Chapter 31
Nyxiana
The cold is deeper this morning.
I run cool, have done ever since I can remember. This isn’t that. This has been sitting in me since I opened my eyes and it hasn’t shifted. The sun is full on the boards outside my window with August heat.
I get the cruor out of the case where I keep it.
Eleven coins, more than a run to the quarter has ever taken.
Blood Moon is home, home is where the prices go strange on you.
I count them out into my palm the same way I’ve counted them for decades, oldest first, checking the crystal in each one against the light from the window.
My hand isn’t as steady around them as it should be and I put them down.
Before I take a crossing that long I’m going to know exactly what I have to spend on it.
So, I test it. Floor to door, one side of my cabin to the other, a distance I’ve covered without thinking about it since the day I moved in.
The dark comes up but it’s slow coming and even slower letting go, so much that it doesn’t finish.
I come out of it a full step short of the door with my weight already going the wrong way.
My hand reaches the frame before my knees reach the floor.
I holding on with my heart hammering against my ribs and my legs not entirely willing to take the rest of me back off that frame.
The cabin is eleven feet across. I’ve crossed continents, this has never happened.
Not the year I went longest without a run, nor any of the times I let it go past sensible because there was work in front of me.
I make myself go through it properly instead of around the edges of it.
The last time I fed to full was before Drakoria.
Since then there’s been the quarter, which came to less than half of what I went down there for.
Then a broken vessel in a street, three swallows off the bottom of it.
Every crossing since Drakoria has had Valen.
He doesn’t carry like a passenger, never has.
Something in him pulls against the dark the whole way and I’ve been paying out of a reserve that had nothing spare in it to start with.
It’s worse than I let myself track. I could go anyway.
I’m good enough to make Blood Moon on empty, probably, and that is the entire problem.
A phase that doesn’t finish clean over open country in the middle of a crossing isn’t a risk I get to take by myself.
Not now. Not with the last of them in front of me and no one else in any realm who can read those marks. Which leaves the other thing - asking.
I’ve fed myself in the dark for decades and nobody at Ash Hollow ever knew it was a thing that had to be managed.
Valen knows. He caught my hand shaking in the yard before we crossed to Drakoria and kept his own on my arm until I said it out loud.
Then he told me to tell him the next time, before it got this far, said we would handle it together.
The day after that, in Drakoria, he asked me why I go to another realm for blood when fifty people live at Ash Hollow, and I gave him the rest of it.
Outside my window, past the horse paddock, Valen is at the far edge of the compound.
He hasn’t moved off that treeline since last night.
The light came up over him and the sun is high enough now to put his shadow short on the path.
He’s still standing in it. I’ve watched that man come in off a perimeter at dawn morning after morning.
He always came in. This time he left my porch before I got to say anything other than the answer he asked for.
There’s more in me, none of it is anything he wanted to hear at the time, some of it he might want now.
I stay at the window. Then I go to Lyanna.
Everyone at Ash Hollow knows what I am. Dane knew before I ever crossed the yard.
What none of them know is that it has to be managed.
Lyanna is the one who worked that out on her own because she’s treated people in this compound who aren’t wolves, she knows what those bodies run on.
She’s never asked me a question I didn’t offer to answer first.
She looks up when I come in. Whatever she’s holding goes down on the table. She doesn’t ask me what’s wrong.
“How long since you fed properly?”
“Before Drakoria.”
She goes still at that.
“And since?”
“Part of a vessel in the Blood Moon quarter. Then most of another one that got broken before I finished it - a third of what I should have taken, since this hunt started, with a crossing on nearly every day of it.”
Saying it out loud takes something out of me that the crossings didn’t. Lyanna comes around the table, takes my wrist in both hands, holds it a while. Then she puts two fingers under my jaw and turns my head into the light.
“You can’t make Blood Moon like this,” she says. “Not safely. Not today.”
“I know.”
“Then we can skip the part where I talk you out of it.”
“Is there another way?”
“There’s always been another way.” She lets go of me. “You’ve simply never taken it.”
“Nobody offered.”
