The scroll moved at Alpha speed.

Her hands blurred. The parchment raced through her fingers, unrolling and re-rolling in a continuous stream, runes and text cycling past her eyes at a velocity that would have been unreadable to any human brain that was still human. Her white hair lifted. The pink glow intensified, pulsing with each line of text her possessed eyes consumed, the light throwing pink shadows across the walls of Hyran’s study.

“Possessed Serena,” Gavriel announced to the room. “For anyone keeping score.”

Nobody was keeping score. Everyone was keeping distance.

Dex’s jaw locked. His hands curled into fists at his sides, every instinct screaming to grab her, pull her away from the scroll, break the contact, end the possession. He didn’t move.

He had learned, across multiple unexpected adventures, that grabbing Possessed Serena produced one of two outcomes: she looked at you with an expression that suggested she was considering setting you on fire, or she ignored you completely, and both outcomes were equally effective at making an Alpha feel irrelevant.

Fin was identical. Rigid. Coiled. His eyes gold at the edges, Xeon pressing, the wolf surfacing with the focused intensity of a predator watching his mate be borrowed by ancient spirits and whose watching was the only action available because the spirits had seniority and the seniority was non-negotiable.

Serena reached the end of the scroll. Her hands stopped. Her head lifted. Her pink eyes focused on a point in the air that contained nothing visible to anyone else in the room.

She spoke. One phrase.

Maelor’s eyes flashed and his lips twitched, visibly pleased.

Aeron shot him a sideways glance. “Care to translate that?”

“No,” Maelor replied.

The air split.

A portal ripped open in the center of Hyran’s study with the surgical violence of a wound appearing in reality.

Pink light blazed from the edges. Heat rolled through the opening, dry and mineral, carrying the scent of old stone and older magic.

Serena ran through it.

No warning. No hesitation. No glance at the six people in the room who were about to have their evening ruined. Her body launched into the portal at Alpha speed, pink light streaming behind her, her white hair whipping through the threshold, and she was gone.

The portal held. Humming. Blazing pink. Waiting for the rest of them like a door that had been left open by a woman who expected them to follow and whose expectation was correct and whose correctness was infuriating.

Dex moved first. He always moved first. Instinct compressed into a single stride, his body punching through the portal with the specific energy of a man whose mate had just been hijacked by her ancestors and teleported to an unknown location and whose response to the teleportation was pursuit at maximum velocity.

Fin was half a second behind. Jaw locked. Eyes gold. The controlled fury of an Alpha following a possessed mate through a portal because the alternative was standing in a study and the standing was unacceptable.

“Third time’s the charm,” Gavriel said, running behind both Alphas.

The portal was humming and the humming was getting louder, which historically meant the window was closing.

Maelor straightened his robes. His satchel was already on his shoulder. His expression was the expression of a man walking into conditions that would be beneath his professional standards and whose standards were going to be violated regardless and whose violation was going to produce complaints that he would distribute evenly across the group for the duration of the mission.

“I want it on the record,” he said, stepping toward the portal, “that I have prepared countermeasure arrays for seven distinct threat categories, and Possessed Serena has just rendered all seven irrelevant by sprinting into a portal before I could assess the destination, the climate, the magical signature, the threat profile, or whether my robes are appropriate for the terrain.”

He stepped through. The portal swallowed him with a flash of pink.

“His robes are never appropriate for the terrain,” Aeron muttered.

He was already moving. The Master Mage of Shadowclaw crossed the threshold with the controlled excitement of a man who had been trained for war and was being given war, and the giving was occurring through a portal made of Fae magic opened by a possessed princess, and the specificity of that delivery system was something he had stopped questioning two Serena incidents ago.

Hyran stood alone in his study.

Papers were scattered. The scroll’s residual magic was sparking across his desk in fading pink embers.

Snow from the last portal had been replaced by dust from this one, a fine layer of ancient mineral coating his books, his instruments, his journal. His tea was cold. His study was compromised.

His protégé was possessed and ran through an unknown portal without sparing him a glance.

“Typical,” he said to the empty room.

He stepped through.

The portal sealed behind him with the crisp finality of a door closing on a room that now contained zero people, scattered papers, cold tea, and the fading pink light of magic that had been here and gone, just like the woman it had borrowed.

✦✦✦

The portal snapped shut behind them like a slammed door.

Seven people stood on the edge of a volcanic cliff.

The landscape was wrong. Fundamentally, geologically, aesthetically wrong. Across the distant horizon rose a volcano crowned in firelight, its peak glowing amber against a sky that was too dark for the hour it appeared to be. Ice-capped mountains flanked it on both sides, snow and fire coexisting in the same frame, sharing a border that geology said was impossible and this continent said was Tuesday.

Hyran stepped to the ledge. Looked down.

Steam. Thick, churning, white. A boiling void that swallowed depth and distance and any possibility of visual confirmation of what was down there. He could not see the bottom. He could not gauge the distance.

He could not calculate a portal endpoint, because portals required a destination and the destination was hidden behind a column of geological steam that extended from whatever was below to somewhere above and the somewhere was unhelpful.

He stepped back.

“I can’t see the bottom. No portal,” he said. His voice carried the clinical frustration of a mage whose primary tool had been defeated by weather.

Maelor peered over the edge. His robes caught the updraft of hot air and billowed dramatically, which was the only part of this experience he appeared to enjoy.

“The steam is magma-heated. The base of this cliff is volcanic. Whatever is down there is surrounded by active thermal vents, which means the temperature at the bottom is significantly higher than up here, which means my robes are going to be catastrophically inappropriate for the climate, which I predicted and was ignored.”