1 Reed #2
Sinking deeper into the dark, the noise of the aircraft’s engines faded into a dull, distant thrum, replaced by the rushing sound of wind across an endless, starlit plain.
My feet touched down on the silver grass of the Threshold—the astral meadow where the spirits of the pack were meant to run.
And there, waiting for me in the quiet, was my wolf.
A massive obsidian beast with eyes like molten copper, his form solid and real beside mine on the dream-plane.
He stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me, his chest rumbling with a low, protective growl that mirrored the fury in my own chest. Man and wolf, together in the ether, looking out toward the dark horizon.
My obsidian wolf snarled, his hackles rising as he lunged at the dark. We shoved against it together, pouring our magic into the connection, trying to melt a door through.
“Reed! Breathe!” Del clamped a hand onto my shoulder. “Judd, get the oxygen—his chest isn’t moving! He’s freezing solid!”
“His pulse is dropping!” Mac scraped his boots against the deck as he leaned over me. “Del, grab him! He’s going under!”
I ignored them, our spirits lunging again at the darkness—at what I now knew wasn’t proof of my mate’s death, but rather a hex-warded barrier.
But the raw, unshielded force of my Founding blood rebounded.
The concussive shockwave hit my mind, and the backlash traveled up the connection to my physical brain.
My eyes snapped open. I convulsed, my spine arching off the crew bench as the cold slammed through my muscles. I coughed, a wet, rattling sound, and a line of hot liquid I knew must be blood began to track down from my nose.
“Get the mask on him!” Mac lunged across the aisle. Bowie held the oxygen bottle, his face white.
“Get off me!” I shoved Mac back with my good arm, sending him into the opposite bulkhead.
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand, my breath pluming thick and white in the cabin.
The temperature in the hold had dropped ten degrees in three seconds.
“Shut up! Everyone shut the fuck up and let me work!”
“Reed, you’re going to kill yourself before we even hit the drop zone.” Del kept his hand on my collar, his face set in a hard, grim line. “Look at your hands. You’re throwing frost.”
I looked. White lace was tracing my knuckles, the skin blue under the grime.
My teeth were chattering so hard I couldn’t hold them still.
I didn’t know what it meant. This had never happened during the other times I’d entered the Dreamscape, searching for the magic of our mating bond to follow it to her.
“Leave him be.”
Maren spoke from the deck plating, where she knelt over the chalk glyph. The witches beside her paused their chant, watching us. Maren wiped a fresh ribbon of black blood from her own lip.
“He’s trying to cross the Threshold,” she said.
The crew went silent. Judd looked from me to the witch. “The what?”
“The dream-gate.” Maren lifted her head, her dark eyes locking onto mine with an ancient, judging weight. “The fated-mate tether. The silver pathway of the astral plane. He is trying to force his way into through the Dreamscape to his mate.”
“Is that possible?” Bowie stepped closer.
“For a Founding Alpha? Yes,” Maren said. “But he’s a fool. He tried it once before—didn’t you? And he hasn’t learned a damn thing since. He thinks Founding fire can solve everything.”
“Maren,” I warned, my voice a gravelly rasp. “Don’t.”
She didn’t flinch. “I might not know exactly what you tried, but can I guess.”
The cargo engines howled, but nobody moved. Mac looked at Del, then back at me, his hand dropping from my harness.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I pressed my thumb into the burn scars on my forearm, pressing until the pain gave me somewhere to stand. The wolf in my chest had gone quiet and terrible, curled under the ash of my own history, realizing the truth of Maren’s words.
“I’ll stop,” I ground out, my eyes snapping open. “I’ll hold the line.”
Del looked at me, his hand still on my neck. “You good?”
“No.” Glass in my throat. “Twenty years ago, I thought I killed her.”
Del carried the crew’s history since before I’d built it into what it was, and he carried mine too, the parts I let him see. “And now?”
“Now I find out she’s been in a cage the whole time because I was too arrogant to set a perimeter ward.” The words came out of me like something torn. “I’ll never be okay.”
My magic had jump-started her—my Founding blood, my kiss, a surge I’d fired into a heart that wasn’t ready.
Premature Heat. A beacon that lit the sky.
The Wardens through the treeline in minutes because I hadn’t warded the circle, because I’d believed my own presence was enough, because I was twenty-five and I thought I was a god.
I had mourned her. I had built a watchfire and spoke her name to the full moon every year for twenty years. And she was alive.
