13. Chapter 13
Northern Lights, Alaska
Dasher
My predecessor and Noelle finished the Christmas season with Santa, and I was grateful for his guidance. He remained human while I shifted and wore the reins and harness for the first time. Dasher was a calming presence as I struggled to get used to my new reality.
He took me on a few practice flights so I understood the rhythm of the ride. On my fifth attempt, Santa loaded the sleigh about halfway, and I joined the team on a frigid Alaskan night.
“I think it’s time, Dash,” he said to me one evening. “Noelle’s ready, and, truth be told, so am I.”
“For what?”
“I think you know.”
“No.”
He nodded, the silver more pronounced in his hair under the moonlight. “It’s time I retired. I need to give Noelle a life she put on hold for me.”
I clapped my hand on his back. “I’ll miss you.”
“And I, you.”
On a gray morning, after the shortened summer in Alaska passed, Dasher and Noelle left Santa’s compound.
They were kind in waiting until the wall between Meredith and me came down.
She and I stood at the edge of the treeline, Meredith’s hand in mine, watching their sled loaded with their whole life disappear south into Alaska’s vast wilderness.
Furniture, books, and the quilt I recognized from Noelle’s couch rested in the carrying hold.
“You’ll still hear me,” Dasher said, before he climbed up beside Noelle, gripping my shoulder with a hand gone rough from decades of reins and hard weather. “Distance doesn’t cut or fray the thread between us. You need steadying; you reach, same as always. Just don’t make a habit of needing it.”
“I won’t.”
“Oh, you will," he said, and there was genuine warmth under the gruffness of his words. “But that’s what the thread’s for. Go on. Take care of your girl.”
“Come visit us soon,” Noelle called, waving back at us.
They settled into a hut two hundred miles north of nowhere, timber and stone with a woodstove and a view that ran clean to the horizon in every direction, and it was there, a bit later into the deep dark of the Alaskan winter, that Meredith and I made the journey up to see them for the first time.
“This is insane,” Meredith said, stepping out of the truck into snow that came past her knees, staring at the hut with its single lit window glowing gold against the dark.
“This is where they chose to retire? There’s nothing out here.
” She brushed the snow off her gloves. “I would have thought Noelle would want civilization.”
“Isolation is rather the point, I think.” I caught her hand before she could stumble on the buried porch steps, and she let me hold her the way she hadn’t let me those first few days and weeks when every touch still felt like something she was deciding whether to allow.
Noelle met us at the door with flour on her hands and Dasher’s old mended shirt swallowing her whole.
The four of us spent the evening around a table too small for the meal she’d cooked, trading stories that had nothing to do with mate bonds or reindeer lines, or any of the fantastical threads of fate running under both our lives.
Tonight, we were us: people, enjoying a meal.
Somewhere around my second helping, on the first evening since I landed in this world, I felt ordinary. I hadn’t known how badly I wanted the ordinary until I had it in front of me.
Later, once we cleared the table and cleaned the dishes, Dasher and Noelle left to follow whatever quiet routine decades together had worn smooth between them.
Meredith and I walked out past the treeline with blankets bundled under our arms, and lay down in a clearing where the trees opened up wide enough to swallow the entire sky.
The aurora took its time coming to life, the way it always did, beginning as a faint green smear at first that built into something alive, curtains of light bending and rippling overhead like the sky itself had decided to breathe.
“I never get tired of that view,” Meredith said, tucked against my side, her breath fogging in the cold. “I grew up seeing it half my childhood, and it still gets me every time.”
“We didn't have anything like this on my planet,” I said, watching the light shift and fold. “Not colors moving like that. My sky back home ran clearer and quieter.”
“Which one’s yours, you think?” She tipped her head back further, scanning the smear of stars beyond the green. “If you had to guess.”
“Which one what?”
“Planet.”
I studied the sky for a long moment, hunting for something familiar in a field of lights that belonged to a world I hadn’t chosen and didn’t have the ties to call home yet either. “That one,” I said finally, pointing to a faint cluster low near the horizon. “I’m running on instinct over certainty.”
“What drew you to it?”
“The light’s got the right kind of color to it. It feels warmer than the rest.”
“Bullshit. It looks the same.” She laughed. “You’re making it up.”
“Absolutely, without a doubt,” I admitted, and she laughed again against my ribs. “But it’s nice to have an answer, even a false one. Gives me a place to look in the sky instead of just being empty.”
She fell quiet after my admission, watching the aurora fold and shift, and I let my fingers trace circles against her shoulder. I placed no urgency in it and expected nothing from her other than her weight and warmth against my side. Somehow, with her, this life was starting to feel like mine.
“I like this,” she said, her voice soft.
“Me too.”
“Not the North Pole. Not the aurora, although it’s gorgeous.” She waved a hand in the space between us. “I mean, you and me, lying in the snow discussing our thoughts on which star is your home planet. It feels like an actual relationship instead of whatever chaos we started with.”
“I like it too.” I meant it more than my words let on. “I spent my whole first part of life thinking I had it figured out. Fields, fences, a mundane life I never questioned. I didn’t know I was missing anything until I lost it.” I pressed a kiss into her hair.
“Would you go back if you could?”
“If you could come with me, sure.”
“What if you had to trade this life for your old one?”
“I don’t know if I’d trade this to get that back. Some days I still don’t know. But nights like this, holding you, make the not-knowing easier to live with.”
She turned her face up to mine, and I kissed her slow, unhurried, nothing chasing it, just the two of us and the sky doing its slow green burn overhead, and for a long while neither of us said anything at all, content to let the quiet hold.
Dasher’s voice broke the spell - not spoken or out loud. But I felt a need, a pull, rising up suddenly from that thread he told me never quite went slack.
It pulled behind my sternum sharp enough that I sat up fast, my hand going to my chest, hoping I could press the feeling back down.
“What is it?” Meredith said, sitting up beside me, alarm creeping into her voice. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Hold on a second.”
I felt the thread pull and settle, like an unmistakable call deep inside my veins. It called to whatever dormant part of me carried the old Dasher’s line, and it was insistent in a way that had nothing to do with giving me choice.
“I feel a pull,” I said, still pressing a hand flat over my heart like the pressure of it might ease that way. “Dasher spoke of this.”
“What?”
“It’s the pull. The thread that unites our line and ties us together. I feel the call Dasher spoke of.” I looked at Meredith and felt the whole warm ease of the evening drop away under the weight of what came next. “We have to get back before Christmas Eve. Santa needs me.”
Meredith flopped backward into the snow with a groan that carried clean across the clearing.
“Fucking Christmas,” she said, to the sky, to the aurora, to whatever god had decided her whole life needed rearranging around one single holiday. “I finally find my soulmate, and of course he’s tied to fucking Christmas.”