The surface was right there, pale and rippling.

Twelve feet.

Ten.

Five.

Fin broke the surface first, hauling Dex up with him, and the sound Fin made pulling air was raw enough to carry across the lake. Dex didn’t show signs of breathing.

Gav came up half a second later, gasping so hard his throat cracked.

Fin’s dislocated arm hung at an angle that made Gav’s stomach turn, and blood was sheeting down the side of his face from a wound hidden somewhere in his hairline. He didn’t acknowledge any of it. He shifted Dex’s weight, treading water with his legs alone, and jerked his chin toward shore.

They swam. Fin on one side, Gav on the other, Dex held between them by two men who had no business still being conscious and had apparently decided that was a problem for later.

Hyran and Aeron were already twenty yards out and closing, cutting through the water in tandem, gold magic burning around their bodies. As soon as he closed the distance, Hyran grabbed Dex under both arms, taking his weight from Gav and Fin, and kicked towards shore, swimming harder than he’d swum in his life.

Aeron got under Fin’s good arm, took his weight, and swam. Fin let him. That alone told Aeron everything he needed to know about how bad it was. The Alpha King of North Varos didn’t let people carry him.

Gav and Hyran hit the shore at the same time. They hauled Dex from the water in a single pull.

"Further. Away from the waterline," Gav ordered, pulling rank again. Hyran didn’t argue.

They pulled Dex between them, fast and rough, stone scraping beneath their boots.

"This is far enough," Gav confirmed, gently lowering Dex.

Hyran dropped to his knees and went to work. Gold magic poured from his palms before Dex’s shoulders were flat against the stone, flooding the prince’s chest, sinking through skin and muscle and bone, searching for a heartbeat, a breath, anything still running in there.

Nothing happened.

He pushed harder. The gold brightened, humming against the night air, and the mage’s face was a mask Gav had never seen on him before. No sarcasm. No distance. Just concentration so total it had burned everything else away.

Still nothing.

Dex’s lips were blue. His chest wasn’t moving.

Gav dropped to his knees beside him.

"Dex."

No response.

"Don’t do this."

Gav shoved him onto his back and drove a hand into the center of his chest.

Once.

Twice.

"Dexmon."

Water sprayed from Dexmon’s lips as his body jerked. A violent cough tore through him, followed by a ragged gasp of air.

Gav nearly collapsed with relief.

Hyran didn’t wait for permission. Gold magic pulsed from his palms again, wrapping around Dex’s torso, pulling the water from his clothes, his skin, his hair. Heat followed, sinking into the prince’s muscles, forcing the blue out of his lips and the tremor out of his jaw.

Dex’s breathing steadied from drowning to wrecked, which was an upgrade Hyran would take.

He turned to Gav next, his magic replacing ice with dry warmth that his body grabbed onto like a man catching a rope.

Gav didn’t acknowledge it. His eyes were on Dex, assessing. The bleeding hadn’t stopped. Hadn’t slowed. The wounds Dex had taken underwater were still pumping red through the gold shimmer of Hyran’s warming magic, and the color of it was wrong. Too dark. Too thick.

No words were needed. Gav reached for the back of Dex’s training suit, found the zipper between the shredded panels of fabric, and pulled it down in one clean motion. Hyran was already repositioning, hands hovering over the exposed skin, reading the damage with his fingers before his magic confirmed it.

They moved around each other without speaking, without hesitating, two men who had bled beside their Alpha enough times that triage was a language they spoke fluently. Just a mutual respect and understanding when it came to this.

Gav peeled the suit down past Dex’s shoulders.

Hyran’s hands stopped.

"What the hell."

Three spikes protruded from Dex’s back. Each one roughly the length of a finger, black as oil, buried deep enough that the entry points had disappeared into swollen tissue. The skin surrounding each spike had turned black and was pulsing, slow and rhythmic, like a second heartbeat pushing something through his veins that had nothing to do with blood. Dark lines were already branching outward from the impact sites, threading beneath the skin in patterns that looked deliberate. Intentional. Alive.

The blood around them wasn’t clotting. It was running in steady rivulets down Dex’s spine, pooling on the rocks beneath him, and the gold magic Hyran had been feeding into his body was sliding off the blackened skin like oil on water. Refusing to take hold.

"What the hell..." Hyran’s voice was quiet. The wrong kind of quiet.

Gav looked at the spikes, then at the pulsing black around them, then at Hyran. His jaw set.

Six feet away, Aeron made a sound that Hyran had never heard from him before. The kind of sound a man made when his training was the only thing standing between him and panic.

Fin was sitting up. Aeron had unzipped the back of his training suit, revealing a bloody torso. The same black spikes jutted from his back in three places, one of which was near his heart.

"Same thing," Aeron said. His hands were hovering over Fin’s back, palms lit with magic that was accomplishing exactly nothing. "Mage magic isn’t touching it."

Maelor jogged over. He crouched between the two Alphas, eyes moving from Dex’s back to Fin’s, cataloguing with the clinical speed of a man who collected problems the way others collected coins.

"Dark magic." He placed both palms flat against Dex’s body, closed his eyes, and pushed.

The black pulsed once. Twice. Then nothing.

He pulled his hands back. His expression didn’t change, but his jaw tightened in a way that told everyone watching that his magic failed too.