Gav pulled. Maelor matched him, emerald light flooding in as the spike came free with a crack of compressed tissue. Serena screamed again, more ragged this time, weaker, and her consciousness was flickering at the edges, her green eyes losing focus.

Fin leaned close to her ear. "Stay here. Look at me, Serena. Stay."

Her green eyes found his. Glazed. Drifting.

"Last one," Maelor said. His clinical distance had crumbled entirely, replaced by the focused intensity of a man who understood the margin between alive and dead had narrowed to the width of his next decision. "Between the shoulder blades. The corruption is deepest here. I need thirty seconds of uninterrupted extraction after the spike clears."

"You’ll have it," Gav said.

He gripped the final spike with both hands, braced himself, and looked at Maelor.

Maelor’s palms ignited. The emerald burned brighter than before, tinged at the edges with gold that Hyran recognized as something he had encountered in exactly zero textbooks.

"Now."

Gav pulled. Every ounce of strength he had left went into that single motion, tearing the spike free from between her shoulder blades with a wet, sickening wrench that sprayed blood across his chest and arms.

Serena’s scream cut off. Her eyes rolled. Her body went limp, and the sudden silence was worse than every scream that had preceded it.

"Don’t stop," Gav commanded.

Maelor’s palms were buried in emerald light, both hands pressed flat against her back, and the magic pouring from him was so dense the air around them hummed with it. Black smoke erupted in thick, writhing columns from her wounds, more than either Fin or Dex had produced, and the stream was endless, pouring from her body as though the corruption had been feeding on something inside her that the others lacked.

Her magic. It had been feeding on her magic.

Maelor’s nose began to bleed. A thin line of red tracked from his left nostril to his upper lip, the same signature cost he always paid when his magic pushed into territory that mage discipline alone could never reach. He ignored it, teeth gritted, fingers digging into the light.

Hyran moved in beside him without hesitation, placing his hands alongside Maelor’s, feeding gold magic into the channel the Fae magic had carved. Two streams, emerald and gold, working in tandem. One ripping the dark threads free. The other sealing what was left behind.

Thirty seconds felt like thirty years.

When the last thread of corruption dissolved, Maelor pulled his hands back and swayed once before catching himself. The nosebleed had worsened; both nostrils were running now, blood dripping steadily onto the stone.

"Done," he said, and his voice was thin and hollow.

Hyran stayed. Gold magic poured through her wounds, slower on Serena than it had been on the others, the tissue damage deeper, the healing reluctant and stubborn. Color returned to her skin in painful, incremental degrees.

Fin still held her hand. His thumb pressed against her pulse point, counting each beat, waiting for it to strengthen. Her breathing was threadbare, each inhale a shuddering labor, and each exhale carried a faint, involuntary whimper that she would have hated if she were conscious enough to know.

Gav wrapped her wounds with the last fabric he could find. He pressed the bandages firm against her side, her lower back, the space between her shoulder blades. His hands moved with the same cold precision he had used on Fin and Dex. His face told a different story entirely.

It dawned on him that he was the only one who made it out of the lake without one. Two dives. Three rescues. Zero spikes. That accident of fortune was the only reason he was the one kneeling here with steady hands while the men it had pierced lay bleeding behind him.

Aeron was still beside Fin, gold magic pulsing into the Alpha King’s torso in a steady stream. He looked at Serena, then at the black stains on the stone where the smoke had dissolved, and the expression on his face was one Gav had never seen from him before. It was fear. Undiluted and uncomplicated.

Silence settled over them. The kind that follows violence, thick and fragile, where breathing feels too loud and the absence of screaming is its own form of noise.

Then Serena opened her eyes.

Her green gaze was unfocused, drifting, before it sharpened on something beyond the lake, past the far wall of the cavern. Her pupils dilated.

"The spikes were beacons," she whispered, each word costing her breath she didn’t have to spare. "Whatever sent them knows exactly where we are."

Every man in the cavern went rigid.

Serena’s hand tightened around Fin’s, and her next words carried an iron certainty that sent ice through every spine present.

"It’s already here."

And just like that, the cavern shifted from triage to survival.

A bead of sweat slid down Serena’s temple despite the cavern’s brutal cold. Hyran’s warming spell should have left her skin dry, but the sweat had nothing to do with heat. It was pain, pure and relentless, the kind that lived beneath the skin and throbbed in time with her heartbeat, synced to the three wounds in her back that Maelor’s magic had closed but her body had yet to forgive.

Fin and Dex wore the same expression. Jaws clenched, eyes sharp with residual shock, bodies held upright by willpower alone.

Serena lifted her hand.

Gold magic erupted from her palm, shaking and fractured at the edges, and a tunnel-bridge formed beneath their feet. It rose solid from the stone, enclosed and thick enough that whatever was in the cavern with them couldn’t reach through. She anchored it directly at their position, leaving no gap, no seam, no space for anything to slip inside.

She was pulling entirely from her own reserves, and those reserves were a ruin. The corruption had fed on her magic for longer than either of the others, and what remained was fractured, volatile, flickering at the edges the way a torch gutters before it dies. Every inch of the bridge cost her something she couldn’t afford to give, and she gave it anyway.

Hyran placed his hand beside hers without a word and channeled his gold magic into the structure. It pulsed through her foundation, reinforcing every inch, buying her minutes her body refused to promise. Maelor added emerald from the opposite side, Fae magic weaving through the gold in threads that shimmered and held. His hands were shaking. His nose was still bleeding. He poured in everything he had left and it was barely enough.

Serena looked at them both, exhausted, grateful, before her lashes fluttered and the strength in her arm began to fail.

Gav scooped her into his arms before she could attempt to stand. She didn’t argue. She couldn’t. Her body was failing and she knew it. Her weight was almost nothing against his chest, and that scared Gav more than anything in the cavern behind them.

Hyran and Aeron positioned themselves under Dex, each taking an arm to keep the Alpha King upright. Dex tried to protest, but the sound that came out was a grunt and nothing more. Fin walked behind them, blood drying across his torso, one hand braced against the tunnel wall for balance, his eyes locked on Serena’s face where it rested against Gav’s shoulder.