Chapter 218: High collisions
ÉTIENNE
"Sure," Margaux said, and I heard the muffled sound of the phone changing hands, fabric brushing against the receiver, the low murmur of voices in the background of the car.
"Hey, what’s up?" Laurent’s voice came through, casual in the way he always sounded when he had no idea what was coming.
"I want you to fix your face," I said, "and pretend like I am not about to drop the most insane thing on you that you’ve heard all week. Which, given the week we’ve all had, is saying something."
"Okay," Laurent said slowly, clearly bracing himself.
"I just heard from Margaux’s mother that a demon is after her." I kept my voice as level as I could manage, though the words themselves felt absurd leaving my mouth, the kind of sentence that belonged in the old stories my actual parents used to tell me before I even arrived here, not in an actual phone call about my actual wife. "You need to do your very best to protect her. All of you. Whatever it takes, should something happen."
There was a pause on the other end, longer than I expected.
"She knows about the demon too?" Laurent said.
I felt my stomach drop straight through the floor.
"What?" I said. "You know about the demon too?"
"Yeah," Laurent said, and something in his voice had shifted, gone careful in a way that told me he understood exactly how badly he’d just buried the lede. "We found out plenty at Ophelia’s. It’s Alpha Amine. Or something pretending to be him, at least."
"Didn’t you mention he was a spirit?" I said, my grip tightening on the phone hard enough that I felt the plastic creak faintly under my fingers. "You called him an ancestor. You said he was not harmless. But a demon..."
"We were wrong," Laurent said.
"Fuck." The word tore out of me before I could stop it, low and sharp, and I dragged a hand down my face, trying to reconcile everything I thought I knew with everything currently unraveling in real time. "So Margaux already knows."
"Yeah," Laurent said.
"Give the phone to her," I said. "Now."
That didn’t happen.
Instead, I heard the sudden, violent screech of tires, a sound so sharp and immediate that my entire body went rigid, every instinct I possessed screaming at once.
"Hello?" I said. "Hello? Hello?"
Nothing came back but noise, chaotic and distorted, voices overlapping too fast to separate one from another, and then Laurent’s voice cut through it all, tight with something that sounded like real fear.
"Fuck, it’s Séverine—"
Then the line went dead.
"Hello?" I said again, louder this time, my voice cracking against the empty silence on the other end. "Hello? Hello!"
I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at the screen, the call ended notification sitting there with an obscene, casual finality, and I hit redial with hands that were no longer entirely steady.
It rang once.
Went straight to voicemail.
I redialed again, and again, the same result each time, and something in my chest had gone tight and cold in a way I hadn’t felt since the night I watched my own family burn from a distance too far to do anything but witness it.
"What is it?" Vivianne said, her voice sharp with panic now, all pretense of composure gone entirely. "What happened?"
I didn’t answer her right away.
I stood there in that corridor with the phone still pressed against my ear, listening to the flat, endless drone of a call that wouldn’t connect, and I thought about every version of this exact fear I’d already survived once in my life. The waiting. The not knowing. The particular, specific horror of hearing something happen to people you loved and being too far away to do a single thing about it.
I was not going to survive it twice.
"Séverine," I said finally, the name coming out through gritted teeth. "Séverine found them."
Vivianne’s hand flew to her mouth.
"Who is tha— No... Where?" she demanded. "Where are they?"
"I don’t know," I said, and the admission felt like swallowing glass. "They were on the road back from the wellness clinic. That’s the last thing I know for certain."
I too couldn’t just stand there and wait. I was already moving before I finished the sentence, striding down the corridor toward the front of the estate, my mind racing through logistics faster than I could properly organize them. Sentinels. I needed sentinels, and I needed them mobilized within the next several minutes, not the next several hours, because every second that passed now was a second Séverine had unsupervised with my wife somewhere on an unprotected stretch of road between two territories.
"Alpha Dorian!" I shouted, and my voice carried through the halls with an authority I hadn’t fully claimed until this exact moment, something in the tone of it settling into place like it had simply been waiting for the right crisis to summon it forward.
Dorian appeared from his study within seconds, alarm already written across his face before I said a single word, because apparently my voice alone had told him enough.
"What happened?"
"Séverine found Margaux," I said. "On the road. The call cut out. I don’t know what’s happening right now, and I don’t have time to find out. I need an army."
Dorian didn’t waste time asking further questions.
"Sentinels!" he bellowed, and the estate around us shifted instantly into motion, footsteps thundering down corridors, voices calling out instructions I only half registered through the roaring in my own ears.
Vivianne grabbed my arm before I could move past her, her grip surprisingly strong for someone who had been sobbing on the floor of this corridor only minutes earlier.
"I am coming with you," she said.
"No," I said flatly. "You are staying exactly here."
"That is my daughter out there."
"And she is my wife and while I don’t give a shit about you, she probably does," I said, "which means this is no longer a discussion open for negotiation. You will stay here, where it is safe, and where you will not become another variable I have to account for while trying to keep her alive."
Something in her face cracked at that, but she didn’t argue further, and I didn’t have the time or the patience to manage her feelings about it.
I turned back toward the courtyard where sentinels were already assembling, vehicles pulling forward with the kind of speed that spoke to years of drilled readiness, and I felt the mate bond pulling tight in my chest, stretched thin and taut in a way that told me distance had grown between us in a manner I did not like at all.
Not broken.
Not yet at least and that was good even if I could feel it continue to stretch.
I climbed into the lead vehicle before it had fully stopped moving, my body running purely on instinct and fear disguised as focus, and I pulled my phone back out, dialing Margaux’s number one more time even though every rational part of my mind already understood it wouldn’t connect.
It didn’t.
I stared at the screen anyway, willing it to ring, willing her voice to come through one more time telling me she was fine, that this was some misunderstanding, that Laurent’s panic had been about something small and manageable rather than the exact catastrophe every instinct in my body was currently screaming about.
The car lurched forward, gravel crunching beneath tires as we tore down the drive at a speed that would have terrified me under any other circumstance.
I gripped the phone until my knuckles went pale.
Whatever Séverine had planned, whatever the demon wanted, whatever collision of terrible things had converged on that road, I intended to reach the center of it before it finished happening.
I had already lost everything once.
I was not built to survive losing it again.