Ember Under Four Moons

1. Elara

Elara

I am screaming.

I’d like to think I’m the kind of woman who falls through a hole in the sky with some composure.

I am not that woman. I have never met that woman.

I’m screaming the whole way down — or up, direction has stopped taking my calls — and there are stars everywhere, above me and under me and rushing past my ears.

The one useful thought I manage to have in all of it is that the sky is on the wrong side.

Then the ground finds me.

All of it. All at once. Flat on my back, and the impact goes through me like a dropped piano, and the air leaves my body in one long wheeze and does not send word about when it’s coming back.

Stars. Real ones and the other kind, spinning together.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

If I had any breath, I would lose it all over again.

I get maybe two seconds of lying there being a crater.

Then something lands on me and my eyes slam closed.

Something big. Something heavy. Something warm, hitting me chest to chest hard enough to bounce the last of the air I didn’t have, and my arms are pinned and my lungs are a rumor and there is a body on top of me.

A whole body.

An enormous one.

Around us, the world starts raining men.

One thud. A second, close enough that dirt jumps near my head. A third that sounds like a building sitting down. A fourth that barely lands before it’s moving.

“Remind me,” Gunnar’s voice says, from somewhere to my left, ragged, “never to run through a fucking portal again.”

A portal? What are we in, some science fiction made-for-TV movie now?

A groan. Someone spits out what I hope is grass.

“Who the hell thought that was a good idea?”

“We all did,” Brock says, still catching his breath.

“Elara!” Erik, and it cracks across the clearing like a whip, closer already, coming fast.

“She’s fine,” Rayner says, too calm compared to everyone else. “Probably. She broke Leif’s fall.”

I would like to respond to any of this. I would like to say I’m fine or what portal or WHO IS ON ME. Unfortunately, figuring out that last one requires opening my eyes, and I have become very committed to not doing that.

Ugh, fine. Reality doesn’t stop working if you ignore it, but keeping your eyes closed helps… right?

My eyes open against my will and I can’t see the stars anymore.

All I see is Muffin’s eyes.

Deep blue, that impossible blue, the blue I noticed in the hallway this morning and overruled on a technicality, because no collar means no owner and the system had spoken. They’re six inches from mine and they’re exactly the same eyes, and they are on the wrong face.

A man’s face — jaw, cheekbones, the whole arrangement — and the eyes haven’t changed at all. They’re watching me put it together the way they watched me do everything today. Patient. Like the show is me.

“…Muffin?”

The corner of his mouth goes up.

And I know that look. That is the exact look that came attached to the belly this morning, the this-was-my-idea-the-whole-time look, and it is currently on a person, and the math does itself before I can stop it. The missing one. The fourth one. The name Gunnar kept yelling into rooms he wasn’t in.

“Leif,” I say. “You asshole.”

And then he moves. Down, not up. His nose grazes the side of my neck and he inhales — slow, deep, like I’m something worth memorizing — and a sound comes out of his chest that no person should be able to make.

Low. Rough. I feel it more than hear it, everywhere we’re touching, which is currently everywhere.

My whole body answers it before I get a vote.

Traitor.

He comes back up. Smirks.

He looks comfortable, which is insane, because he’s lying on top of me in the middle of the woods and he is —

Oh.

Oh no.

He’s naked.

There is no fabric anywhere on this man.

I know this with astonishing certainty, because I can feel it — all of it, every warm inch of him lined up against every mortified inch of me — and some of those inches are reacting to the situation in a way that is definitely just physics.

Impact physics. Bodies do things when they fall out of the sky.

That’s science, and I am not going to be weird about science.

My face catches fire anyway. Neck first, then everything, and I can’t even cover it, because my arms are pinned under a very large, very naked man who spent the morning as my cat.

“Ohhh my god.” Gunnar has arrived above us, and I don’t have to see him to know the grin. “Seriously? Commander?”

Leif’s head comes up, unhurried. He looks at Gunnar the way Muffin looked at Kyle — like an annoyance in his kingdom — and then he looks back down at me.

“Commander?”

It comes out at a pitch I’ve never produced in my life, because no. No no no. The cat being the missing one, fine, I was nearly there, I’d have gotten there on my own. But the missing one is their commander, which means their commander sat in my lap.

I did the psspsspss at their commander.

In my hallway.

Out loud.

I rubbed his belly and called it emotional warfare. I fed him cream out of my good ramekin. I told him —

I told him everything.

I have spent the entire day narrating my inner life to their commanding officer, and he purred.

“Up,” Erik says, and it’s not a suggestion.

Leif takes his time about it, because of course he does, he’s a cat — cats don’t have shame, and apparently they don’t get issued any when they turn into people either.

He comes up off me in one motion like the ground was his idea, and cold air rushes into all the places he was, which I’m not thinking about, and then Erik’s hands find mine and I’m upright before my knees get briefed.

He doesn’t let go right away. His eyes do a fast lap of me — head, shoulders, ribs — checking for damage.

“I’m fine,” I say.

He doesn’t look convinced. He also doesn’t look away from my face. Everyone else in this clearing has located somewhere neutral to put their eyes and I have —

I look.

I don’t decide to look. There is no decision anywhere in the process. My eyes just go, all on their own, straight to the naked commander standing in the starlight like this is normal, like clothes are a thing that happen to other people, and —

Trees. I am looking at the trees. The trees are right there and they have never done anything to me.

My eyes go back.

“Elara.” I say it out loud, to myself, like a woman calling her own dog, and somewhere behind me Gunnar makes a sound like a man dying happy.

Third time.

A third time, and what the hell is wrong with me?

Leif catches them at it, because of course he catches them — he’s been watching me this whole time with that maddening cat calm, entirely unbothered, like being naked is exactly how he wanted me to see him.

“Somebody please give him pants.”

“Working on it.” Brock is already shrugging out of his jacket, which is not pants, but apparently we’re starting with achievable goals.

I turn around while they sort it out. All the way around. I stare into the dark between the trees, and behind me there’s the sound of fabric and Gunnar refusing to let a single second of this go — “Commander” — and underneath all of it, under my feet, the ground is humming.

Faintly.

And I know the notes by heart.

Not dealing with that right now. I have a full enough evening. The sky is on the wrong side, the cat is a commander, my face may never come back down to a livable temperature, and every single thing I’ve said out loud since this morning is currently under review by new management.

A hand lands warm between my shoulder blades — Erik’s, I know it without turning, the same way I knew what was standing behind my kitchen wall — and steers me gently around, and we start walking.

I keep my eyes forward.

Mostly.

“Does somebody want to tell me where the fuck we are?!”