6 Sloane #2
“Inside first.” Finn came past me, low, checking the black interior over the barrel of a weapon that had to be nearly dry by now.
He turned back once he’d cleared it and his eyes found me.
I watched him make himself not react to whatever my face was doing.
“Ward it. Fast. Your Heat’s rising. The Saint is beginning to look this way. ”
I was already down on my knees at the threshold with my gear bag open.
The chalk was in the side pocket where it always was, a fat stub of it, alchemical, cut and blessed in a Hearthward kitchen by a witch who’d taught me the three lines when I was still too young to take the tangles out of my own hair.
Three lines to make this place magically invisible.
I’d drawn it a thousand times. I could draw it drunk, asleep, running.
I couldn’t draw it now.
My hand wouldn’t hold still. The fever had it, a fine violent tremor rattling up from the wrist, and I pressed the chalk to the granite and dragged and the line came out jagged, broken, wrong.
I lifted it to start again and the chalk skipped out of my fingers and cracked in half on the stone.
“No.” I grabbed the bigger piece. “No, no, come on—”
“Sloane.”
“I’ve got it.” The tremor took the second line and shattered it into three limping fragments that connected to nothing.
Tears of pure rage stood up in my eyes and I blinked them off.
“I’ve got it, I just—my hands won’t—” The chalk snapped again under the pressure of my own grip.
I was pushing too hard. I knew I was pushing too hard. “Give me a second, give me a—”
“Look at me.” His voice changed.
I’ve heard a lot of men try to sound like they were in charge.
I grew up learning to peel that voice apart, to find the scared boy under the Warden’s bark, the bureaucrat’s fear under the paperwork.
This came up out of somewhere ancient and dropped over me like a hand laid flat on the back of my neck.
It was the opposite of loud, and every cell I owned stopped to listen.
I looked at him.
He was crouched with his hands fisted at his sides—the space between us a living thing—and his pale eyes had gone steady in a way that made the whole mountain seem to hold still around him.
“You’re not going to look at your hand,” he said. “You’re going to look at the stone. Just the stone. The chalk is already where it needs to be. Your body knows the line. Let it draw the line.”
“My body is trying to kill me right now, in case you—”
“The stone, Sloane.” No give in it. Granite in a man’s throat. “One line. Draw it.”
And the strangest thing happened. My hand stopped fighting me.
Not because the fever broke—it didn’t, it was worse than ever, my heart doing something high and wrong behind my ribs—but because his voice gave the tremor somewhere to go.
I put my eyes on the gray stone and I stopped trying to command my fingers.
I let the old motion happen. The one my hands had known longer than they’d known him—except that wasn’t true, my wolf whispered, we have known him forever, for longer than this life—and the chalk moved. One line. Clean. Long.
“There,” he said, low. “The second one. Same. The stone.”
“You’re bossy under pressure.”
“Draw it.”
I drew it. Cleaner than the first. My breath was sawing in and out of me and sweat had soaked clear through my jacket to run cold down my spine. Somewhere below us the temperature dropped again, a fresh plunge of it rolling up the ridge and licking at my ankles like water rising in a tub.
I looked at the stone. I put the third line where it belonged, closing the sigil corner to corner, and I dragged the last inch of it home.
The ward caught.
It sighed—a low pull inward, like a room drawing a curtain, and the screaming beacon of me folded down and down until it was just a woman-shaped ache on a mountain instead of a bonfire on a peak. I felt the great cold attention behind us lose the thread and cast about for it.
“Inside.” He stood, moved to the door, held it. “Now.”
I crawled over the threshold on my hands and knees because standing was no longer possible.
He came in behind me and put his shoulder to the iron-banded door and swung it shut on the dark. He threw the bolt, and the sound of that bolt going home was the best sound I’d heard in years.
We were hidden. We were trapped.
Same thing, tonight.
And then the chase let go of me all at once, and the bill came due.
I don’t remember deciding to lie down. The stone floor was just suddenly against my cheek, cold and gritty and blessedly solid, and the world had gone to a tilt, the walls of the tower leaning in and swimming.
Somewhere very far away my body had started to shake in a way that had nothing to do with cold.
Big shudders. Full-length. The kind that snap teeth.
Years of poison. That’s what I was thinking, in the last clear corner of my head.
Years and years of the worst dead-magic wolf suppression a hedge-witch could brew out of Verdant Order poison, dose after dose, every morning, every dose a murder I committed against the best part of myself—and I’d told myself it was fine because it was temporary, because someday we’d win, and someday I’d stop.
And now the bond—that ancient, wild magic woven by the Moon Goddess at the dawn of the world—had ripped the door off its hinges.
All of it was coming due at once, the chemical suppressant and the wolf both clawing for the same heart, and my heart could not serve two masters.
“Sloane.” Finn was over me. When had he gotten over me?
Both hands out, hovering, an inch above my shoulder, my jaw, my throat, shaking now. His hands, the steadiest hands I’d ever seen, and they were shaking. “Sloane, look at me. Your heart. What is it doing? Tell me what it’s doing.”
“S’fine.” My mouth had gone clumsy. “Had worse. Told you. Worse than a—stairwell full of—”
“It’s not fine, you’re going gray, your lips are—” He cut himself off.
His whole body strained down over mine, caging me, close enough that his scent was the only air left in the room, and the fever howled up to meet it and my back arched off the stone.
“Your heart’s arrhythmic. I can hear it. It’s not keeping time.”
“Don’t.” I got my good hand up, palm to his chest, not touching, an inch off the ash-gray mark at his throat, holding him back with nothing but the last of my will.
“The proximity. You come any closer it—finishes it—you’ll drop with me, right here, and then we both—” A convulsion took the rest of it.
My spine bowed. Something behind my eyes went white and roaring.
I knew it was time to give this up. Time to let my mate take care of me.
Time to go through this. But I didn’t even know him—
We know him. We know him. We know him.
This was the first time we’d met—
We know him from before. This is not the first. We know him from the other place. We know him.
The only way through it was to—
“Your heart is stopping.”
“Finn—”
“No.” He said it the way he’d said draw the line.
The granite all the way through it now, no give anywhere in him, and his pale eyes were blazing and absolutely certain.
“I have spent forty years waiting for you. Searching for you. I will die rather than hurt you. I will not let you die. I will not. Sloane—”
I released a breath, and with it I released my old self, my undercover life. That was gone now. And a growing part of me yearned for what would come next. “You’re right.”
I felt his heat before I felt his skin, the warmth of his palm coming down through the last inch of air toward the wild broken jackhammer of my heart, and every wall I had ever built, brick by brick, over thirty-two years, leaned out over the drop—
—and his hand cupped my cheek.