“I built this whole crew on top of that grave.” The confession scraped my throat raw. “And she was breathing the entire time.”
Del was quiet a moment. The engines howled around us.
“You built a quorum that’s about to burn the Conclave to the waterline,” he said. “You built five mate bonds and a war and a family out of a thing you thought was only grief. That’s not nothing, Reed. That’s not a man who gave up.”
“It’s a man who gave up on her.”
“Then go get her.” He said it simple, the way he nicknamed men and sharpened saws and defused brawls, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Bird’s almost over the line. Go get your mate and make it right.”
Mate. We’d never gotten that far. A rite interrupted, a bond half-struck. But the wolf had never once wavered on the word, and neither, Goddess help me, had I.
She is ours. She was always ours—
Maren cried out.
The sound cut through the engine roar, wrong and sharp.
She knelt in the center of the cabin over the glyphs, a wheel of master-chalk laid on the deck plating, spokes and runes and the long anchor-line that kept this whole roaring aircraft invisible to the scrying-nets.
Her nose was bleeding, a black ribbon in the red light, and the stub of chalk in her fingers had cracked clean across.
Her people closed around her without being told. Two of the Lodestone witches dropped to their knees at the glyph’s edge and picked up the chant she’d broken off—a low, plain, three-note thing, more work-song than spell, the kind of magic that sounds like an old woman humming over dishwater.
“Hold the seam. Hold the seam. What is hidden here is kept.”
One of them pressed a fresh chalk into Maren’s hand and covered it with her own.
“Reed.” Maren wiped the blood off her lip with the back of her wrist. “The dome’s higher than your intelligence said. Their ward’s projecting near three thousand feet.”
The cabin went still around the number.
Judd swore into his mask. He was our smokejumper, the only one of us who’d made a career of falling out of aircraft before he’d found the pack, and he understood altitudes in his bones.
“Three thousand—if we pull at standard we’re blooming our chutes inside their scrying-radius.
Every canopy will ripple their ward-pool.
We’ll trip the whole grid the second the silk opens. ”
“Then we don’t pull at standard.” I was already moving, unclipping from the bench. “New floor. Nobody’s silk opens above two thousand feet. We free-fall through the roof of their scrying-grid and pull underneath it.”
Silence. Then Judd stepped forward. “Boss. Two thousand’s tight. For a jumper with a rig he trusts, on a clear night, that’s a hard deck. For a stick of hotshots who mostly jumped out of a plane twice in training—”
“You’re the jumper,” I said. “Tell me straight. Is it survivable?”
Judd looked at me. Then the light caught the gold in his eyes, and he showed me his teeth around the mask.
“For a human? It’s pavement paste, and they’d be scraping us off the desert floor with a spatula.”
He racked his static line off the cable, deliberate.
“For us? It’ll rattle your teeth and it’ll hurt like hell—and you’ll walk it off in a hundred yards.” The grin widened. “Might even be fun.”
The words barely registered over the howling roar in my head. The whole crew was staring at me, chests heaving, their eyes wide with the realization that their Superintendent wasn’t here anymore. The calm, immovable mountain was gone.
“You will fall,” I roared, letting the full, unhinged weight of my aura crush the air out of the cabin, “until the desert is close enough to smell. You will pull. You will survive. Are we clear?”
Silence hung heavy and suffocating in the red-lit hold. They could feel the madness rolling off me. They knew I wasn’t bluffing.
Mac swallowed hard. He looked at Judd, then at Cal, and finally nodded. “Fuck it,” he choked out. “Clear.”
The cabin answered as one shaking thing. “Clear.”
Maren’s chant caught and steadied under us. The seam held. She didn’t look up from the glyph.
The bay doors ground open on a wall of wind.
The desert dawn screamed into the fuselage, freezing and violent, and below us the basin spread out flat and pale under the massive, silver glare of the moon—the Harvest Moon blazing at its apex.
The stone down there was old. Older than the Order, older than the Conclave, older than the six bloodlines who’d signed a Compact in blood hundreds of years ago and scattered to the wind.
Old-World bedrock, part of the bones of the continent, and I could feel it reaching up for me through miles of air, the way it recognized its own.
Founding blood knows stone the way a wolf knows the moon.
I clipped nothing. HALO meant we fell free—no static line, no cable, just fifteen wolves and a bad idea and the desert.
I stood in the open door with the wind trying to peel me off the aircraft and I looked down at the place they’d caged her.
The last of the man I’d trained myself to be simply went out, like a lamp.