Chapter 548 Green Gamma’s Got Some Gifts

Gavriel tried to push himself up anyway.

Pure instinct. Pure panic. His brain had already left the library and was back in the lake, back in the dark, back with the tentacles and the teeth and the woman whose terror was still echoing through a matebond that stretched across whatever distance the cuff had thrown him. His arm buckled beneath him on the first attempt, elbow cracking against stone, and he dropped with a ragged gasp that sprayed red across the rune.

His body was done. His body could go fuck itself.

A portal rippled open beside them, the air splitting with the clean, bright frequency of Hyran’s magic, and four people stepped through with the coordinated urgency of a team that had done this before and hated every repetition.

Hyran. Maelor. Alaric. Aeron.

Alaric didn’t waste a second on assessment from a distance. He dropped to his knees beside Gavriel, grabbed the zipper of his thermal-weave training suit, and yanked it down to his waist. The clinical composure that Dr. Alaric Kestrel wore like armor cracked the moment he saw what was underneath.

Blood pooling too fast, spreading across Gavriel’s chest in a slick that reflected the chamber’s enchanted starlight. Bruising blooming in warped, unnatural shapes that mapped the tentacles’ grip like a receipt of violence. Several jagged spike-fragments lodged deep in the muscle near his ribs, black and barbed and pulsing faintly with the same dark magic that had been in Serena’s leg, each one embedded at an angle designed to shred more on extraction than on entry.

“Gods,” Maelor muttered, the word leaving him before he could catch it.

Alaric was already wrapping his hand in a strip of cloth. He braced one palm over Gavriel’s shoulder, pinning him flat, and gripped the first spike between wrapped fingers with the detached efficiency of a Master Mage who had pulled worse things out of worse places and didn’t give a flying fuck about bedside manner.

“Hold him,” Alaric ordered.

Tiberon locked down Gavriel’s right side. Hyran took the left. Two men built for combat holding a third man down on a stone floor, which was never the start of a story that ended with everyone smiling.

Alaric pulled without ceremony.

The scream that tore from Gavriel’s throat was the kind that didn’t belong to rank or training or reputation. It was the sound that came from beneath all of that, from the animal underneath the soldier, the raw nerve beneath the jokes, the place where pain stopped being a concept and became the only thing in the universe.

No seasoned warrior made that sound unless something was viciously, specifically, deliberately designed to hurt coming out worse than it went in.

The sound cracked straight through Finnick’s spine.

He remembered exactly how fucking painful those spikes were and the knowledge made the sound worse instead of better because empathy without the ability to help was just torture wearing a different face.

Gavriel’s breathing hitched as Alaric pulled a second spike free, the barbed edge dragging muscle with it. Blood followed in a surge that Alaric caught with gauze he’d already positioned, because Alaric had done this enough times to predict the bleed pattern before the extraction was complete.

“In… danger,” Gavriel rasped, the words coming out in fragments between breaths that weren’t deep enough to qualify. “I need… to get back to her.”

He tried to sit up.

Alaric shoved him down with a palm to the chest, directly over the wound, with the compassionate brutality of a doctor who cared deeply about his patient’s survival and did not care at all about his patient’s feelings on the matter. “Stop moving, Sterling. You’re bleeding out.”

“She’s still—”

“I heard you. You’re still bleeding. Both things are true. One of them I can fix in the next ninety seconds if you stop MOVING.”

Hyran pressed both palms over Gavriel’s chest, and gold magic spilled from his hands in a steady, concentrated pour. Maelor knelt beside him and pushed green magic in simultaneously, the two frequencies layering over each other and into the wound with the practiced synchronization of two men who had done this exact procedure on Finnick and Dexmon and never needed words to coordinate because the work was the conversation.

Alaric wrapped the wounds with quick, movements beneath the magic, his healer’s hands working independently of the mages’ energy, threading gauze between pulses of gold and green with the timing of a man whose muscle memory had been built on worse nights than this one.

Nobody spoke for several seconds.

But Maelor’s eyes moved to Hyran’s. Hyran’s moved to Aeron’s. Aeron’s moved back to Maelor’s. A loaded glance. The kind of glance that carried a full conversation in a quarter-second and excluded everyone who wasn’t fluent in the language of mages discovering something that rearranged their understanding of reality.

Because as they worked, they felt it.

Gavriel’s magical signature was screaming. They had felt it earlier, the same underlying frequency that lived in Dexmon’s signature, the one that appeared overnight for Dexmon and magically for Gavriel when he was still in a coma.

But Gavriel had something else underneath it.

Something they had been sensing for a few days but were unable to identify. It wasn’t strong enough to match any classification and until now, it had been quiet. A whisper behind a wall. A note they could hear but couldn’t place.

But as of this very moment, it was so fucking loud it was deafening.

The green magic pouring off Gavriel’s body was so overpowering that it drowned out everything else in the chamber, flooding the room with a frequency that made Hyran’s gold feel thin and made Maelor’s green, the green of a half-Fae Master Mage who had been practicing for decades, feel like a candle next to a goddamn forest fire.

Maelor’s mismatched eyes widened by a fraction. The fraction spoke volumes. This was the man who had identified Serena’s Fae magic before anyone else, who had mapped her bloodline, who had built her cloak and monitored her tether and jumpstarted her pink reserves like a mechanic with a project car.

Maelor Vantheos did not get surprised by magical signatures. Maelor Vantheos categorized magical signatures the way other people categorized weather: automatically, constantly, and with the mild boredom of an expert in familiar territory.

He was surprised now.