Chapter 13
COUPLE’S TRIP
“Remind me why he needs to be here,” Jasper whispers to me, side-eyeing Omar as he sets out candles in a circle around us.
We sit crisscross applesauce, facing each other with perfect white pebbles underneath us and the scent of the nearby cherry tree, magically in full blossom despite it already being summer, flooding our senses.
“He knows what he’s doing, he can help,” I say back through clenched teeth.
Jasper wasn’t thrilled about my idea for him and me to take a little walk on the Lunar Plane, or at least, he wasn’t convinced it would work. But I’m confident that whatever we experience there will give him some clarity and guidance.
“Do you really think we’ll be able to speak with him?” he asks, painfully earnest.
I sold the idea of a moonwalk to Jasper with the notion that we’d be able to find Jericho in there and even speak to him. The idea lit up Jasper’s face.
I take his hands, letting them sit between us. “I found you, didn’t I? When you were in the hospital.”
“But that’s different. That’s us.”
“I know. But he’s your father and I’ll be there to help find him.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” Omar chimes in. He’s finished setting out candles and is now lighting them with a pack of matches. “The lunar energy in this space is off the charts.”
We’re in the packhouse, in a room vastly different from the glamorous event space upstairs and the corporate offices on the other floors.
Here on the fourteenth floor—fourteen being a significant number for wolves due to it being half the duration of a lunar phase—is the prayer room.
A sacred space for wolves to meditate and connect with the moon gods.
The walls around us are huge LED screens, displaying a crystal-clear landscape, flowing hills, blue skies, and cherry trees, their branches swaying in a light digital breeze, causing the animated blossoms to drift like confetti through the air.
To my right, a crystal the size of an office chair rises from the pebbled floor, the energy vibrating off it in waves that are almost visible to my wolf senses.
The instant I stepped in here I could tell we were in a special place.
The veil between our plane of existence and the Lunar Plane is wafer thin here, it feels sort of translucent, as if I could easily step from one side to the other.
“Are we almost ready?” Jasper asks, his impatience overt.
“Can’t rush the moon gods, my man,” Omar replies, pouring a pouch of wolf’s teeth onto a large wooden platter with a carved border, and placing it between us.
When he’s done, he moves beyond the edge of the circle of candles, sitting next to the large crystal, behind a crescent of dimpled bronze bowls. “Remember how this works, Max?”
I nod to Omar, then say to Jasper, “Close your eyes.”
Jasper studies me skeptically for a minute and I give his palms an encouraging squeeze—we got this. He closes his eyes. With one big breath in I do the same.
“I want you to focus on your breath,” Omar says, guiding us, “acknowledge any intrusive thoughts that enter your mind, and let them drift away.”
Immediately, I’m confronted with a swirl of intrusive thoughts.
How am I going to tell Jasper about moving across the country for college?
What if I don’t want to be marked? What if we don’t find his father waiting for us on the Lunar Plane?
But I do my best to follow Omar’s guidance and release these thoughts into the ether.
I take another breath, letting it fill my chest, letting my shoulders rise and my back expand, then releasing it, along with my anxieties and concerns.
The warbling bell sound as Omar drags a small, cloth-covered mallet around the inside of one bronze bowl rings out, quietly at first then gaining volume.
He moves to another, this one with a deeper sound, resonant and rich, harmonizing with the still-ringing sound of the first, sending vibrations through me.
Another tone is added to the mix, and pretty soon my mind is flooded with sound.
Omar plays the bowls in a random but enchanting sequence, revisiting tones, mixing them with new vigor.
My mind’s eye pulses with colors and shapes as I zero in on the sounds.
“Hey Max.” Jasper’s voice arrives in my head, low but audible over the ringing. “How do we know if it’s working?”
“Listen to the world, let your mind open,” I say. “Let your wolf self roam.”
Omar adds a familiar-sounding instrument to the mix, a bean-filled bamboo tube that sounds like rain as it’s flipped, as well as his own voice, a deep hum that warms me from the inside out.
That feeling spreads, the heat increasing until my skin feels like it’s on fire.
I open my eyes but am confronted by nightmare visions, coming at me all at once.
It’s freaking intense. I see wolves howling out in pain.
A smoke-flooded field, where hundreds of wolves lie strewn across the muddy grass, blood spattered everywhere.
I see my friends lying in a heap, their wide eyes unblinking, their bodies not moving.
I see Aisha running down a long dirt path at night, turning back as if she’s scared of whoever is following her, as if she’s scared I’m following her.
I see Jasper and think the nightmare visions are over but as he approaches, he opens his jaw inhumanly wide, fangs elongating.
His hands hold me in place, I try to shake free, to scream but I can’t move, and no sound escapes my parted lips.
I cry out in pain as his teeth sink into my neck—
“Max,” Jasper says, and I know it’s not the terrifying vision of him, but the real him speaking to me, and I’m suddenly calm.
I find myself floating in a galaxy-like void.
Pinprick lights dance around me. My fingertips drape through the onyx river, causing ripples in the nonexistent water.
This place feels familiar. The Lunar Plane. “Max, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Where are you?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think it’s working.”
“What can you see?”
“Nothing. My eyes are still closed.”
Up ahead I spot a small light on the horizon and I swim toward it, half flying, half floating.
As I draw closer I realize the light isn’t a star or the moon, it’s Jasper, he’s floating in the same inky black void, with his eyes closed.
I reach for him and take both his hands, the same way we began this journey.
“Open your eyes,” I say.
He does and from his eyes shines a light so brilliant and white it blinds me momentarily.
