The Heartless Alpha’s Beloved Luna (Avery and Gideon) novel Chapter 578

Ten years of forgetting, of letting the memory blur and fade until I couldn’t trust my own head anymore, and now I had it back, and this time, I wasn’t letting go.

That was the thing. The witch didn’t know about the silver. She couldn’t know. Whatever she was, she’d never once been touched by the Moon Goddess’s light, not really—she lived somewhere deep and dark beneath the soil, somewhere the moon had never once reached.

She’d gotten everything else right. But not that.

Something cracked as a scream tore from my ribs, and then, just like that, the fog was gone. In its place surged a bond that was so achingly familiar it nearly made tears spring to my eyes.

But I didn’t have a chance to dwell on that feeling. Because the screaming started. Avery’s voice, terrified, just like that first night.

And just like then, I would do anything to make sure it stopped.

I opened my eyes to Bjorn hanging twenty feet over my head, dangling from the witch’s fist on top of a column of shrieking, writhing spiders, and Avery screaming my name like she’d been screaming it for a while and I was only now hearing it.

My nails split and lengthened with a partial shift as I hit the base of that column, and I dug them into the writhing mass of it and climbed, spiders bursting and screeching under every grip, up through a curtain of them that should have stopped me and didn’t.

The witch’s eyes, too many of them—I saw it now, that grotesque half-mortal form, like a spider’s skin stretched over Avery’s body, and Goddess, how could I have not seen it before?—widened when they saw me. Her pincers opened, but she didn’t have a chance to react before I leapt upward.

I slammed into her so hard her grip slipped, and she went flying right off that column, eight limbs windmilling, unable to catch herself.

The spiders started dying the second she fell. Withering, shriveling, turning to dust in midair before they even hit the ground, the whole column of them collapsing into nothing.

Bjorn dropped straight into my arms.

I twisted so my own back took the fall instead of his, hitting the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of me, but he was safe, both arms locked around my neck, sobbing into my shoulder, alive.

“Gideon!” Avery was there a second later, dropping to her knees beside us.

I flipped us so Bjorn and Avery were beneath me and I shielded them with my body, bracing myself for the impact.

It never came.

Behind us, I heard a shout, and a grunt, and the sound of something wet.

Avery’s eyes went wide, fixed on something over my shoulder as her fingers dug into my shirt.

Slowly, I lifted my head to see Sebastian, back to his, a single pincer protruding from his back.

His arms were stretched wide, and his entire body was limp as the pincer retracted, letting him drop to the forest floor.