“Your brother did. He asked me about it the week you left for Drakoria, and I told him yes.” She goes to the cupboard. “Nobody ever came back to me.”
She tells me the same way she’d tell me the dose of something - somebody gives blood.
She draws it into a vessel, with the same care she uses on everyone.
I take it from a cup. Nobody’s mouth goes near anybody’s skin.
That last part is why I’m still standing in this room. I’ve never fed on a person I know.
“Clean,” she says. “Clinical. That’s all it is.”
“Who?”
“Somebody who won’t make it a story afterward.” She’s already reaching for the case with the needles in it. “Leave that part to me.”
“All right,” I say.
Lyanna sends for Evren who comes in a few minutes later with his sleeve already pushed up past his elbow.
“Lyanna said blood.” He drops into the chair by the table and puts his arm out on it. “How much do you want?”
“Evren, you don’t have to.”
“I heard that part.” He’s already looking at Lyanna for the needle. “Left arm’s better. The right goes hot on me sometimes and I’d rather it not do that with a needle in it.”
There’s a heat coming off him even though he’s sitting still.
His knee is bouncing under the table and none of it stops him holding that arm perfectly steady when she asks him to.
Lyanna draws it the same way she’d draw anything, unhurried, both hands sure.
Evren watches her with mild interest, talking the whole time about a horse that’s gone lame, whether it’s the shoe or the leg.
Then she stoppers the vessel and pours. The cup goes into my hands exactly as she said it would.
I hold it, warm against my palms. Decades of this.
I count back. The runs down to the quarter, the coins counted out on a board in a black-stone street, every homecoming with my hood up and nothing said to anybody in this compound.
Managing it by myself was the entire point of managing it.
Now here it is in a cup, in my own compound, in the middle of the morning, because I couldn’t.
I drink it. All of it, without stopping, because stopping partway would mean standing in this room holding a half-empty cup while two people wait for me to finish.
It goes down and goes to work fast, faster than anything I’ve bought in that quarter in years.
The cold starts letting go of me from the inside out. My hands come back firs, then my legs.
“How are you doing?” Evren asks. He’s got his sleeve back down and he’s looking at my face while he says it, checking my color.
“Better.” My own voice comes back with it. “Considerably better.”
“Good. You looked gray when you came in.” He stands and stretches his arms over his head. “Say the word if you need more. I’ve got plenty and I’m not doing anything with it.”
It takes me a second to catch that he’s joking. I smile at him, and he grins back like he’s been waiting for it.
“Thank you.”
“It’s nothing.”
He offered this before we left for Drakoria.
Kaspian brought it to me in the yard and I said no before he’d finished asking.
It’s the first time in my adult life another living person has put any part of themselves into keeping me on my feet, it’s the second time this one has tried.
He’s saying it in same the tone you’d use when lending somebody a rope.
“Thank you,” I say again.
He knocks the doorframe with his knuckles on the way out.
When they’re both done with me, I stay and help Lyanna put the room back in order.
My legs will hold now although standing still isn’t going to work for me today.
Instruments are back in their case, vessel washed and set on the rack, the chair pushed in.
Out the window, past her herb beds, Valen’s over at the paddock rail with two of the younger wolves.
He’s off the treeline, then. Back at work.
He’s the tallest thing in that group by a clear margin.
I’ve him picked out before I can make out either of the boys with him, a hand on the top rail, back to the compound.
His hair is dark with water from where he’s put his head under the trough.
He leans down to say something to the smaller one, the boy laughs and goes off toward the barn at a run.
Then he straightens, turning his head and for a moment I have the side of his face, his mouth set the way it does when he’s working. It tells me nothing, never has.
I watch him for a while from Lyanna’s window, she comes to stand next to me.
“Go, talk to him,” she says.
“It isn’t that simple.”
“It never is,” she says, going back to the table. “You’ve got until you leave.”
I go back to my cabin, legs holding the whole way across the yard, steady for the entire distance, for the first time in days. That’s strength enough to make the crossing. It isn’t enough to walk down to that paddock and ask him to come with me.