Chapter 552

ARIA

“For what,” Jordan said, doing it anyway.

+5 Pearis

“I need to go in,” she said. “Manually. Extract the parasite before the activating sequence completes.”

“Go in,” Jordan said. “As in-”

“Surgically,” Ivory said. “Without sedative.”

“Without sedative,” Nina said.

“Sedative kills the host,” Ivory said. “The compound interacts with the death eater’s biochemistry. The sedative neutralizes the host’s immune response which the parasite uses as a suppression barrier – without it, the parasite accelerates. Killian dies faster.” She looked at Killian’s face, at the black eyes and the dark veins and the thing that was using his body. “He’s going to have to experience this.”

The room was very quiet.

I thought about what Ivory had said in the briefing.

“You’ve done this before.” I said.

“Once,” she said. “On myself.”

“On yourself,” I said.

“There was no one available to do it for me,” she said.

The look she gave me then was brief and complete and carried twelve years of doing things alone because alone was what was available.

“Tell me what you need,” I said.

“Hold his head,” she said. “He needs to see something real. If there’s anything of Killian still conscious in there, he needs an anchor. That’s you.”

“Why me,” I said.

“Because the bond is real,” she said. “The wolf can feel you through it even in this state. You’re the clearest signal available.”

I moved to Killian’s head. Knelt down. Put my hands on either side of his face and looked at the black eyes and tried to find whatever was underneath them.

“Killian,” I said. “I need you to be here. Whatever part of you is still here – I need you to hold on.”

The black eyes didn’t change.

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But something moved behind them. Just slightly. Just enough.

Ivory put the knife to his stomach,

What happened next was going to be in my memory for a long time. The sound Killian made, sent shivers down my spine, the skin was burning, scent of burned skin in the air as she made a straight incision,

She reached in.

“Talk to him,” she said to me.

“Killian,” I said. “I know you’re in there. I need you to hold on. You came here. You came here because this was where you were going and you’re not done yet. Hold on.”

The black eyes flickered.

I had seen a great many things in the months I’d been at Shadowmere. I’d been in a border battle. I’d held a moon-shield against two hundred wolves. I’d watched Kael put his hand through a mahogany council table. I’d been in the secondary clinic when Ivory had stitched her own wounds and I’d understood something about what she was capable of because of how she moved through it.

I was not entirely prepared for this.

Killian was screaming. The sound of it had a specific quality that came from someone who’d been stripped of the thing that managed pain – the pitch-black eyes had gone and Killian’s own face was back, which was worse in some ways, to hear the sound coming from a face that you recognized. Kael’s jaw was locked Nina and Jordan held their positions with the specific resolve of people who’d decided the holding was the thing and were doing it.

Ivory’s hands moved.

She found the death eater and brought it out and it was exactly as wrong as the movement under the skin had suggested it would be a pale gray shape, the size of a large caterpillar, moving with the autonomous

–

purpose of something that didn’t have a nervous system but operated as though it did.

Ivory put the dagger through it.

It turned to ash.

Immediately. Completely. The specific finality of something that had existed and then simply didn’t anymore, the ash dispersing before it could settle.

Killian went still on the floor

Killian’s eyes changed.

–

TRA

The black bled out of them in the way darkness bled out of a room when a light was turned on — trut gradually, quickly, the black draining back to wherever it had come from and leaving behind the eyes that were actually his. The dark veins on his neck fader. The wrongness in the quality of his presence dissolved with the same speed as the ash.

He made a sound that was the human version of what had been happening, and it was a bad sound, ami l

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kept my hands on his face because that was what Ivory had told me to do and Ivory had told me to do it

for a reason.

“I have you,” I said. “I have you. You’re back.”

“Ivory,” he said, and his voice was his voice, the wrong layers completely gone. “Is she-”

“I’m operating on you,” Ivory said, from below his sightline. “Don’t move. You’re going to lose significant blood if you move.”

He went very still.

“The parasite is gone,” Ivory said. “You’re going to be fine. I need four minutes to close this.”

“Ivory,” Killian said. “Your throat-”

“My throat is fine,” she said.

“There are marks,” he said.

“I’m aware,” she said.

“I did that,” he said.

“The parasite did that,” she said. “You were not in control of the parasite.”

“I-”

“Killian,” she said, and her voice had the specific quality she used when clinical precision was the kindest thing she could offer. “I need you to stop talking so can close this properly. The artery is adjacent and I need my full attention on the stitching.”

He stopped talking.

She stitched.

I stayed where I was, hands on his face, watching the color come back into him in the specific way that people came back after something had been taken from them. Kael was standing at the edge of the space – he’d stepped back when Ivory had moved in, giving her the room, maintaining the position of someone who was present and ready but understood that the clinic was hers.

—

Nina and Jordan were still holding the arms, though the holding was unnecessary now more a contact thing, the specific communication of people who’d been scared and were expressing the being-scared through their hands staying where they were.

When Ivory was done she sat back on her heels. She did it with the controlled movement of someone managing pain and was not going to show that they were managing it. The throat marks were visible from where I was They were going to bruise.

She looked at Killian.

He looked at her

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“The monitoring missed it,” she said. “I missed it. That’s my error.”

“You were injured,” he said.

“That’s not an excuse,” she said. “It’s context. It doesn’t change the miss.”

“Ivory,” he said.

+5 Pearts

“I’m adding a full parasitic scan to the standard treatment protocol,” she said. “Effective immediately. That scan exists, I’ve done it before, I simply didn’t run it here because I was – managing too many things at once and I made a judgment call about prioritization and the judgment call was wrong.” She held his gaze. “I’m sorry.”

Killian looked at her with the expression of someone who’d just had something extracted from his stomach without sedative and was receiving an apology from the person who’d done the extracting and was trying to process the sequence.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For your throat.”

“The parasite is responsible for my throat,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry anyway.”

She looked at him for a moment. At the stitches. At the closed wound that was his now rather than the parasite’s entrance point.

“You held on,” she said. “Whatever part of you was still there, you held on. The black eyes flickered because something was still present.”

“I could hear you,” he said. “Distantly. Like through water. But I could hear what was happening.”

“Good,” she said.

“You said you weren’t going to die,” he said. “When I came in. Before the-” he stopped. “I was already beginning to go and the last thing I heard was you telling me you weren’t going to die because you bad too many things to document.”

Ivory’s expression did the thing it did when she received something that got through the clinical register

“I have extensive documentation pending,” she said. “It was accurate.”

“The runes on Aria’s hands.” he said. “That’s one of them.”

“Among others,” she said.

“Add the death cater scan to the list,” he said.

“Already added,” she said.

She stood. She moved to the cabinet and put the moon-metal knife away and Icked it and pocketed the key. Then she went to the secondary counter and began the post-operative organization that she did after every procedure-putting things back in their places, restoring the order that operations disrupted

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Chapter 552

Kacl was at my elbow.

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I hadn’t heard him move but he was there, and the specific quality of him being there was the warm presence I’d been navigating toward all afternoon in the woods and hadn’t reached.

“The knife,” he said, quietly, to Ivory’s back. “Where did you get the moon-metal knife.”