Page 21 of Hellfire to Come (Infernal Regions for the Unprepared #5)

Chapter Twenty-One

brOOKLYN

Every muscle in my body trembled so violently, I half expected to rattle apart.

Twitching, aching, burning with the weight of what I had just given, what had been taken, my limbs jerked in uncontrollable spasms. You’d think I’d sprinted across the continent in a single day.

And honestly, even for someone like me, supernatural or not, that would be a feat beyond comprehension.

And yet there I was, shivering like a fevered leaf in the eye of a storm.

Dominic held me as if I were made of glass and sacred fire.

His arms, iron-wrapped velvet. His heartbeat, steady, strong, unyielding, thundered against my ribs like a war drum laced with comfort.

Ever the calm inside my chaos, my mate stood like a sentry between me and the consequences of my bargain.

A wall of devotion in the aftermath of what I’d unleashed.

He hadn’t waited. Not for permission, not for protocol, not for sense. The moment the protective barrier of the ritual circle had flickered out, he was there. Storming forward like a predator denied its mate for too long, scooping me into his arms without a second glance toward the others.

Laughing Crow had protested. Loudly. Unapologetically.

She had barked some demand about leaving the circle intact for spiritual equilibrium or residual reading.

I couldn’t track the exact words through the fog in my head, but Dominic was deaf to it.

His snarl at the shaman had rattled through my chest like the growl of thunder rolling in after lightning. I felt it more than heard it.

He cradled me close, pressing his lips to my temple, breathing me in like he was reassuring himself I was still here, still breathing.

I was, but only barely.

I could feel something inside me unspooling still, slow and irreversible. Not breaking. Not burning. But… shifting. Re-aligning into something new.

And I didn’t want to speak of it. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

“She needs to rest,” the shaman snapped from somewhere near my shoulder. “There are still variables in motion. You’ll stay. I must monitor her for anomalies in her energy, her mind. What she opened tonight wasn’t clean magic. The spirits always take their due.”

“Get away from her, you deranged human,” Dominic growled, and I winced at the rawness in his tone. I could feel the fury coursing through him like a storm with no place to land. “You’ve done enough.”

I wanted to hush him, to soothe the ache behind his eyes, but I didn’t have the strength.

Not when each breath still carried echoes of fire and bone-deep fatigue.

So instead, I buried my face in the curve of his neck, the scent of him grounding me, filling my nostrils with cedar smoke, heat, and the faintest trace of blood still clinging to him after our ordeal at the cages.

Laughing Crow, to her credit, didn’t flinch at his tone. Didn’t cower before the beast he held barely in check.

“If she hadn’t come to me,” she countered coolly, “your precious Alice would be dead. You think you could’ve undone that curse on your own, cat ?”

Her smirk was infuriating.

Dominic’s chest rumbled beneath me. “Our Alice,” he corrected, biting off each word. “Don’t you mean your Alice too? She carries blood from your people, does she not? Or do you reserve your loyalty for only the convenient children of your bloodline?”

There was a pause. Heavy. Laced with an unspeakable something.

It was like time itself hesitated, uncertain if it should keep moving.

And then I saw it.

A flicker in the shaman’s eyes. Subtle. Fleeting. But undeniable.

Shock.

She masked it quickly, too quickly, but the damage had been done.

I lifted my head from Dominic’s chest, the weight of his words settling over me like a mantle of cold iron. “What did you just say?” I rasped, voice dry and rough like wind scraping over salt.

“She has roots here,” Dominic murmured, his voice low and rough, cutting through the air with sharp clarity.

He didn’t look at me, didn’t need to. His words weren’t for me alone.

“Did you not wonder why her soul burns so loudly in this land that even I could feel it from outside the circle? Why the spirits stirred like wind through dry leaves at the sound of her pain?” He paused, his nose twitching faintly.

“I can smell it, too. They carry the same note…your wolves, your trees, your wards. She has it. It’s in her blood. The same scent Alice carries.”

The air thickened like a held breath.

My heart stuttered.

I turned to Laughing Crow slowly, dread pooling behind my ribs. Her gaze, always so penetrating, so direct, was now cast aside. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“I thought…” My voice splintered mid-sentence.

I swallowed hard, pushing through the tremor that curled in my throat.

“I thought it was just a mistake. I could smell her when we stepped onto the reservation, but I chalked it up to being able to find her anywhere. I thought I was imagining things because I was worried sick about her.”

Still, silence.

A silence too full to be empty.

Dominic’s arms tightened around me, pulling me closer, as if bracing me for a truth he already understood. “You made no mistake,” he said firmly, each word striking like a war drum. “And this woman damn well knows it.”

At last, Laughing Crow looked at me.

Not with the sharp eyes of a sentinel. Not with the cold detachment of a shaman measuring weight and worth. But with something heavier, something that lived deep in the marrow and did not age with years.

