Claimed by the scarred Alpha

MARGAUX

The last traces of light slipped from my hands before I could even grasp what I had done with them.

The corridor eased into a familiar darkness, the sort that belonged to late afternoon , not the unnatural shadow the apparition had cast. The air warmed, inching back toward something human. I stood frozen, palms outstretched, staring at them as if they were the hands of a stranger.

"She is gone," Laurent said. "Whatever that was, it worked."

"Did you kill her?" Étienne asked.

He was upright, which I checked first; his hand clamped over the place where claws had torn him open. The wound was already knitting itself together, his unnatural healing at work, but the blood blooming through his shirt proved how real and deep the injury had been.

"She is still here," I said.

They both looked at the space in front of me.

Their faces told me they saw nothing at all, that whatever I was witnessing was now once again invisible to them.

Prim’s apparition had changed.

The stretched, unnatural shape was gone, along with the pale electric terror she had become in her first fury. What remained was almost human, the outline of a person instead of a thing that had forgotten it was ever one. She stood in the corridor, gazing down at her hands, turning them over just as I had done moments before.

She raised her eyes to my face.

"You purified me," she said.

Her words carried genuine surprise, not blame, only the bewilderment of someone who had braced for one fate and found herself in another.

I looked at my hands again. "I did not mean to do anything."

"But you did it." She studied me with an expression that had been stripped of the rage that had driven her through the last several minutes, leaving something quieter and more complicated underneath it. "You are the one they were talking about."

"Who was talking about me?"

Before she could answer, a window at the end of the corridor shattered inward.

The temperature dropped back to nothing in less than a second.

Something slipped through the shattered glass, another apparition, electric pale blue and warped in the same way Prim had been before my light touched her. It glided straight to her and merged in a single, seamless motion, their forms folding into one. I watched as the gold my light had left in her was swallowed by the returning blue, warmth draining from her like color from a fading face.

"What is happening?" Étienne said quietly beside me.

"The second part of her came back," I said. "The piece that was still purely the wraith. It came back and merged with whatever I had, I guess, purified."

She lingered, both halves of her fused together, the electric blue blazing over the gold that still shimmered beneath if you looked closely. Her eyes met mine, changed now. Gone was the wild, singular hunger for destruction. What stared back was something deeper, more complex.

Still, I was not sure about her. Was she still going to attack Étienne? My guard was up because of that fear.

Prim’s ghost spoke first.

"You are a whisperer," she said, looking directly at me.

"If I say yes," I said carefully, "will you stop?"

"I will spare him." She looked at Étienne briefly and then back at me. "I understand now that Séverine does not actually love him. What she feels is not love. And the fact that you are here means the goddess is still watching over me." She paused. "I want your help."

"You want a favor?" I said.

She nodded.

"I do not think that is a good idea," Laurent said immediately.

"What is happening?" Étienne said again, directing it at Laurent this time.

"She wants Margaux to make a pact with her," Laurent said. "To save your life, most likely."

"That is not the reason," I said, glancing at him before fixing my gaze back on Prim.

"You really do not want to kill him anymore?" I asked her.

She shook her head. "As I said, I realize now that Séverine does not actually love him. Not in any real sense. I understand the difference, now that I am clearer." She paused. "I realize that still wanting him dead is pointless and does not achieve the goal of why I chose to return."

"I do want to kill Séverine," she said, with a directness that made me take a small step sideways. "That should please you both. You, for obvious reasons. And him, given what she did and tried to do." She looked at me steadily. "But I cannot simply take her. She has marked girls in this estate, bound them to her. Every time I hurt her, she draws from them. Uses their life to recover herself. I cannot destroy her while those marks hold."

"You want me to do what then?" I had to know.

"Break them."

"To break them?" I repeated.

"Yes."

"I do not know how to do that. I do not think I even can do that." I was being completely honest. "I do not fully understand what I just did to you. I have no training in any of this. I have been operating entirely on instinct and panic for the last few days."

"You absorbed my negative spiritual energy with the raw strength of your own," she said. "That is not a skill. That is what you are." She looked at me with something that might have been patience. "You are a precursor of a witch after all. That means you carry something they carry, but without the binding, without the pact, without the familiar or the darkness that comes with those choices. You are what they were before all of that."

I stared at her. "What does that mean exactly?"

"I am not entirely certain," she admitted. "It was given to me as information when I crossed, as part of the rules a spirit has to understand if they intend to come back to the mortal plane with unfinished business. They told me what you were, told me your type could be here, but they did not explain the full meaning of it to me."

"Then we are equally lost," I said. "Because I have no idea what I am. I have been figuring this out in real time, and I have been figuring it out very badly."

A flicker crossed her face, not quite a smile, but close enough to echo one.

"But you want to help me," she said.

I looked at her properly, at the thing she had been turned into against her will, at the woman underneath it who had brought me tea and checked whether I was comfortable and had never done a single thing that deserved any of what Séverine had done to her and her family.

"Yes," I said. "I want to help you."

"Then we have a deal."

I nodded before I could think too hard about what I was agreeing to. That was probably the only way I would ever say yes to something that demanded so much faith in myself.

"We have a deal," I said.