“Alaric cleared me. Relax.”

“He cleared you for light training.”

“Yes, and?”

“This is a combat. Identify the part of that sentence that qualifies as light.”

“The part where I let everyone else do the heavy lifting.” Gavriel spread his hands. “I’m logistics. I’m the compass. I stand in the back and look pretty. Lightest duty on the roster.”

While this was happening, Dex and Fin both stiffened.

The stiffening was subtle, simultaneous, and aimed at the same target, which was Serena, whose emotional output had just spiked through both matebonds with a frequency that the necklace was dampening but could not entirely suppress. Both Alphas received the spike through the fog: anxiety.

Sharp. Directed. Carrying the specific texture of a woman who was worried about a person in this room and whose worry was producing a physical response she was trying to hide.

Both of them looked at Gavriel.

Both of them arrived at the same conclusion through different routes: she was worried about him. The man had just come out of a coma and was volunteering for a mission that had historically produced injuries, near-death experiences, and multiple spike stabbings.

She was worried he would get hurt. She was worried because she cared about him and caring about people who had recently been dying was a reasonable emotional response and the response was producing anxiety and the anxiety was leaking through the necklace’s dampening.

That was the obvious explanation. Both Alphas selected it.

“Gav, are you sure?” Dexmon’s voice carried genuine concern. “Maybe you should sit this one out. We just got you back.”

“Agreed,” Fin said. The agreement was immediate, natural, carrying zero of the adversarial energy that historically defined his interactions with Gavriel Sterling. “We’ll manage without you. Go relax and get some rest.”

Aeron blinked.

The blinking was the blinking of a Master Mage whose Alpha had just expressed genuine, unprompted concern for the Gamma of Drakenfell, a man his Alpha had been, by Aeron’s calculation, barely tolerating for weeks.

Aeron had witnessed the tension between Fin and Gavriel firsthand. He had catalogued the jaw-clenching, the measured distance, the specific temperature of two men who occupied adjacent orbits around the same woman and whose adjacency produced friction that was managed rather than resolved.

Fin had just said “we’ll manage without you” and “go relax and get some rest” in the same breath, and the breath had been warm, and the warm was baffling, and the baffling was producing a recalibration in Aeron’s understanding of inter-pack dynamics that was going to require additional data.

“I’m the only member of this team who walked out of that lake without a scratch last time,” Gavriel pointed out. “Every single one of you got hit. Dex took spikes and was trapped. Fin bled from three places I could count and probably four I couldn’t.” He looked around the room. “I carried two of you out. And I did it while cracking jokes because the jokes were the only thing keeping the morale from hitting the goddamn floor.”

He crossed his arms. “So respectfully, to both Alphas who are very kind right now and I appreciate it: I am going. This task was given to me by possessed Serena and I have been on every single mission.”

Silence.

“He has a point,” Maelor said from the bookshelf, inspecting a vial and not looking up. “He was, regrettably, the least injured among us. Which is either a testament to his skill or a commentary on the rest of ours, and I choose to find neither option acceptable.”

Hyran exhaled through his nose. The exhale was the white flag of a mage who had run out of arguments against a Gamma whose stubbornness was a geological formation and whose formation was immovable.

“Fine. If you collapse, I am leaving you where you fall.”

“You say that every time. You have never once left me where I fell.”

“Hope springs eternal, Sterling.”

Gavriel grinned. The grin was the grin, the Gavriel Sterling original, the one that communicated zero concerns and maximum confidence and hid everything underneath with the practiced ease of a man who had been hiding things his entire life and whose hiding was his finest skill.

“Alright.” Hyran stood. Placed both hands flat on his desk. Looked at every person in the room, one by one, holding each look for exactly one second. “The scroll will point us to the third artifact. We retrieve it. We come home. Nobody dies. Nobody gets stabbed. Nobody touches anything glowing without my explicit verbal authorization.”

He looked at Serena.

“Explicit. Verbal. Authorization.”

“Understood,” Serena said.

“She’s going to touch something,” Gavriel said.

“I know she’s going to touch something,” Hyran replied. “The authorization speech is for the official record so that when she touches something and the something activates a three-century-old defense mechanism, I can point to this exact moment and confirm that I gave clear instructions that were clearly ignored.”

“Your faith in me is inspiring,” Serena said flatly.

“My faith in you is nonexistent. My faith in your curiosity is absolute, and the absolute is the problem.” He rolled the primary map across his desk. “Let’s move.”

Gavriel placed the scroll in the center of the desk.

The parchment unrolled itself. Slowly. Deliberately. The scroll had always done that, the self-unrolling, the ancient magic embedded in the fibers responding to proximity and intent and the specific gravitational pull of the woman it had been assigned to.

Serena’s hand moved.

She didn’t decide to reach for it. The decision was made somewhere upstream of her conscious mind, in the place where the ancestors lived and the ancestors’ intentions operated on a timeline that did not consult Serena’s preferences. Her fingers extended. Her hand crossed the three inches of air between her body and the parchment.

“Here we go,” Hyran murmured.

Her fingertips touched the scroll.

Pink light erupted from the contact point, detonating upward through her hand, her arm, her shoulder, flooding her irises in a single pulse that replaced green with blazing, luminous pink. The color was immediate, total, consuming, her pupils disappearing behind a wall of Fae magic so bright that every person in the room squinted.

Serena was gone.

Her body was still there. Standing. Upright. Functional. But the woman behind the eyes had been replaced by something older, something that predated the body it was wearing, and the something was using Serena’s hands with the casual authority of a landlord who had returned to a property they had never technically sold.