21. Chapter 21 #4
Behind us, the quartet continued, but the music began to thin with distance.
Laughter turned faint. The glow overhead diminished.
Here the path was lined not with strings of golden bulbs but with iron torch stands burning orange-gold, their flames bending and lifting in the evening air.
The trees pressed closer together on either side, the undergrowth darker, the earth beneath my slippers softer than the flagstone and packed gravel nearer the house.
“I care for you,” Sage said as we walked.
I kept my eyes on the path. It seemed wiser.
“I want to be with you.”
His voice was low and intimate, as if he were offering rather than declaring.
I tried to pull my arm free enough to create space between us. He did not tighten his grip noticeably, but I also did not get free.
“I know,” he said, “truly know, that you want to be with me as well.”
My mouth went dry. “No.”
“You do.”
“No.”
“I have a way to make that happen.”
Those words reached me through the fog like a bell struck underwater.
The clearing appeared ahead.
Torchlight ringed it in a rough circle, tall iron stands driven into the earth, flames lifting and shuddering so that the whole place seemed to breathe in orange and gold.
At its center sat a large, flat stone altar waist-high and broad enough for a body.
Symbols had been carved into its surface and sides—deep-cut lines I did not recognize, old and deliberate and wrong enough that my wolf recoiled before my mind caught up.
I stopped walking.
Every instinct I had left rose all at once, too late and fierce enough to hurt.
“No.”
The word came out thicker than I intended, dragged through the heaviness in my tongue.
Sage turned to me fully then. His face in torchlight looked not demonic, not wild, but worse: sane. Convinced. Tender in the way fanatics often were when they had decided harm counted as mercy.
“It will be alright,” he said.
Not like this, I wanted to say cleanly. What came out was, “No. I don’t want thish.”
I tried to step back.
Before I could manage more than the thought of retreat, he bent, lifted me clean off my feet, and laid me on the stone.
The shock of it ripped a sound from me. The altar was cold even through the gown.
My skirt spilled around me in useless white excess.
I shoved at his chest with both hands and tried to twist sideways, to kick, to do anything that resembled the body I knew how to use.
Nothing answered properly. My arms had strength enough only to protest, not to fight.
My legs felt delayed, sluggish, treacherous.
Panic poured through the gaps where coordination ought to have been.
“Stop—”
Hands appeared from beyond the torchlight. Not faces. Hands. More than one set. They caught my wrists and my ankles. Leather bit skin.
“No, no, stop—”
I thrashed as best I could, which was hardly at all. The bindings were fast, practiced. By the time I tried to wrench my right hand free, it had already been strapped down. Then the left. Then my ankles were pulled apart and secured.
The realization hit in sick stages. This had been planned. Not merely by him. By others. The circle of elders. The wine. The path. The timing. The whole beautiful evening narrowing to this stone beneath my spine.
“Please,” I said, and heard my voice crack and slur. “Please don’t do thish.”
Sage stood over me, one hand braced on the altar beside my hip, his expression still agonizingly calm.
The torchlight made everything look ceremonial enough to lie.
I dragged in air and screamed because politeness had clearly become irrelevant.
“Nikolay!”
His name tore out of me and flew up into the torch-lit dark like a flare.
Sage’s open hand connected with my cheek so sharply that for one white instant the world disappeared into the impact.
My head snapped sideways against the stone. Heat flooded my skin where he had struck me. My ear rang. I tasted metal.
“Do not,” he said, every syllable clipped with sudden fury, “call that bloodsucker’s name in this sacred wolf space.”
I went very still.
Not because I had surrendered. Because shock pinned me there more effectively than the leather for one stunned heartbeat.
My cheek burned. My eyes watered from the sheer force of the blow.
Above me, the torch flames moved in wavering orange spears.
Around me, I sensed bodies more than saw them, shadows arranged at the perimeter of the ritual like witnesses who had decided not to be human tonight.
And somewhere through the fear and the pain and the hard, dead cold of the stone under my back, another realization settled over me with genuine horror.
I was inside Ironwood territory.
Warded.
Whatever protections Sage had put around this place, whatever anti-vampire, anti-compulsion, anti-intrusion work had been sunk into its bones, Nikolay could not simply feel where I was and come. Not cleanly. Not quickly. Not through this.
The thought opened a hollow in me so deep I nearly choked on it.
Then something yanked hard in the center of my chest.
Not physically. Not on the body bound to stone. Deeper. Inside the place where the mate bond lived strained and aching and wounded. It snapped taut with violent force, like a rope drawn all at once between two drowning people.
My breath caught.
He felt that.
Somewhere far away and impossibly near at once, Nikolay had felt exactly what I felt.