Chapter 208: Rings
MARGAUX
I cannot believe I forgot about him.
That was the thought that arrived the moment Laurent said the name, arriving with the specific shame of someone who had been so consumed by the immediate crises stacking up around them that they had let something important slip entirely out of focus. Alpha Amine, who had led me to the encyclopedia in the library and made a deal and then simply stopped appearing, and I had not once thought to wonder why.
Prim’s blob started flashing.
Not the slow, deliberate glow she had been using to answer yes and no questions. Something more urgent, cycling through colors faster than I could interpret them, the formless shape of her shifting with the quality of something trying very hard to communicate something it did not have the tools to express.
"Is she telling you something?" Laurent asked, watching my face rather than the space I was watching.
"She is trying to," I said. I looked at Prim directly. "Did Alpha Amine attack you?"
Her colors stopped flashing and stayed blue.
My stomach dropped.
"I do not understand it," I said, mostly to myself. "He presented as a weak spirit. He said himself he was not particularly talented as a ghost. How in any possible world could he do this to you?" I looked at the shifting blob. "I went up against you. I would have lost badly if not for whatever came out of my hands, which I still do not fully understand. You are considerably stronger than him. Or was he just..."
Prim started cycling through colors again, and I watched the sequence, trying to find a pattern in it, and eventually accepted that I could not.
"It is useless," I said quietly. "I can only get yes and no from you right now."
I turned to Laurent.
"It was Amine," I said.
"What the fuck?" He said it quietly, which somehow made it land harder than volume would have. "If he is a violent spirit, could it be that—" He stopped, his expression working through something. "You freed him. In the library. Could he have been trapped somehow in that space before you found him?"
I looked at Prim.
She glowed gold.
I stared at her.
"He was not trapped," I said slowly. "She says no." I turned it over. "So he came to that library deliberately. Maybe he even found me deliberately." I felt cold prickle across my arms. "What if he knew what I was before I did?"
Laurent was already on his phone.
"I am messaging Étienne," he said. "He needs to know there is something in that estate that attacks people and is not what it presented itself as."
"What would they do against a spirit?" I asked. "Étienne and Alpha Dorian. What can they actually do?"
"I do not know," Laurent said, typing without looking up. "But they should know regardless. That is basic information sharing."
I nodded, accepting the logic of it even if the practical utility remained unclear.
I had been staring at my hands while we talked and it was only when I looked up that I registered we had crossed into different territory at some point during the conversation. The road had changed character, and now had wider verges, smaller buildings, and now the texture of human-inhabited space rather than pack-controlled territory.
"Are we close?" I asked the head healer.
"Very." He pointed toward a turn ahead.
The car followed the healer’s directions, leaving the busier roads behind until we turned into a quiet residential street. At first glance, it looked like any other neighborhood, rows of well-kept houses, trimmed hedges, and shaded sidewalks. Then, gradually, something about it began to feel different. Less like a place people simply lived, and more like one intentionally set apart from the rest of the city.
"There," the head healer said, pointing ahead.
My gaze followed his hand.
Ophelia’s Wellness.
The building had once been a house. That much was obvious. Time and careful renovations had transformed it into something that existed somewhere between a modern clinic and an old-world sanctuary. A lush garden bordered the front path, overflowing with herbs and flowering plants I couldn’t identify, their scents drifting faintly through the open air. The wooden sign hanging beside the entrance bore the clinic’s name in elegant lettering, while people came and went through the front door with the easy familiarity of those who had done so countless times before.
The sentinel driver and the other one, eased into the parking area, as we also climbed out.
The moment my feet touched the ground, I noticed the air.
It wasn’t merely quieter.
The silence here carried a strange quality, as though the world itself had lowered its voice out of respect for whatever this place held. The tension I’d been carrying since we left the hospital eased by the smallest fraction, and even the breeze felt softer against my skin.
We started toward the entrance.
I took one step onto the stone path.
Something slammed into me.
Pain exploded through my body so suddenly that my breath caught in my throat.
"Ouch."
The others turned immediately.
"What happened?" Laurent was already moving toward me.
"I don’t know."
I lifted a hand in front of me, moving cautiously, the way you reached into darkness to find something your eyes couldn’t. My palm met resistance.
I froze.
There was nothing there. Nothing I could see.
Yet something solid pressed back against my hand.
It wasn’t the unyielding hardness of brick or glass. The surface yielded ever so slightly beneath my touch, almost alive, and instead of the cold I expected, warmth radiated through my palm, gentle but unmistakable.
I pushed harder.
It refused to let me pass.
"I can’t go in," I said quietly, my eyes fixed on the empty space before me. "There’s something here."
Laurent stepped forward past me with no difficulty whatsoever. He turned back and looked at the head healer. "What is this?"
Before the head healer could answer, the front door opened.
The woman who stepped outside wasn’t what I had imagined.
From everything I’d been told, I’d unconsciously assembled a version of her in my mind, piece by piece. The real woman fit almost none of it. I couldn’t have explained why. She simply carried herself differently, as though whatever I had expected belonged to someone else entirely.
Her gaze found her brother first.
Warmth bloomed across her face, softening her features into an expression so effortless it made me wonder how often she smiled like that.
"I thought I smelled you," she said.
"Ophelia." The head healer smiled.
It was also then she noticed the rest of us.
"Oh," she murmured. "Guests."
Without another word, she reached behind the glass door and flipped the small hanging sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSED before stepping fully outside.
Laurent didn’t waste a second.
"Why is she blocked from coming in?" he asked, his composure fraying around the edges despite the calmness of his voice. "We were told you were like her. This however feels like some kind of magic."
"You would be right," Ophelia said.
She looked at me with an expression I could not read, and then she said a name.
"Arania."
Something moved behind her.
Light dazzled outward from behind Ophelia’s shoulder, and then settled there, and I leaned forward instinctively trying to understand what I was looking at.
It looked almost human. The proportions suggested a person but at a scale that had no business existing, glowing from somewhere inside itself rather than reflecting anything outside, and behind it the most extraordinary wings, translucent and structured like a dragonfly’s, catching the morning light in spectrums I could not name.
A voice came from it, tiny and wispy, like sound produced by something considerably smaller than a voice had any right to be.
"I apologize," it said. "It only stops strong spiritual energy. And you, girl." The creature turned those luminous eyes on me. "You are absolutely covered in it."
I turned to Laurent.
"Can you see that?" I said.
He swallowed.
"Fae," he said. "I believe."
The creature flew forward, delicate and fast, and snapped fingers that should not have been functional at that scale.
The resistance vanished and my hand fell through empty air.