Chapter 48
Nyxiana
Itake us home. The crossing takes nothing out of me. I come out the other side of it with more in me than I had going in. His blood is in me now.
We land in the valley in full daylight. The air is different.
I’ve phased home into this valley more times than I can count.
Every one of those landings had the failing seal sitting over the top of it.
Faelan had his hands in it underneath that the whole time.
There’s nothing over this place now but sky.
My wings are still out. They’ve been folded against my back since the chamber.
Putting them away before I walk into a yard full of people is the oldest thing I do.
I get most of the way into it before I stop.
I’ve called myself a vampire since I was young.
It’s the first word out of my mouth when anybody asks what I am.
It’s true but it’s never been all of it.
The wings come from my mother. Most of the people who know me have never seen them.
They stay. We walk in toward the lodge. The relief reaches me before we’re halfway across the grass.
It’s running through every bond in this pack at once.
Ansel’s out on the treeline where he always is.
He lifts a hand at us as we come past. He’s never taken his eyes off those trees long enough to do that before.
Two of the younger ones have a ball game going against the barn wall.
One of them sees us and drops the ball in the grass.
Word of what happened up there has come home ahead of us.
I’ve no idea how it got here. Every face that turns toward us across that yard is asking me the same question.
Nobody says it out loud. Is it actually over?
I give them the smallest nod I have. One of the older women starts clapping.
The man beside her joins her. Then four more.
Then everybody in the yard is clapping. Fifty wolves standing in the grass in the middle of the afternoon.
It doesn’t let up. Then they come. Hands land on my back and my arms. More land on him.
The whole compound closes in on the two of us, they’ve kept a polite two feet of air around me since the day I got here, today nobody bothers and I stand there and let them.
One of the kids stops dead in front of me and stares at my wings. Her mother takes her by the arm and moves her along.
Dane has one arm around Nova at the edge of it.
The two of them are quiet in the middle of all that noise.
Nova’s wrist is bare. The silver is no longer on her skin.
Not faded, not gone quiet, there’s nothing left where it was.
I’ve never seen the inside of that woman’s wrist without it.
Harper has a sleeve shoved up past the elbow.
She hasn’t done that in front of this pack since the day she touched the Debt Stone and she isn’t looking at the bare place.
Ben has two fingers resting on it while the two of them talk to Dane.
Kari’s got her right hand in Rafe’s. When a wolf passes she pulls her hand loose, turns her palm up to show them then gives it back to him.
Then group breaks up. There’s a smoker going behind the lodge, has been for hours by the smell of it, and people start moving that way.
Two of the women drag a table out into the grass.
People start past us toward the smoker. Valen stays where he is, he’ll come to a fire and sit at it.
He takes the outside log every time. I stop with him.
His hair has come loose over his forehead and he’s left it there.
There’s a closed line at his collarbone where a construct came through his shirt.
His eyes go across the yard once before coming back to me.
Dane comes across the yard to us. He puts his hand out and Valen takes it.
“Every wolf I put on that line is still walking,” Dane says. “The two of you did that.”
Valen keeps hold of his hand a second past where the shake ends. Then Dane looks at me.
“Welcome home,” he says.
He walks back across to Nova.
“Valen.” Ben calls from behind the lodge. “Give me a hand with this bench, would ya?”
Valen heads over to him. I go up onto the porch and watch from there. Valen lifts one end. Ben takes the other. They carry it across the yard to the fire pit and set it down. Ben backs off a step and looks at it.
“That’s crooked.”
“It’s the ground,” Valen says.
“It’s you.” They pick the bench up, shift it eight inches, and put it down again. Ben looks at it a second time.
“Worse.”
Valen laughs. I’ve never heard him do that.
The porch rail is worn smooth under my palm.
Kaspian comes to stand beside me. He doesn’t say anything.
His shoulder settles against the post, and he looks out at the yard, standing the way he has stood next to me since we were children.
I push off the rail, sit down on the porch steps, down among them.
Somebody puts a plate in my hands and is gone before I can see who it was. I eat what’s on it.
The afternoon runs down. Lyanna comes through, takes my chin in her hand, turns my face to the light.
She smiles at me, lets go and moves on. Evren comes past with an armload of wood.
He’s carrying it bare-handed, and the bark isn’t smoking, it’s the first time that’s been true in a month.
Evie’s on the end of the woodpile, boots hooked on the log under her.
She looks like she hasn’t slept. I’ve read that girl since the first week I knew her.
There’s been nothing there to read since before we left for Drakoria.
Evren comes back through and sits down on the log beside her.
The yard thins out by degrees. A fire starts in the pit.
Somebody takes up a guitar, badly, is shouted at, keeps playing.
I find Valen at the treeline. He’s out past the last of the firelight with his back against a pine.
When there’s no work left, this is where he ends up.
I put my hand in his, walk him a short way further out, away from the fire and the noise. He comes with me.
“There’s something I never told you.”
He turns to face me. Out here I can see him better than he can see me. His hair is still down over his forehead. His mouth easy. He waits.
“Doria. The balcony outside your room, the morning you went out to walk the grounds.”
“He came to you.” He says it like something already settled. “I heard him say so in that chamber.”
“You heard what he wanted the Council to hear.” I make myself say the rest at a normal speed.
“Before he asked me for anything, he told me where the third point was. Under the floor of the Purification Chambers. It isn’t in an archive, and it isn’t in anybody’s history. I was never going to find it. He handed it to me. Then he asked me to stand aside.”
Valen doesn’t move.
“At breakfast you told me you turned it up in the court records,” he says.
“Yes.”
“On the stair you told me Lachlan mentioned it.”
“Yes.”
“I heard you do that.” His voice comes out low. “I decided I’d misheard you. I wanted to have misheard you.”
“You didn’t. I said it two ways because I hadn’t worked out which one you’d let go.”
He waits me out. “There’s the rest of it,” I say. “When I put my hand on his throat, I told him he was right about the crime. He didn’t lie to you in that chamber. Not one word of what he said about me was untrue.”
His hand stays where it is on my arm. “We came home out of Doria with three points because he gave us one.”
“Yes.”
“And you carried that alone through Blood Moon and everything after it.”
“Yes.”
“Why now?” he asks.
“Because I’m done deciding what you get to know. Not just tonight, not just about this. I’ve done it all my life. I did it to you for months, I’m finished with it.”
He takes a long time with it.
“Standing in your doorway, that would have gutted me,” he says.
“I know.”
“It doesn’t now.” His hand comes up to the side of my face. “Faelan’s dead, Ana. You could have kept that for the rest of your life. You told me anyway.”
Both arms come around me and pull me in against him.
His chin comes down on the top of my head and he holds on.
That’s all of it. He has every piece of it now.
Behind us the fire is going, and somebody is still playing that guitar.
Two people start in on each other about a horse.
He pulls back far enough to look at me, pushes my hair off my face and keeps his hand there.
“Come on,” he says.
I take his hand. Neither of the two at the fire looks up when we pass.