Page 78 of Veradel

I laugh and nudge him with my elbow. Then we both take a deep breath and turn back toward the Wall.

It looms so high above us that the air goes cold as we step into its shadow, descending down the needle-strewn ground, where Lucan’s old pawprints already scar the forest floor. This close, I can also make out the faintest gouges in the door where he once clawed at it—and no doubt burst with pain upon contact. Pain that we’ll now use against the Wall itself.

“Are you ready?” I breathe, eyeing a particularly thick vein in the doorway and placing the tip of my needle against it.

“I’ve been ready for a few hundred years,” Lucan murmurs, and he does the same. “All I do is push?”

I place my thumb against the tip of the plunger and nod. “Just one last push.”

So side by side, eyes locked on each other, we plunge the needles into the Wall.

And push.

For several minutes, nobody speaks.

I squint at the Wall, hardly daring to breathe, as if I can make those veins of venom dissolve just by concentrating hard enough. They undulate as slowly as ever, giving the stone a ripple effect that messes with my vision the harder I look.

Slowly, Lucan and I hand the empty syringes back to Taika, who puts them back into his medical bag before retrieving his cane from the stump and waiting.

And waiting.

And waiting.

“It can take more than thirty minutes for antivenom to work in human patients,” Taika finally says, breaking the silence shrouding us like a heavy cloak.

“What about in a Wall patient?” Soren asks out loud.

Everyone—even Stella—turns to shoot him an exasperated look, and Soren scrunches his nose.

“Right. You wouldn’t know, because you’ve never had a Wall patient before. I’ll shut up now.”

“That’s the smartest thing you’ve said all day,” Vivian murmurs.

Still, the exchange seems to have broken the spell of silence gripping us all by the throat, and soon murmurs rise among the werewolves at my back. I stare straight ahead, gripping Lucan’s hand with enough force that in any other male, I might have squeezed his fingers off. But Lucan squeezes me right back, anchoring me to him as my heart drops further and further down, the minutes dragging by with painstaking slowness.

By the time half an hour passes, the moon shifting in the sky above us, the Wall still hasn’t changed. As much as I try to imagine it into existence, the stone isn’t melting back into wood. It stands just as impenetrable as always, looming over us like a hulking monster rooted deep into the earth, refusing to budge.

“Maybe I should check—”

Lucan moves before I can hold him back, reaching out to brush his fingertips against the stone… and immediately jerks back with a curse.

A pit sinks so low into my stomach, I want to fall to my knees. Behind me, Gabriel speaks the words I can’t bear to say out loud.

“I’m not waiting around for this shit any longer. It didn’t work. It’s over.”

I can hear pine needles crunch underfoot as he turns to leave, and worse, the sound of several others turning to follow him. Taika passes me a sympathetic glance, and Lucan wraps his arm around my shoulder, pulling me in tight.

“It’s okay,” he whispers. “Remember, we try over and over again until the world caves.”

I shake my head, tears burning images of my mother as a statute into my retinas. Images of Malcolm and Gaia, Eleni and Sylvia, all the people I have failed who might not live long enough for the world to cave. For the first time since my mother was Chosen, there’s a gaping wound in the world that I can’t heal, that I can’t fix.

And I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know how to keep trying.

I don’t know what the point is.

“It’s over,” I repeat, the words like ash on my tongue.