Slowly though, the light dissipates and, blinking, I realize we’ve arrived somewhere new.
We’re still holding on to each other’s hands, but now we’re standing, surrounded by cherry trees and green grass that carpets the sloping hills rolling away in all directions.
We’re in the orchard from the screens in the prayer room, only now it’s real.
Blossoms dance in the wind and branches sway in a breeze that grazes my cheek.
“Whoa,” Jasper says, looking around, taking it all in. “Is this . . . ?”
“Yeah,” I say. Even though it looks different than the last time I was here. “The Lunar Plane. We made it.”
He lets go of one hand but stays holding the other, wandering a little from where we’ve landed. The aroma of the blossoms is intense and sparks a familiar affection in my stomach. It’s the same scent that’s always accompanied Jasper.
“Where do we go?”
I look around for a sign or some guiding spirit animal. “I don’t know. Last time my wolf self found me.”
“I don’t see any wolves.”
Then my eyes catch on something in the distance. From here it’s just a shadow, a dot on the horizon, but I can tell it’s a house of some kind from the smoke wafting out the chimney.
“What’s that?” I point in the direction of the silhouette.
“A cabin?” Jasper says, already starting to move in that direction.
“How can you tell?”
“Because I know it.”
He speeds up until he’s running toward the squat building, pulling me along with him.
For what feels like hours but also no time at all we run, until we finally arrive at the door.
Before me sits your quintessential log cabin, a lumberjack’s dream house.
Thick pine trunks run horizontally along the walls, a set of uneven stairs lead up to a front porch complete with rocking chair, the door is a different color wood from the rest of the house.
“You’ve been here before?” I ask.
“This is my dad’s cabin.” Jasper is staring at it intently. “It’s not far from the lodge at the pack retreat. My dad built it when I was a kid, said it was our private hideaway, a place we could go when things got overwhelming with the pack.”
“I didn’t see it during the Blue Moon Festival.”
“It’s deep in the forest, well hidden. A proper retreat.”
I readjust my hand in his so that our fingers are laced together. “Why do you think we’ve been brought here?”
Jasper takes a tiny step forward. “Maybe . . . he needed somewhere quiet to come while he healed?”
“You think he’s inside?”
He gestures up to the chimney, where a light plume of gray smoke swirls into the sky.
“Someone’s in there.”
Jasper takes another step, letting go of my hand.
“Dad?” A shadow moves behind one of the windows.
“Dad!” Without waiting another beat, he springs up the stairs, pulls open the door without knocking, and disappears inside.
I chase after him, not wanting to lose him if some trippy, metaphysical shiz happens.
But what I find when I burst through the door rocks me to my core.
Oh my moon gods . . . I clutch the doorframe to stay upright.
Jasper is standing in the center of a circular woven rug. A sofa sits to his right, facing a crackling fire, the air is warm and smoky, the delicious scent of apples and cinnamon drifts from the little kitchen, and sitting at a crooked, round dining table is a woman.
“M—Mom?” Jasper asks, his voice barely a whisper.
She looks just like him. The same green eyes and freckles, the same slim nose. And there’s something about her energy that’s familiar, instantly warming me to her.
“Is it really you?” Jasp asks, wonder and disbelief making him hesitant.
Jasper’s mom, Mitsuha, stands, her long black hair falling over one shoulder. She’s wearing a simple yet elegant dress, a scarf wrapped around her narrow shoulders.
“Jasper,” she says, her voice soft, almost as unbelieving as her son’s. “I’m so glad you came.”
“Mom!”
In an instant, Jasper has run into his mother’s arms, pulled her into his, and they stand like this for a good long while. Her head rests on his shoulder, his on the top of her head.
“Is this real?” he asks, finally. “It feels real.”
She smiles with tears in her eyes. “Then it must be so.” Carefully, as if she’s trying to commit every detail to memory, she runs a hand down the side of Jasper’s face, finally resting her palm against his chest. “You look good,” she says, laughing a little, color rising in her cheeks.
“So do you,” he replies. “You look . . . wonderful. I never thought I’d see you again.”
“I’ve always been here,” she pats his chest softly, and I don’t know if she means the cabin or Jasper’s heart. “I always will.”
“It’s so good to see you.”
Jasper pulls her into his chest once more and she leans into the hug as fiercely.
“Would you like to introduce me to someone?” Mitsuha asks, leaning back and glancing in my direction, a teasing smile on her peach-tinted lips.
Jasper opens his eyes. “Yes.” He leads his mother to me, keeping one of her hands firmly in his, and reaching for me with the other. “Mother, this is Max, my mate.”
“I—I’m honored,” I say, wholly unable to locate the right words.
“Max,” she says, smiling, and it feels like all the stars in the cosmos are shining at me.
“I’m so happy to meet you.” She reaches for me, and I give her my free hand, so that she, Jasper, and I are standing in a strange sort of circle.
Mitsuha’s energy flows like a celestial river from her to me.
Jasper’s cheeks are wet, with more tears streaming down them.
“It’s so nice to meet you too,” I say. “Jasper is—he loves you so much. He’s told me so many amazing things about you.”
“And I’ve watched over you both,” she says. “I want to thank you.”
“Me? For what?”
“For loving my son and fighting for him.” She glances slyly at Jasper. “I know that took great perseverance.”
Jasper laughs, looking down bashfully before we catch eyes. He looks so happy and so overwhelmed all at once.
“Mom, I . . .” Jasper says, but stops to swallow, his throat bobbing. “We’re in trouble. I don’t know what to do.”
“Come,” Mitsuha says, turning for the table. “I’ve made tea. We have some time.”