Chapter 8
Nyxiana
The lodge common room smells like woodsmoke, and the herbs Lyanna keeps by the hearth, cool morning light coming in through the windows behind me.
Harper sits closest, her wrist bared on the table between us.
Nova and Kari sit past her, close enough to touch.
Lyanna stands at Kari’s shoulder already, her healer’s kit open on the bench beside her, though there’s nothing in it that treats what we’re actually here to look at.
Three marks, three women I’d bleed for. I still don’t know what Faelan built into their skin.
“I want to read them properly.” I say it to the whole room. “All three, together. It’s the only way I get past guessing.”
Dane stands near the hearth, one shoulder set against the stone. “And you need him for that.”
He means Valen, standing just inside the door where I put him. Rafe hasn’t stopped watching him since he walked in.
“The marks only move when he’s near.” I keep my tone plain. “I need them moving to read them.”
“He’s the reason Kari ended up on the ground yesterday.” Rafe doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. “Now you want him standing over her again.”
“I’m not asking anyone to trust him.” I hold Dane’s eyes, not Rafe’s. “I’m asking for enough distance to work and not enough to lose the read.”
“Get on with it.” Kari has one arm crossed over her chest the other is resting, hand turned palm up, on her knee where the mark sits. “I’d rather know what’s living in my hand than sit here being protected from finding out.”
Lyanna keeps two fingers at Kari’s pulse point the whole time, watching for anything that looks like the flare that dropped her before. “She’s steady,” she says, once, to no one in particular, more for the room’s nerves than mine.
Dane looks at Valen a long moment, then nods once. “Close enough to work. No closer.”
“Walk towards me. Slowly.” I keep my eyes on Harper’s wrist, not on him. “I want to see where the marks start answering you.”
Valen crosses the room at an even pace. I watch for the first sign of a reaction.
“There.” I stop him six careful feet out, right as the marks answer.
Harper’s wrist warms under my hand. Nova’s hand twitches against her own knee.
Kari sucks a breath through her teeth. Lyanna presses her palm steadier against Kari’s skin, watching for any sign of the burn flaring again.
Nothing burns. Nobody goes down. I look at Valen next, to see whether he’s steady enough for this to work.
My own read of him gives me nothing so I take him in the only way I have left: the stillness in his hands, one resting against his own thigh.
He hasn’t moved since I stopped him, feet planted exactly where I called out the distance.
It’s the same stillness I watched him carry through the yard yesterday, when the whole pack turned on him at once.
His eyes stay fixed on Harper’s wrist, not on me, gray and steady, giving away nothing at all.
That stillness gives me plenty, even while my own instruments are giving me nothing usable.
I could stand here and keep looking at him.
It’s the thing I want to do most right now.
I make myself stop and turn to the marks instead.
I take Harper’s wrist in both hands. My sleeve slides back off mine and the star I was born with shows on the inside of my left wrist, a shade paler than the skin around it.
For one moment my own sense reaches for her mark and gets exactly what it always give me - nothing I can hold.
Silver-white knotwork sliding out from under me.
It has never held still long enough to be anything but damage, now that it’s finally moving, its worse.
Valen’s presence changes that. The knotwork stops.
It sits there, whole, held in one place instead of sliding away from me the second I try to look directly at it.
I’ve studied this mark a dozen times since the network came down and never gotten past the same shifting nothing.
Now it holds. My sense sinks into the first line of it slowly, deeper than ever before, half expecting it to slip the way it always has.
It doesn’t. I don’t understand why yet. I only know that with him this close, it’s the first time I can actually study what Faelan built instead of chasing it across the surface of her skin.
Harper’s mark isn’t just a mark anymore.
A line runs from it, faint, continuing past her wrist into something my mind wants to call absence and isn’t quite.
I reach for Nova’s mark next, then Kari’s.
The same lines run through both, where they should stop at three separate wounds, they don’t.
They pick up from each other instead, one design instead of three.
“It’s not damage.” I say it out loud before I’ve fully worked out what I’m looking at. “It’s one thing. A map. A trail.”
Harper leans forward. “A trail to what?”
I follow it from the start on Harper’s wrist, out along the line as far as it runs clean. The first stretch carries a signature I already know, the way I’d know a voice across a crowded room long before I could place the face that owned it.
“Drakoria.” The word feels right the second it’s out of my mouth. “It starts at Drakoria.”
Dane straightens off the hearth. “Starts.”
Kari’s mouth twists into something with no humor in it at all. “Wonderful. My hand’s a road sign now.”
