Lahat ng Kabanata ng Bewitching the Alpha: Kabanata 81 - Kabanata 90

For the next three days, time didn’t pass so much as it thickened. We were living in a bubble of suspended animation, a breath held too long.The cabin, usually a place of refuge, had turned into a war room. The air inside was stale, smelling of old paper, dry dust, and the dregs of cold coffee that sat in mugs on every available surface. Outside, the world was white and silent, the snow muffling everything. Inside, the silence was different. It was the heavy, pressurized silence of people waiting for a bomb to go off.Guilermo spent his hours on the perimeter. I would see him through the frosted windowpanes, a dark silhouette against the blinding white of the tree line. He was restless. He paced the edge of the wards, his breath puffing out in clouds of steam, his hand always drifting to the knife at his belt. He was hunting for signs of the Coven, signs of Sibal’s remaining loyalists, signs of anything that wanted to hurt us.I was hunting it, too. Just older ones.I had turned the

We camped in the ruins of the Second City, about halfway to the Altar. Or maybe it was two-thirds. Distance in the Hollows was a slippery concept, bending and stretching like taffy in the sun.The truck, our rust-bucket savior, had given up the ghost three miles back. The engine block had cracked down the middle, split open by a stray pulse of wild magic that shot up from a fissure in the road. We had walked the rest of the way, the silence between us heavy, charged, and filled with the unspoken acknowledgment that we were running out of time.Now, we were huddled in the shell of what used to be a cathedral. The roof was long gone, blown away in some forgotten war, leaving the sanctuary open to the swirling, bruised purple vortex of the Hollows sky. The black moon hung directly overhead, unblinking, watching us like a malevolent eye.It was freezing. Not the crisp, clean cold of a winter morning, but a deep, bone-gnawing chill that seemed to leech the heat straight out of the stones.

The truck Guilermo had scavenged was barely holding together. Every pothole sent a shudder through the chassis that vibrated straight up my spine and settled into my broken shoulder. The suspension squealed like a dying animal, mirroring the state of my own body. My left arm, still bound tight, throbbed with a dull, heavy pulse. But the physical pain was a distant second to the ache in my chest.The bond felt bruised. It wasn't the warm, fluid connection it used to be. It felt tender, like a muscle that had been torn and stitched back together wrong.We crossed the border into the industrial zone as the sun began to dip, painting the smog-choked sky in shades of bruise-purple and charcoal."We need a place to regroup," Guilermo said. His voice was rough, scratching against the silence that had filled the cab for the last two hours. "Somewhere Sibal won't look immediately.""He'll look everywhere," I said, leaning my forehead against the cold glass of the passenger window. Outside, the

We didn't have time to celebrate. We didn't even have time to breathe.The truck Marco had stolen tore down the icy highway, the tires humming a frantic rhythm against the asphalt. We were putting distance between us and the smoking, toxic ruin of the Foundry, but the dread in the cab was heavier than the smell of smoke clinging to our clothes.Marco drove like a man possessed. His jaw was set like granite, his knuckles bleached white on the steering wheel as he weaved through the sparse late-night traffic.In the back seat, space was tight. Guilermo was pressed against me, his heavy arm wrapped around my shoulders, pulling me into his side. He was shivering.I closed my eyes and reached for the bond. It wasn't the roaring river of power it had been moments ago. It was a trickle. The surge of energy I had poured into him to save us from the gas was fading, metabolizing too fast, leaving him hollowed out and gray.But he was alive. His heart was beating against my ear, a little too fas

I wasn't in the snow anymore. The biting cold that had been eating my bones was gone. The pain in my shoulder, the ache in my head was all gone.I was floating.It wasn’t the weightless drift of sleep. It was heavy, like sinking into the bottom of a deep, warm ocean. But the water wasn't water. It was ink. It was shadow. It was violet, velvety darkness that pressed against my skin, filling my ears, my nose, my mouth.It tasted like iron and ozone.I was submerged in a sea of pure, concentrated energy. It wasn't the golden, aggressive fire of the Wolf that I had grown so used to feeling through the bond. This was cooler. Darker. It was ancient and quiet, like the air inside a tomb that had been sealed for a thousand years.It was my magic.Not the scraps I had been taught to use by the Coven, the polite little sparks used to light candles or mend teacups. Not the regulated, safe spells I had practiced in the academy. This was the source. This was the deep, subterranean well that Morgan