Chapter 27
Everything is quiet.
Too quiet.
The moon above us is the only thing that moves, something I can feel in increments inside of me more than see. Still, she reminds me the way she always does. Not just of who I am, but that my work isn’t done here.
This needs to be the end. I’m the one who will end it.
That’s the full Wolf Moon up there. I have a claim to honor tonight.
This shit is personal.
I have the heart that Vin?a burned to a charcoaled crisp in my mouth. The taste is worse than that disgusting paste her priests slathered all over me. I spit it out into the air and then shift as it falls back toward me so I can catch it in my hand.
Then I stare down at what’s left on the ground. Briar’s body, ruined Vin?a.
As I do, I can feel that damned heart in my hand beat.
Right there against my palm.
More than once, in case I think it’s a fluke, until I have to accept that it’s finding its own rhythm.
In the distance, the acolytes—who dropped when Vin?a did—begin to stir. They heave themselves to their feet and they run, knives pointed directly at me.
But the Wolf Moon is on my side tonight.
She is headed toward the other side of the crater. I can feel the way she moves, and when she gets there, there will be no moonlight left in this dried-out pit that should be a lake. It should take even less time for her to no longer beam down on this altar rock area.
At my feet, what’s left of Briar slithers.
I turn toward the altar and explode into action.
One step, another, then I jump.
I land hard on the rock, and as I do, I hear a terrible scream.
It’s coming from Briar’s heartless corpse. It’s coming from the heart in my hand. It’s everywhere, filling up the crater, sick and terrible.
I take the burned-up heart in my hand and throw it high, toward the moon—
Where it explodes.
Something in me does, too.
I feel myself toppling through space, blown backward by the strength of my throw and the exploding heart, and I know that I’m going to hit the ground hard—
But Ty is there.
He catches me before I hit the ground.
I feel limp and strange, but his arms are around me. I can smell him. He’s here. I open up my eyes and I gaze at him.
“You caught me,” I say.
He looks like he’s taken some heat tonight. There’s an ugly slash down the side of his face. There are scrapes and dark bruises all across his wide tattooed chest. I’m thankful for the rain that helps wash away the blood and grime.
Ty looks down at me and shakes his head, as if scolding me. Always scolding me. I don’t know why I like it. Why it makes all the noise inside of me . . . quiet down.
“I always catch you,” he rumbles at me.
He sets me down on my feet, but everything feels like jelly. Ty peers down at me, then he takes his thumb and rubs at my mouth, making me wonder which particular revolting thing is on me.
Whatever it is, it doesn’t keep him from leaning down and kissing me on my forehead. It doesn’t keep me from sagging against him. I close my eyes, breathe him in, and watch the screen in my head.
Savi is flowing her way through the battlefield that seems to part before her, and it’s hard not to make Red Sea comparisons. She slides like an inevitability through all of those red cloaks, smiting them with golden bursts of sorcery as she goes.
She murmurs as she moves, locating the wounded Kind in every pile of the fallen.
With a few words and a wave of her fingers, she moves hurt vampires and wounded wolves out of her way. I watch her for some time before I realize that she’s gathering up all of the acolytes and removing anyone who is not one of Vin?a’s faithful.
Then she piles them all together in a heap, ignores the falling rain, and sets them on fire.
I open my eyes again when Ariel appears in his typical whirl of smoke.
Winter is holding on to him, her arm looped around his neck.
She looks pale and sickly, I think, but the vampire king is way ahead of me.
He barely spares her a glance as he tears open his own wrist and then puts it to her mouth.
She grips him with her free hand, and drinks.
It’s another level of intimacy, then. Me sagging against Ty because I can’t stand of my own volition when I would normally hurt myself so as not to appear weak.
Winter taking her lover’s blood that we all know will heal her and keep her human body strong and something a little better than merely human, which is something I doubt very much she shares with anyone but him.
Meanwhile, Ty and Ariel discuss the battle we just won in their low voices. They sound dark, I think—but less urgent.
Eventually, Savi makes her way across the crater to us.
She looks polished to a smooth shine again, not a hint of a hair out of place despite the enduring rainfall.
Her gaze is assessing as she sweeps it over Winter, less so when she looks at me, and she nods slightly. Apparently pleased with what she sees.
Or what she doesn’t see, I think, that paste and those things rolling back over me for a moment. I shove them away.
Winter smiles up at Ariel, kisses his wrist, then wipes her own mouth as he pulls his wrist back, shakes it once, and heals.
I straighten, but not before I press a kiss to that sweet spot between Ty’s pectorals.
Then we all, finally, turn and look down at Briar’s body.
“We will burn her twice,” Savi pronounces in a voice that reminds me that she is made of old laws, from ancient cities no one alive now will ever see.
“And then flood this crater all over again,” Ariel agrees, sounding even more ageless and stern. “Just in case.”
I think someone should say a few words for Briar. I think that someone should probably be me, but I also remember the way she looked at me before she died. Before I killed her.
Maybe I’ll keep my oddly conflicting feelings to myself.
Savi builds a bonfire around the sacrificial rock. All the Kind clans gather around, some nursing injuries, others looking around furtively—not used to interacting with other Kind species if it’s not violent, if I have to guess.
The priests go on the fire first. All the rest of the minions are burning in that pile on the crater floor, but Vin?a’s priests get special, personal attention.
Their bodies are covered in their runes and their symbols, all of them carved deep into their skin, and though the priests are already dead we can hear each rune and symbol moan as the fire reaches them.
“Black magic fears the light,” Savi says with satisfaction.
When we finally lay Briar’s ruined body on the pyre, we throw in all the charred bits of heart we gathered up, too. Then we all flinch, because the flames scream. And they counter the charred black darkness in her that we can see swell and then shrink as the relentless fire burns and burns.