“Not yours.” I glance at her, at Nova. “Yours are still dark. Only Harper’s is clear.”
Nova’s hand goes to her own wrist. She doesn’t catch herself doing it until I do. “What does it mean, that it starts with her?”
“It means Drakoria’s where we go first. It’s the only point on this thing I can see.”
“Past that, it goes dark.” I follow the line further and get nothing back. No signature. Nothing to place. The same blank I get every time I reach for whatever Valen actually is underneath. “I can’t read past the first point. Not the next realm. Not how far it runs. Not where it ends.”
I try again anyway, pushing past Drakoria the way I’d try a locked door a second time, half expecting a different answer. Nothing changes. The dark past the first point gives back exactly the same nothing however I come at it.
“This is Faelan’s work.” I look up from the marks to the room.
“His own path through the realms, built into the three of you on purpose. It only shows one step at a time. My best read says each realm holds a piece of it and carrying that piece home is what wakes the next point. I can’t promise that’s how it works. It’s the only way forward I can find.”
Nova’s voice stays steady, already turning the fact over for what it takes from the pack, not for what it means to her alone. “So, we walk it blind. One realm at a time. And hope.”
“Yes.”
“Who’s walking it?” Dane asks.
“Me. And Valen.” I don’t hesitate over that part. “The marks move when he’s near. That’s the only reason I’ve got a read at all. The three of you carry the marks. You don’t have to carry yourselves through them.”
There’s one more piece and saying it will make it true in a way I can’t take back once it’s out of my mouth. I look at the trail one more time, at the single line the three marks make when they stop fighting each other, and every part of that line bends toward the same point.
“It answers to Valen.” I say it to the room, with him standing right there to hear it. “Without him near, the knotwork won’t hold still long enough to read at all. Whatever this trail is, it’s built to need him.”
Every wolf in the room turns to him at once.
“Of course it does.” Rafe’s voice goes low and hard. “Of course, the trail nobody can predict answers to the one man nobody can predict. That’s proof he’s tied to whatever this is. Deeper than any of us knew.”
“That’s not proof of anything.” I don’t let my voice climb, though more arms cross around the room with every word.
“There’s no reading it without him.” Nova cuts through before it goes further, already thinking three steps past the argument. “Whatever he is or isn’t, that part’s fact.”
“Fact or not, I don’t like it.” Wyatt, near the door, not moving off it. “The trail nobody can read answers to the one man nobody can read. That’s worth worrying about.”
“It’s not proof he’s dangerous.” Harper says quietly, thinking it through out loud. “It might just mean he’s built into this the same way we are.”
“Built in how?” Wyatt again, not backing down. “Nobody asked to be built into anything. He showed up yesterday and now the whole trail turns on him. That’s not coincidence, that’s a target on our backs.”
“Or it’s the reason we’ve got a way forward at all.” Nova doesn’t raise her voice to say it. “Pick which one matters more to you and act accordingly. I know which one I’m picking.”
The pack splits clean down that line. Half of them look at Valen like he’s the danger they always suspected. The other half look at the marks and understand, the way Nova does, that nobody reads those marks at all unless he’s standing right there.
I take in all of it in one breath. This is bigger than three women and a healer’s room. This is Faelan’s hand reaching directly into the people I love. I only just found the edge of it. I already know I haven’t found the bottom.
My attention goes to Valen. He holds still while half the room decides he’s the enemy, arms crossed over his chest, muscle visible where his sleeves are pushed up, nothing in his stance giving them a single thing to work with, the same stillness I watched him carry when this whole yard turned on him yesterday.
He stands there and lets them argue, gray eyes level on Dane instead of on any one accuser, hair falling over his forehead, his whole body planted like a man who’s already decided none of this can touch him.
Somehow that stillness makes half the room angrier than shouting would have.
The urge to put myself at his side again rises in me, sudden and unwelcome. I don’t move.
I don’t tell the room the rest. I don’t say that reaching into the dark past Drakoria feels exactly like reaching for him: the same nothing comes back either way. I don’t say I think the two are connected somehow, or that I have no idea how. I don’t know where either one ends.
There’s no walking this without him. The man I can’t read and can’t stop watching is about to be at the center of everything this pack does next. I’m the one who just put him there.
This is what I have: a trail I can read one step into and no further, and a man every line of it points to, standing six feet away like he doesn’t know he’s already the center of it. I don’t know yet how far that road runs, or what walking it will take from me.