dogs."

Her knees chose that exact moment to give beneath her and dropped her back into the leaves before she could finish the argument.

Raven felt that was spectacularly unfair timing.

She abandoned the attempt, rolled onto one side and crawled toward Brielle instead. Once she reached her, Raven dragged herself between Brielle and the clearing, which achieved approximately nothing considering the size of the things in front of them, but it was still the only place she wanted to be.

Brielle’s eyes were open.

She looked at Raven first, then past her shoulder.

"Is that—"

"Yes."

"He’s Blade’s—"

"Yes."

The air shifted behind her.

After that, Raven only caught pieces.

Cassian’s white hair appeared between the black bodies and disappeared again before her eyes could properly follow him. One wolf twisted violently after something that had already gone past it, found nothing there, and had its throat opened from underneath before its paws came back to the ground.

Black blood swept across the leaves in a long arc and steamed faintly where it landed.

Cassian barely made a sound at all.

A jaw snapped shut where his head had been, but he was already beneath it. His blade came up once, disappeared into the creature’s throat, and Cassian was somewhere else before the body understood it had been cut.

Every turn he made should have thrown him off balance at that speed. None did.

Twice Raven caught thin silver-blue lines flashing beneath the skin of his forearms before they disappeared again, and whenever his weapon moved, the air along its edge bent the light around it.

Another wolf lunged.

Cassian went under it.

The creature tried to turn.

Too late.

Its front legs collapsed beneath it before the rest of the body followed.

Raven barely had time to understand what she had seen before one of them finally caught him.

A claw struck him across the chest and launched him backward. Cassian hit the ground hard enough that Raven’s stomach dropped.

For the first time since he’d entered the clearing, the wolf had him.

It came down over him immediately, jaws opening.

Cassian took the impact.

Something tightened through his body at the last possible second, and instead of folding beneath the creature’s weight, he drove his blade straight up through the underside of its jaw.

The wolf jerked once.

Cassian pushed it sideways, rolled the body off himself and stood.

That was when Raven understood something.

She had watched Dante put both Blackthorn twins on the floor without even looking strained.

Until this moment, she had thought that was what dangerous looked like.

Cassian was quieter.

Somehow, that was worse.

Raven lay in the leaves with one arm across Brielle and watched Cassian Blade dismantle the pack with less noise than the wolves themselves had made.

That was the disturbing part. Cassian didn’t look any different. Same calm face. Same unreadable expression and that irritating lack of expression.

She had simply misunderstood what that calm meant.

There were two wolves left.

Then there was one.

Cassian broke its back leg first.

The creature went down hard, snarling and tearing at the earth, but he was already on it. He drove one knee between its shoulders, forced its chest into the leaves and settled the blade beneath its jaw.

"Shift."

The wolf thrashed beneath him.

It did not shift.

Cassian pressed the blade a little closer.

"Shift, or I open your throat."

Then the clearing turned white at that moment.

Not Raven’s eyes.

Everything.

A hard flare raced through the ground along a line running between the trees. Pressure snapped inside Raven’s ears, the way it did before a storm broke, and for one strange second the air seemed to leave the clearing entirely.

Then it rushed back.

The smell of rot went with it.

Fresh forest air hit Raven’s lungs.

What—

Wardens came through the trees at a dead run.

Dozens of them.

They poured into the clearing from several directions at once, full academy colours flashing between the trunks as they spread around the fallen students.

Raven was still trying to understand that they were real when sigil light flared above Isolde. Another Warden dropped beside Garrick. Three more converged on the Ashbourne students at once.

Now?

The thought arrived slowly through the exhaustion fogging Raven’s head.

You’ve had an hour.

A Warden shouted for a healer.

We’ve been in here an hour.

Another dropped to his knees beside Brielle.

Where the hell have you—

The Headmaster emerged from the trees.

Her sleeves had been burned away to the elbows.

Behind her came Dante, Rowan, Nikolai and what looked like half the instructing staff of Valerius Academy.

Rowan never even looked around.

The moment he saw Seren, he crossed the clearing at a run, dropped beside his sister and slid his hands beneath her with a care that looked strange on him. He said nothing to anyone as the Wardens made room.

Nikolai went first to Isolde, then Mara, moving wherever the Wardens directed him and putting his hands where they told him to.

Dante came straight to Raven.

She had barely started trying to sit up when his arm went around her and hauled her against him. Heat poured off his body, banked so tightly she could feel how much worse it wanted to become.

