Chapter 39
Valen
Itake the blade out before the sun clears the ridge, sit on the top step with it across my knee.
It has an edge, had one yesterday. I run the whetstone down it anyway, slow, one long pass at a time because I want something to do with my hands. My pack sits by the door where it’s sat since the first morning I slept in this cabin. I don’t carry it when I go with her. It stays packed regardless.
Morning light comes low across the yard and puts the shadow of my own roof out over the steps.
The sun’s on my boots, the rest of me is in the cold.
Through the trees toward the lodge there are more wolves in one place than I’ve seen in days.
Nobody’s crossing that ground with a chore.
The lodge door hasn’t stopped opening since I sat down, the ones going in aren’t coming back out.
That’s not a patrol getting sorted, it’s a pack being called.
No call came to me. It never does. The bond goes around me the same as has in every pack before this one, because it goes where wolves go and I’m not one.
I’ve never said a word about that to anybody.
Somebody comes out onto the porch and goes back in, then Nyxiana breaks off from the group and starts across the yard.
Alone, heading straight for my cabin, past the woodpile.
Her stride is even the whole way, the walk she uses when she’s holding herself together by force.
I’ve watched her put it on for a fae crown and her own pack.
It’s the first time she’s ever used it walking toward me.
I set the whetstone down on the step and stay where I am.
Two hundred feet of open dirt and she takes all of it without looking at anything except me.
She stops at the bottom of the steps. Her hair’s down and the sun turns it more silver than white.
Her face is pale, which is nothing new, but the gray has gone out from under her eyes and there’s color in her mouth that wasn’t there before Blood Moon.
She fed while she was gone. I’m glad. It’s the first thing since Doria I’ve been glad about.
She opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again.
“There’s a fifth realm,” she says. “The celestial one. It’s where the founders sat when they did all of it. It’s still standing, and Faelan is most of the way into it through the crack Harper’s death opened.”
I put the whetstone in my pocket.
“The key is finished. It’s on my wrist. Nothing else opens that door.” She stops. “And the map has answered to your signature since the first day we opened it. Never to anybody else.”
“So you can’t do it without me.”
“No.” Her hands are open at her sides. “I could stand here and make that the reason. I’m not going to. I’m asking you. Will you come with me?”
I don’t answer her. Not because I’ve decided anything. I simply don’t have anything to say, I’ve never told anybody yes to something this size. I don’t know how a man starts. She waits, then climbs to the second step, which puts her face level with mine while I’m sitting on the top one.
“Valen.” She says it quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“You said that already.”
“I said I’d do it again. It was true then, it’s true standing here. It also wasn’t the part that needed saying, and I knew that while I was saying it.” She takes a breath. “I’m not sorry I knew what you were. I’m sorry I decided you didn’t get to.”
She holds still while she says it, her eyes on mine the whole way through.
I’ve never seen her look at anybody like that.
My hand comes up off my knee and the hum goes off under my sternum.
It comes up sharp and all at once, the way it did on that bed last night with her name on my lips.
I know what I am. I’ve known since the night at her door.
What I can’t explain is why the thing built into me answers hardest when she’s the one standing in front of me.
My fingers stop at the edge of her cheekbone.
I can feel the cold coming off her skin.
“Nyxi.”
Kaspian is at the bottom of the steps with the dust from his boots still moving behind him. My hand goes down. Hers goes down. We’re a foot apart by the time he stops.
“The marks spiked,” he says. “All three at once. Lyanna caught it from across the compound with nobody’s hands on any of them. Then her crystal went off with Rhonan in it, out of Drakoria.” He’s still getting his breath. “Faelan’s moving. He’s going for all three at once, every realm.”
“How long?”
“Nobody knows. Lyanna says hours if we’re lucky and she won’t put a number past that.”
“And Dane?”
“Dane wants you both. Now.”
Nyxiana is still one step below me with her hand at her side.
I could put mine down and turn for the treeline.
That’s what I have done with every moment like this one in my life.
Or I say it now, out loud, in front of her brother, with the whole pack gathering two hundred feet away.
There’s no good way to do it and there’s no time left to find one.
I come down the last step and take her hand.
“It still cuts,” I tell her. My voice comes out rough. “You knew what I was from the first day. You let me stand out there believing something else for months. I want you to hear that from me instead of working it out later.”
“I know.”
I keep hold of her hand. I have stood at the edge of other people’s ground all my life, waiting to be told I could come onto it. I’ve never asked for any of it, never taken any of it either.
“You’re not going in there alone.” My voice comes out hard. “There’s no way in any realm I let you go in there without me.”
Her eyes go gold at the edges, she lets it happen where I can see it then her fingers close hard around mine.
“Come on,” Kaspian says. “Both of you.”
I pick the pack up off the boards and put it on.
Then I fall in on her other side, close enough that my shoulder brushes against hers on the second stride.
I don’t move off. That’s the part that’s new.
We’ve been bumping shoulders since the North Range, every time it happened, I put a foot back afterward.
Crossing the yard the hum comes up closer to the surface than it’s been in days.
There’s a charge behind my eyes with it and nowhere for it to go.
Every other time I’ve shut that down and gone back to work. This time I leave it alone.
The pack is assembled at the lodge steps.
Rafe has his perimeter drawing spread out on a barrel top with three people around it.
Lyanna’s at the door with a bag over her shoulder, her sleeves pushed up.
Nova and Kari stand together on the near side with Harper between them.
There’s a chair behind Nova that she has clearly been told to sit in and hasn’t.
“You, Kari and Harper stay inside Lyanna’s reach,” Dane says to her, not for the first time by the sound of it.
Nova holds his eyes a long moment. Then she pulls the chair around and sits down in it. Evren comes in off the north at a run and stops at the back of the crowd without saying anything to anybody. Dane is up on the second step with the whole compound in front of him.
“The valley holds,” he says. “Whatever comes at that line while you’re gone, it comes at us, and we’ll be standing here when you get back.”
Then he looks past her and puts it straight at me.
“Valen. Are you going with her?”
Over fifty wolves in that yard and every one of them hears him ask it. Nobody in any pack, anywhere, has ever asked me a question in front of the people who’d have to live with the answer.
“Yes.”
Dane nods once. It’s the smallest thing a man can do and more than I ‘ve ever been given.
Nyxiana steps out into the open ground and turns her left wrist over.
The star flares once, hard, bright enough to put color on the faces nearest her and throw the shadow of her arm on the boards behind her. Then the air in front of her opens.
Suddenly there’s a door standing open, and the light coming through it isn’t morning light.
Every wolf in that yard takes a step back from it.
It’s impossible to look straight at it. She turns and holds her hand out to me.
The hum comes up under my sternum hard enough that I have to set my feet.
It’s the strongest it has been since last night, and this time I know where it’s pointed.
She puts both fists in my shirt and pulls me down to her and kisses me.
Her hands come up on either side of my jaw. I pull her in close against me and kiss her back like a man who might not get another one, because I might not.
Nobody in that yard makes a sound.
She lets go. I put my forehead down against hers.
“In case,” she says.
“In case.”
I take her hand.
We go through together.