“No.” Red pushed to sit up, shaking snow from her hair. Her face had gone stony. “Eammon might kill him, and I’d like to punch him at least once first.”
Nerves twisted in Neve’s middle, the pinch of it more pronounced from the fact she’d been dead until moments ago. They’d solved one problem—the cosmic, god-proportioned one—but she was somehow far more apprehensive about the personal ones on the horizon. Like making sure Red and Eammon didn’t kill Solmir, even though he deserved it.
Like explaining why she didn’t want them to.
Red stood, called across the snow, “If you’re fighting about us, everything is fine now! If it’s over something else, carry on!”
Everyone on the plain froze, a tableau in the churned snow as more poured from the sky. Then Eammon—looking worse for wear—staggered over the ground toward them. He wrapped Red in his arms, and she buried her face in his chest, heedless of the blood crusting his nose.
“You were dead,” he murmured into her hair, his voice still breaking on the word. “I felt it, you were dead.”
Red’s hands tightened around him, white-knuckled. “Of everything that’s happened to us, me coming back from the dead is the biggest surprise?”
The Wolf—but was he the Wolf anymore? He looked like a man, only a man—huffed a jagged laugh and pulled her closer.
Neve pressed her lips together, wrapped her arms around herself. In the distance, Solmir stood, chest still heaving. He didn’t move any closer. Neither did she.
Eammon looked up, eyes meeting Neve’s. There was a flash of anger there, and she supposed she deserved it. But the anger settled to wariness after a moment, and she understood that, too. Love could wrench the most undeserved compassion out of you.
“I’m Eammon,” he said with a nod. “It’s nice to meet you, Neve.”
She managed to smile, though it was a shaky thing. But she didn’t trust herself to speak, not yet.
His eyes lighted on Arick’s body over her shoulder, then widened. “Is that…”
“Let him sleep,” Red said quietly. “He’ll wake up when he’s ready.”
The slowly falling snow lumped around Arick, nearly obscured him from view. Neve put a hand to his forehead, afraid he’d be cold; he felt pleasantly warm, and shifted in his sleep, frowning. She took her hand from him and moved away.
Confusion still knit Eammon’s brow, but he acquiesced to his wife. He sighed, shaking his head. “What happened to us? I feel… I don’t…”
Her sister pressed a finger against his lips. “You’re human,” she murmured. “And so am I. The rest of it we’ll figure out.”
A shudder went through the former Wolf, mingled horror and relief, a long-held burden finally relinquished. Eammon tilted his forehead against Red’s and closed his eyes.
Behind them, Solmir’s dim figure stood still in the snow, like he was waiting for Neve to tell him what to do.
She didn’t know. She didn’t know.
The other ragged figures drifted over, the ones she’d briefly seen when she was all shadow—Red’s friends. A white man with reddish, curling hair, his arm around a beautiful woman with golden-brown skin and a halo of dark curls, both of them looking at her like… well, like someone risen from the dead. The woman’s face was only wondering, but the man’s looked like he hadn’t decided if her rising was a good thing or not.
She guessed that was fair.
Lagging slightly behind them, another woman she’d never seen before. Short, with dark eyes in a pretty, heart-shaped face and a fall of straight black hair. Her expression cycled between guilt and awe and something that looked almost like jealousy. Dark eyes flickered to Neve, then away to the last person trooping over the snow toward them.
Raffe.
Neve didn’t know where to let her eyes land, what to do with her hands. She wanted to rush him, to wrap her arms around him and hold him close. She wanted to run away before he could see her, see what she’d become.
Just a soulless woman who’d been a god. Who’d been a queen. Who never wanted to be either of those things ever again.
The air around them seemed to spark, just for a moment. Filaments of light spangling in the snow, and a tiny, prickling feeling at her fingertips. But it was gone when she blinked, so quickly she might’ve imagined it.
Raffe stopped a few feet from her, a tall, imposing shadow against the sky. She couldn’t read the expression on his face, his dark eyes glued to hers, his mouth slightly parted.
The woman with the long black hair swung her gaze between them, then away.
“Neve.” Raffe’s mouth worked before it settled on her name, like he couldn’t decide what other words he could feed into the silence.
“Raffe.” Her fingers clenched on the scraps of her nightgown. The diaphanous thing she’d worn while she was dead was gone, leaving her in only her nightgown and boots and Solmir’s torn coat, and the freezing cold sank teeth into her newly human body.
It seemed to spur Raffe out of inaction. He stepped forward, shrugging out of his own coat before noticing the one she already wore. A pause, his arms awkwardly half out of his sleeves. He shrugged back into them with a pensive expression.
From the corner of Neve’s eye, she saw a tall, long-haired figure step backward, farther away from her, farther into the snow.
“Are you well?” But as soon as he said it, Raffe shook his head. “No, of course you aren’t well, you spent weeks in the Shadowlands—”
“I’m fine,” Neve said quietly. “I’m fine.”
Raffe’s lips pressed together, unsure of how to follow the tangling thread of this conversation, but before he could try, Red turned her face from Eammon’s chest. “We took care of it,” she said decisively. “The Kings, the Shadowlands, the Wilderwood. All of it. It’s gone.” She looked behind them, at the forest—still standing but empty, drained of all the magic it had held. Her lip went between her teeth, like she wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or cry.
Behind her, Eammon’s eyes widened, his shoulders sagging slightly even as his arms stayed wrapped around Red. He looked down at his hand on her waist as if he’d never seen it before.
“Gone?” This from the pretty woman next to the red-haired man, her delicate brows drawn together in confusion. Fawn-colored eyes flicked from Red to the man beside her, to his arm, like she was looking for something. “Fife, what you took… you mean all of it…”
“All of it.” Neve’s voice still sounded quiet, whispery. All that screaming followed by death had left her throat raw. “We…” But there was no easy way to explain what they’d done, souls turned to apples and dashed on the ground, people become reliquaries. “We took care of it,” she said simply, echoing her sister.
The woman’s brow creased, lips pursing. “I still feel…” She trailed off, her fingers twitching at her side. Again, that spangling of the air, like currents of light ran just behind a veil.
The man at her side looked at her with his mouth pressed flat. Neve couldn’t tell whether he saw the light or not. “What do you feel, Lyra?”