Claimed by the scarred Alpha

PRIM

Ophelia had found something inside herself, some reserve none of us had seen yet, and the spirit light she released didn’t simply glow. It detonated, a shockwave of gold tearing outward from her palms with enough force that I felt it even through the demon’s grip on my throat, felt the wrongness of it against whatever kept him tethered together.

He shrieked.

The sound tore out of both halves of him at once, raw and genuinely pained in a way none of his earlier taunting had carried, and his grip on me shattered along with whatever composure he’d been wearing. The two halves of him lurched back toward each other, unsplitting in a wet, violent rush. His flesh and shadow slamming back together like something forced rather than chosen.

I dropped, gasping, my form barely holding its shape as I hit the floor.

"I am done with this shit," he snarled, whole again now, and with fury radiating off him in waves that made the air itself feel thick. "You have to die, whisperer."

He then charged.

Ophelia stumbled backward, whatever well of options she had been drawing from finally running dry. Her spine struck the counter behind her with a solid thud, leaving her nowhere else to retreat.

Luckily, Arania got there first.

She flew directly into his path, so small that he barely seemed to register her as an obstacle until she was already there. Then she pointed one tiny finger toward the ceiling.

We all looked, even the demon, some instinctive pull forcing his attention upward despite himself.

Gold runes had unfurled across the ceiling tiles in a pattern so intricate my eyes struggled to follow even a single continuous line. Symbols nested within symbols, each one feeding into the next, forming the kind of working that spoke of hours, perhaps even days, of careful preparation rather than something conjured in the middle of a fight.

Except it hadn’t been prepared.

She had been drawing them while fighting him.

The demon recoiled at the sight, his face twisting with unmistakable revulsion.

And that was all I needed to see.

For the first time since this began, the demon was afraid of something.

Which meant, finally, we had the upper hand.

"You fucking bitch," the demon spat, understanding a half second too late exactly what he was looking at.

Chains of solid gold light erupted from the pattern overhead, streaming downward with a fluid, deliberate hunger that reminded me uncomfortably of snakes striking. They coiled around his wrist first, then his forearm, winding higher with terrifying speed. He thrashed against them with everything he had, tearing one loose only for two more to snap into its place.

"You really believed you had me cornered," Arania said, hovering just beyond the reach of his flailing limbs, her voice carrying none of the fear the rest of us wore so openly. "As if I hadn’t been playing your game since the moment you noticed us."

He roared and lunged for her.

The chains jerked him backward in mid-motion, snapping taut as they dragged him off balance. He crashed to his knees hard enough to crack the tile beneath him.

"The thought that you could actually beat me," Arania continued, drifting closer now that the chains had him properly restrained, "is genuinely insane."

More chains climbed his chest, winding around his ribs and throat, tightening with every passing second until even his movements began to look strained.

"If a violent death right now wouldn’t ripple straight back to the girl you’ve bonded yourself to," Arania said, her gaze flicking briefly toward Margaux, who still stood frozen over Étienne, "considering how fresh that connection is, I would have ended you already."

The demon strained against the restraints, the gold light biting deeper into his flesh.

"There are cleaner ways to make certain something like you never walks this plane again." Her expression hardened as another chain locked around his throat. "But this will have to do."

"Will this kill it?" I asked, my voice still ragged, barely holding together.

"No," Arania said. "It will merely trap him. Not nearly enough to destroy something like that, but it will keep him from meddling any further while we go save the girl."

The chains climbed over his mouth.

"This will not take long," he managed, his words muffled beneath the layers of gold already sealing across his face. "How long do you truly believe this spell can hold? I will be back and I will be ready for you Fae and your little bitch girl! Margaux is mine. I won that whisperer fair and square!"

The last chains slid over his eyes.

Then the glow died.

All at once, the gold light collapsed inward, vanishing into the spell as though it had been swallowed whole. Where a demon had knelt only seconds earlier, a stone figure now remained, frozen in the middle of a snarl, his fury carved permanently into unmoving rock.

For a moment, nobody moved.

The demon was gone.

But somehow, I had the distinct feeling we had not seen the last of him.

Silence dropped over the gas station.

I turned, breathless, toward Margaux and Étienne.

She still stood over him, a makeshift spear fashioned from a metal rod suspended in her mental grip, its sharpened end aimed directly at his heart. Her entire body trembled with the effort of following through on what she’d started.

Étienne lay beneath her, bloodied and barely moving, yet he watched her with an expression that held no fear. Only something raw. Something pleading.

The spear hovered a hair’s breadth from his chest.

It didn’t move.

Something in Margaux’s face cracked, just for a moment, a fracture in whatever cold, borrowed thing had taken possession of her features.

Arania didn’t wait to see whether that fracture would hold.

A spell shot from her fingers, striking Margaux directly in the head with swift, merciless precision.

Margaux collapsed instantly.

The metal spear slipped from her mental grip and clattered harmlessly to the floor beside her as her body crumpled after it.