"Raven."

She heard her name against her hair.

Then she saw the Headmaster walking toward the captive wolf.

Cassian still had it pinned beneath him.

The Headmaster stopped over the creature, and Raven had never seen that expression on the woman’s face before. Not during the assessment court. Not during the Guardian trial. Not even when Raven had turned the school upside down.

Whatever calm usually lived behind the Headmaster’s eyes had been burned away with her sleeves.

This had happened under her watch.

Inside her Ward.

To her students.

"Shift."

The pressure that came off her bent branches around the clearing.

The wolf convulsed beneath Cassian’s knee.

It stayed a wolf.

The Headmaster’s expression did not change.

"Shift."

Another violent shudder ran through the creature, followed by a sound caught somewhere between a growl and a whine.

Nothing else happened.

"Contain it," the Headmaster said, her voice going flat. "Take it to the lower cells. It stays alive."

"It will shift."

Raven barely recognized her own voice.

Most of it was gone, scraped down to something hoarse and ruined, but somehow it carried.

The clearing stopped.

Every head turned toward her.

Dante’s arm tightened immediately.

"Raven, you can’t even—"

She pulled herself out of his hold.

Or tried to.

Her legs were unreliable enough that the first step nearly became a fall, but she caught herself and took another.

"Raven."

She ignored Dante.

A Warden reached toward her, saw her face and apparently reconsidered his career choices, because his hand dropped again.

Raven kept walking.

The glow behind her eyes was still there. Low now. Steady.

And beneath her ribs, the thing that had gone quiet was beginning to turn over again.

"Rivers."

Cassian said it without moving from the wolf.

One warning.

Raven kept coming.

The creature heard her footsteps and turned its head as far as Cassian’s hold allowed. Its black lips pulled away from black teeth.

A growl rolled out of it.

Then something inside Raven rose so quickly she lost her next breath.

You dare.

The wolf snapped at her.

Cassian’s grip tightened.

Raven stopped directly in front of it.

For a moment, she simply looked down.

At the black eyes.

At the dark veins moving beneath its hide.

At the mouth breathing that rotten heat into her face.

Then everything that had happened in this clearing over the last hour came back at once.

Brielle screaming.

Seren’s hand breaking.

Garrick choking beneath a boot.

Her own face ground into the leaves while they stood around and watched.

Raven’s mouth opened.

"Shift."

The wolf went rigid.

Nothing moved for one heartbeat.

Then it fought.

Really fought.

Its claws tore four long furrows through the ground as its entire body bucked beneath Cassian. He had to drop his shoulder and put more of his weight into it just to keep the creature pinned.

It didn’t matter.

Whatever Raven had spoken to, she had not spoken to the thing on the outside.

The wolf’s body folded inward.

Its spine jerked first. Bones dragged back through themselves with sounds Raven felt in her own teeth. The black hide thinned and retreated as the enormous limbs shortened beneath Cassian’s hold.

The creature screamed.

Still it changed.

Fur became skin.

Claws became fingers.

Its jaw collapsed back into a human face until, piece by piece, the wolf came apart and left a man lying face-down in the dirt beneath Cassian’s knee.

Shaking.

Blood running from his mouth.

The dark veins remained beneath his skin, climbing from his chest and disappearing up his throat.

Nobody said anything.

Not the Wardens.

Not the instructors.

Not even the Cardinals.

Above them, the iron observation ring embedded in the tree hummed softly and continued watching.

Raven swayed.

Now she wanted to sit down.

Very badly.

Her wolf disagreed.

Whatever forcing that creature back into human form had done, her wolf had felt it too. Instead of retreating, it surged harder against whatever still held it inside her.

Raven could feel it throwing itself against the remaining restraints, again and again, until the invisible links seemed to vibrate through her bones.

The clearing tilted.

"Raven."

Dante’s voice came from somewhere very far away.

She blinked.

"Rivers."

Cassian was closer.

Somehow, he sounded just as distant.

The trees disappeared first.

Then the bodies.

The Wardens blurred with the Headmaster’s burned sleeves, Cassian kneeling over the captive, Dante moving toward her—all of it thinning beneath a spreading wash of white.

Raven tried to hold onto the clearing.

The white swallowed it anyway.

Then, slowly, the light pulled back.

A girl stood inside a stone circle.

Black hair fell down her back.

Hooded figures surrounded her on every side.