I find that my urge to say a few words is truly gone. I really take in what Vin?a did to Briar, the horrific tangle of her limbs, with half of her seeming to be inside out. Not to mention what I did to her.
I stare into the flames for a long while, Ty’s arm over my shoulders and the heat of him rivaling the blast from the fire.
The hour grows later. The moon is getting higher in the sky.
The wolves are getting restless.
Most of the pack’s females are back in the den, too far away for a mating run tonight.
But I’m not.
The wolves start howling. They circle the fire, doing a decent impression of the ritual the way it’s supposed to go—even without the drums.
All around us, I’m aware of the other members of the Kind who might understand what’s happening here but have certainly never witnessed it before. I see Savi and Winter exchange a glance, both of them looking various degrees of wide-eyed or fascinated. Maybe both.
It makes sense to me that this is how this happens. Nothing typical for Ty and me. Nothing run-of-the-mill. Only the death pyre of a death goddess beneath the Wolf Moon for the first high king and his famously reluctant queen.
If I’d planned it this way deliberately, it couldn’t suit us more.
I stand straight, feeling like myself again—and a little bit more. A little more kick, courtesy of the moon. I can feel her pull. I can feel everything.
Longing. Yearning—if, of course, he’s male enough to catch me.
I push away from Ty and grin up at him.
“My liege,” I say, and I let everyone hear me, because the run will be ours—but the pack has earned the right to hear me claim Ty, too. To acknowledge the moon, and Ty. To signal that I am finally embracing my fate. “There’s a full moon tonight. You might have noticed.”
I feel everything in Ty still. His dark eyes are so intense I can feel them inside and out. They gleam—but he doesn’t smile.
We’re years past that.
“If I were you, baby, I would run,” he warns me. “Take a head start. See if it helps you.”
That’s all the warning he’s going to give me. I know that in every humming inch of my body.
I shift like lightning, and then I run.
And as I run, I hear the wolves howling my name. I head for the sleek, steep sides of the crater and I barrel my way up.
The moon is almost there. I can feel her everywhere, urging me on.
I run.
I feel it—we all feel it—when the Wolf Moon hits her greatest height. It’s that loud, wild song that heats my blood and spurs me on, and this time, for the first time since I was very young, I let it carry me.
I let the howls of my pack light me up and make me faster.
And everything changes because I’m part of it. It sings in me and I am the song, and Ty is already behind me. He’s right there.
We streak out of the crater and I cut to the left and race along the rim, scenting him not three paces behind me.
He and I are one. Together, we make a glorious harmony.
I want to do this song of ours justice. I take to the mountains and he chases me there.
He loses ground when I cut beneath a fallen tree.
He catches up again when I lose my grip on some rocks, but I make my fall an attack—taking him out at the knees and then switching direction while he’s still on his back.
I’ve never run this hard or this fast.
It’s like running to the moon herself. For her.
I can feel him at my heels. I can hear the way he sounds out the glory of this, so loud that every wolf, all over Southern Oregon, can hear.
I howl back.
Somewhere in between Crater Lake and Mount McLoughlin, I try to turn a tight little corner in the Sky Lakes Wilderness, then slip.
That’s the end of it.
And the beginning of everything else.
I discover, as he takes me down at last, that what I always thought of as a submission is anything but.
I do my part. He does his. Together we make one bright and burning song beneath the moon.
We sing out, into the trees. Ty surges deep inside of me. I take him in deep.
We fuck ourselves free and we come and come and come.
This goes on so long that I can’t tell the difference between the two of us.
When I know myself again, when I’m conscious that there’s some separation between him and me however little I want it, he’s deep inside me. I can still feel his cock, thick and engorged, and we wait there for it to subside.
Tonight, he takes his snout and he pushes my head back, exposing my throat. He rolls us so we’re both lying with our bellies toward the sky. Then he lets a howl out to the moon that seems to shake every part of me.
I feel a wild heat on my throat, like his hard human hand wrapped tight, though I know he’s still a wolf and still rooted deep within me.
I howl myself when it hurts, and when it’s done, Ty licks my tears away and hums as if they’re precious.
I know that when I look at myself again, I’ll see a patch of darker fur in my wolf form. In my human form, I’ll have a new tattoo.
My crown at last.
I feel shivery and shaky. I feel great.
And we’ve lain like this before, too many times to count. But tonight, everything is changed. Everything is new.
“My queen,” Ty says in the old language, his snout at my ear.
I already feel different, but those words are like runes. It’s like he’s carving them into my flesh, my bones. I feel myself shimmer into someone new. I wonder if the fire will hear me moan when I go. If it will be Ty’s name.
“Your queen,” I say in the same old way, formal and forever.
Then, together, we howl out the true name of the moon that only werewolves know, and it’s done.
It’s like a different source of light is in me now. As if there is the sun now, the moon always. And now this. Us.
Burning bright forever. Connected in ways that I can feel. I can’t feel that link that I knew was fate, drawing us together.
Instead it’s like I’m inside of him too. As if we will never be apart, no matter what our bodies do. It’s beautiful. It’s hot. It’s our song, and we get to sing it for the rest of our lives.
“Did you know?” I ask him, in wonder.
He nips at me, gently. “I hoped.”
Eventually, we separate, but when we sit up we press against each other. Feeling ourselves separate takes some adjusting. I feel almost like a new cub again, unsure how to operate my own body.
We sit there for a long while, all alone. Away from the noise in the pack, the burning bodies of our enemies, and the future unfolding before us.
As soon as we see the first hint of the coming morning, we break into an easy kind of trot and head back down, out of the mountains, and into the brand-new year.
I am claimed now. We are mated. All of our struggles with fate are over.
Vin?a is gone, and the world is new.
And if I have anything to say about it, ours.