“I did not know,” she said quietly. “Not with certainty. But when I looked at her for the first time, I felt the land murmur. It does not speak often. But it remembered her blood.”

My chest tightened as if bound by cords of memory I never wove. “Then you should’ve said something,” I whispered. “You should’ve told me.”

“So, you just let her nearly die anyway?” Dominic’s voice was all claws and thunder now. “You heard the land call her home, and still you left my mate burning on your floor. You let Brooklyn bargain for a life that should’ve been protected here.”

Laughing Crow didn’t flinch. “She offered her life freely. And I do not interfere with the sacred will of the spirits. Alice’s blood may call to the land, but her choices, her fury, her grief, her guilt…They belong solely to her. I do not stand between a soul and the storm it summons.”

“That’s convenient,” Dominic bit out. “You’re very good at telling yourself stories to justify letting people suffer.”

The shaman’s dark gaze flashed. “You think I don’t carry ghosts of my own, cat ? You think I don’t know the price of interference? This land has bled under our care. Bled for our mistakes. Ancient magic demands balance, and you expect me to tip the scales without consequence?”

“I expect you to honor blood,” Dominic snapped.

Silence pulsed through the room, sharp as shattered bone.

I slowly pulled away from him and sat up straighter, letting my feet touch the ground. The ache that rippled through me was deep, not physical. It was older than flesh. I met Laughing Crow’s eyes without flinching.

“You say the land remembers her,” I said, voice steadier now, carved from something brittle but unyielding. “Then what is she? What is it remembering?”

She watched me for a long time, unreadable.

Then, in a softer voice, as if speaking not to me, but to the space between us, she said, “The Great Spirit does not speak about Alice, child.” I almost laughed that she called me a child when I was probably older than her by hundreds of years.

“It speaks about you.” Something other shifted in her pitch-black eyes and I started rethinking my certainty of who was older than whom.

“Me?” Shock evident on my face and in my tone, I reached for Dominic’s hand instinctively knowing that this human was about to pull the ground from under my feet.

“You are a child of two forgotten truths. One born of fire, one born of earth. The land remembers your mother’s sorrow.

The blood that fled and never came home.

You were not supposed to step foot on our land.

And yet… here you are walking our soil as if you were born to do so.

Asking to die for someone else. And the land answered not because of who you are now…

but because of who you were always meant to be. ”

My breath caught, ragged and unformed.

I didn’t understand all of it. But I knew this: something ancient and hidden inside me was being unearthed. Slowly. Irrevocably confirming the truth in her words.

Dominic tightened his hold on my fingers. I gripped his without looking away from her.

“Then help me dig through those forgotten truths, Shaman,” I said. “I’ll walk into every fire and sift every ash if I have to. But I’m done letting people speak for me or use me for their gain. If the land remembers me, then maybe it’s time I remember it, as well.”

Laughing Crow inclined her head, just barely. But the glint in her dark eyes had changed. Wariness had not vanished. But something else settled in behind it.

Respect.

“We’ll speak again soon,” she said. “When you’re ready. Not before.”

Then she turned, her shawl sweeping the floor like trailing feathers, and headed toward the trees, the scent of sage and the echo of ancestral breath trailing behind her.

“You said the spirits took something,” I called out to her. “And I felt it. I need to know… what changed.”

Laughing Crow looked back over her shoulder. “You are not dying. That’s what matters.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

She studied me, then turned around slowly tilting her head, as if listening to something far off.

“The magic in your blood is no longer bound, girl. It’s… layered now. Altered. Intertwined with something older. The cost was not your life, but the shape of your gift. It belongs to more than just you now. The Fates waited for a chance to alter your destiny. You opened that door for them tonight.”

Dominic’s voice was ice. “Stop speaking in riddles, human, or I will break your neck. What does that mean?”

Laughing Crow’s black eyes flicked between us. “It means the spirits did not take her power. They made it free. We will all see what that means in time. I am the Great Spirit servant, I am not a seer to see the future.”

Silence fell again when Laughing Crow turned her back to us and walked away, but this one felt different.

Not tense.

Final.

Dominic carried me back to the house to a woven mat near the hearth and laid me down carefully, his arms still wrapped around my waist as if letting go might invite some invisible hand to take me from him.

I didn’t fight it.

After a long moment he settled next to me and pulled me gently into his arms once more. “Are you all right?”

“No,” I said truthfully, burying my face into the safety of his chest. “But I think I’m finally on the edge of some real answers.”

He held me there for a long time.

And for once, neither of us filled the silence. We just let the land breathe. Let the house watch. Let the truth settle like dust between bones once forgotten, now stirring again.

For the first time in hours, maybe days, the trembling had stopped.

But nothing felt settled.

Not yet.

Because whatever shifted inside me…

Was just beginning to wake.